The term ‘record producer’ is the greyest of grey areas. ‘Producers’ have had to deploy a startlingly wide range of skills. They have to play some role in pre-production (assembling the musicians and musical material to be recorded, overseeing rehearsals and sampling sessions, downloading existing tracks from bands' laptops), production (the actual recording of music) and post-production (its editing, mixing and assembly for delivery to the record company). Producers have been (and are) individual entrepreneurs, freelance operators, record label owners and record label employees. They have been people managers, whether Svengalis, artist and repertoire developers, or gifted amateur psychologists able to guide temperamental artists through a recording session. They have been events managers: the possessors of specialist legal knowledge in relation to contract and copyright law, finance and accounting (the producer will often be budget holder and administrator for the entire project of making an album). They have been musical managers: session fixers, composers, arrangers, synthesiser and drum machine programmers, and conductors. And very often they will have started as sound recording engineers, a profession dealt with in this book by Albin Zak. But most importantly they have been listeners, able to decode what happens in the recording and mixing studios in order to represent the eventual listening customer.