Always exceptions, which is why I used the qualifier. I will counter with even the Juggalos are smart enough to suspend their circus.
Wait. Maybe I'm not following the thread of the discussion, but aren't a lot of producers musicians? Or do you mean at that specific point, ie., while producing?
If you manipulate sounds for artistic effect, then you are a musician. Almost all musicians manipulate sound through some sort of technology. To say producers are not musicians is to say that only beatboxers are musicians. Which is something I could get behind too.
No, I meant producer. The guy moving the knobs is not a musician. Good grief. At a live show, is the man at the mixing board a musician? No.
It's been awhile, but in the old days you couldn't count on the guy at the mixing board knowing what the ******** he was doing. It's been a long time since that's happened to me. Whether someone calls that person a musician or not doesn't matter much to me. (something like "audio engineer" might be more accurate, though) Just so long as we don't go back to the 70s or 80s when most of the people doing it didn't have a clue as to what they were doing.
The way I look at DJs is that they're similar to conductors. It may not look like much but they know what they're doing. They choose the songs to play, what pitch to use, know how to work a crowd, and know how to get an atmosphere going. There's a difference between the wedding DJ playing Celebrate and DJs like Fatboy Slim, Moxie, Black Madonna, Honey Dijon, Gilles Peterson* (highly recommend checking him out, he got me into Brazilian jazz), and Peggy Gou. Some of the ones mentioned compose their own music, others just DJ and do shows and nothing more. *: Gilles doesn't compose music but the man knows how to make an atmosphere.
Something I learned the hard way in the peak techno era of the early 90s is that many of the famous producers were technically poor DJs The best guys for parties were local guys, who in the pre-internet era would spend every day of their lives and a small fortune to import all the underground records and then mix up a storm. Then came the idea to bring out the big names, and then people realised that you could charge people wildly more to see someone like Warren or Mills compared to local DJs Problem was many of these guys were simply bad e.g Thomas Heckmann played a set so strange we thought it was a sound check We also saw the same thing in reverse. Guys who were great DJs got to make music which was trash
I nearly spit out the water (ok, who am I kidding, it's beer) I was drinking because I asked the initial question with Monsieur Easter specifically in mind! Yes!
Really? A DJ only reproduces recorded sounds by pushing some buttons. A musician has to manipulate an instrument to let it produce sounds from nothing. A musician creates a sound that wasnot there before. In contrast to a dj, who's nothing without his stock of recorded sounds.