Artists and Producers:
Dan Nigro:
Dan Nigro is a producer and songwriter who has worked with many successful musicians I look up to such as Renee Rap, Lorde, Conan Gray, Olivia Rodrigo, and Chappell Roan. He has been nominated for 16 Grammys and voted Producer of the Year in 2024 by VarietyHitmaker’s.
He’s well known for making sound not only polished but human and emotionally believable. This is why his production style connects so strongly with younger audiences. He achieves this by prioritising emotion over perfection, he does this through vocals by leaving imperfect features like breaths, timing imperfections, vocal cracks, and raw takes to avoid over polishing his productions.
Another reason his work is so successful at captivating an audience is because he changes his production style depending on the artist. Listening to some of the songs he’s credited on, I can hear the difference in artist personality and musical story telling because he doesn’t try to force all his songs into one style. An example of this difference is Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo and Heather by Conan Gray. In deja vu he creates a sense of desperation and anger that matches the lyrics focusing on the anger of an ex relationship, he incudes a varied amount of instruments like synth, guitar, bass, drums, keys which build an interesting texture with changes throughout, this matches how the lyrics and vocal tone focuses on anger and sadness over change. However in Heather it focuses on soft acoustic guitar and a very refined texture, only building on emotional peaks, with shows a more sad, yearning, “you’ll never love me” perspective.
Nico is very good making songs that build emotionally, they often start minimally with soft vocals, piano, guitar, and ambience then he gradually adds harmony’s, percussion, distortion, synth textures, and wider stereo layers.
He focuses on organic production, meaning his music feels fresh because he mixes live instruments, indie textures and modern production wich leaves room noise, analogue-style distortion and realistic ambience to avoid his music sounding sterile.
From researching Dan Negro I realised I was inspired by him without even realising he was behind the songs that inspired me. I love his intimate vocal recording style, so will aim to achieve similar results. Another feature of his music that inspires me is the emotional authenticity, I will try to archive this by not striving for perfection and leaving some imperfect things in, like small amounts of threat buzz and vocal imperfections. The way he tells a story though sound is also something I strive to achieve, I will try to replicate this by focusing on texture and dynamics as well as changing timbre of instruments while I’m recording them to make them sound more raspy or maybe palm muting in certain parts.
A. G. Cook:
A.G. Cook is short for Alexander Guy Cook who is an English record producer. His label, PC musics style of exadurated pop tropes led to form the foundations of hyperpop. He later became famous as executive producer of Charlie XCX, gaining recent success for her album ‘Brat’.
A. G. Cook is almost the opposite from Dan Nigro because he focuses on futuristic sound design, experimentation, and digital manipulation with pushes pop music boundaries. He became influential because he challenged typical ideas of polished pop production by heavily using artificial textures, un-natural vocals, heavy pitch shifting and sharp transients.
His production chaos can mean something emotionally, for example his use of glitchy sounds can give the listener feeling of enxiety or chaos and his sudden transitions can create emotional unstability. but he mixes these styles with softer melodies and emotional lyrics which creates a beautiful mix and really sends the lister on a journey throughout.
He has gained influence from a lot on genres like pop, electronic, dance, ambient, industrial, and experimental music with makes many of his songs, Club Classics for example very fun to dance to, and it sounds different and exiting.
Even though I want my productions very different from this style, there are still certain elements and ideas off his that I would like to take inspiration from, mainly his unconventional sound choices, I believe having natural sounds and samples that you wouldn’t normally hear in a song makes it sound more interesting and immersive for a listener, because rather than just listening to the song, they can picture an environment.