I asked about this on the discord server(Join us) and it was suggested I create a post here.
Me:
Is there a good way to, and does anyone store producer tags? Or like make a collection or something for recordings with producer tags? Or is that a silly idea? I’m not a big fan of them, but I notice them a lot and get obsessive about tracking these things.
It would be nice to be able to find tags, find recordings with the tag, and know which producer is responsible for the tag.
As you can hear in the videos above, they aren’t always the same sound clip, some the artist them self says the tag. Also, a producer might not put them in every recording they work on, so producer credits alone wouldn’t necessarily tell you which songs have them.
I won’t quote everything(Feel free to check the #questions-and-help channel on the discord server to find the discussion), but two posts from it:
RandomMushroom128:
there are 2 producer tag tags already it seems Search results - MusicBrainz
but without “:”
made by sound.and.vision
A large list of producer tags on genius. And it looks like they link the tags to tracks, which is what I would love to be able to do on MB. So it seems other people outside of MB even like to track this information as well.
Not sure I explained what I meant by tag clearly. I mean the audio bits producers insert into some recordings they work on. Not tags on MB or in files. Those audio bits is what I am interested in. (Though tags on MB might be the best way to track the Producer Tags? Which is what I am wondering about here)
If you listen to the second video you can hear the same audio in the background of each track “INCOMING”. And if you listen to the first one you’ll hear “Brave Sound” in each one.
so I started mine after watching a TikTok (I am very trendy) about different hip-hop and EDM producer tags (video ws by Sin & Brook if anyone is curious, and no I can’t now find the video in question).
Yes I think it would be interesting to identify tracks that use these little audio “signatures”; most of the time it’s already known that the producer produced that song.
Why? Well because not every track by a producer will have one of these audio “tags”, they can also change as they progress in their career.
They seem to have started sometime in the 2000’s from my very light research, and Genius already has begun the process of documenting the variations (but not the apperances - which is something we can do): https://genius.com/Rap-genius-producer-tags-directory-annotated
So yeah, I think we’re all clear now as to what we mean by “Producer Tag”.
I only have done two so far, I’ll be honest I’ve not been listening to as much hip-hop recently and its on my list to go through at least my hip-hop playlist on Spotify to identify more, it’s cool to see others care about this stuff certainly for other genres (like K-Pop who also adopted this practice).
The next question is what about tagging producer tags that are not a repeated sample/vocal stab but a particular style… this might be impossible and too messy, but an example would be Pharrell Williams stuttered-beat that is used in many of his/Neptunes produced tracks:
