Top row: Jimmy Douglass, George Massenburg, Frank Filipetti, Chuck Ainlay. Bottom row: Elliott Scheiner, Sylvia Massy, Niko Bolas. Courtesy of Jeff Schmale.
I recently attended a sneak preview of an upcoming event of great interest to music lovers and tech heads alike: Studio Confidential, which brings seven of the world’s top recording engineers together for an evening of stories and personal reflections about their work with music’s biggest stars. We’re talking top engineers: Studio Confidential will host Jimmy Douglass, Chuck Ainlay, Sylvia Massy, Niko Bolas, Frank Filipetti, Elliot Scheiner and George Massenburg. The show will take place at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan from February 3 through March 1, 2026. (Here’s a link for tickets.) There will also be a preview performance at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Ridgefield, Connecticut on January 27.
Together, these recording engineers have amassed 31 Grammy wins and have worked on more than 7,000 recordings. Here are some credits, the tip of the iceberg:
Jimmy Douglass: the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Roxy Music, Aaliyah, Ginuwine
Chuck Ainlay: George Strait, Taylor Swift, Miranda Lambert, Emmylou Harris, Travis Tritt, Chris Botti, Lionel Richie, Jewel, Marty Stuart, Steve Earle, Peter Frampton, Willie Nelson
Sylvia Massy: Prince, Johnny Cash, Jason Isbell, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tool, Life of Agony, System of a Down, Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morrisette, Patti Smith, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Niko Bolas: Carole King, Neil Young, James Taylor, Warren Zevon, LeeAnn Rimes, Sheryl Crow, KISS, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, Fiona Apple, Prince
Frank Filipetti: Wicked, The Book of Mormon, Aida, Carly Simon, Foreigner, the Bangles, Barbra Streisand, George Michael, Frank Zappa, Korn, KISS, James Taylor, Rod Stewart
Elliot Scheiner: Steely Dan, Van Morrison, The Godfather, Jimmy Buffett, Sting, Paul Simon, Eagles, George Benson, Eric Clapton, Queen, Beck, B.B. King, Faith Hill, Ricky Martin, R.E.M.
George Massenburg: Earth, Wind & Fire, Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel, Randy Newman, Kenny Loggins, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Herbie Hancock, Toto, Little Feat, Weather Report, Lyle Lovett. He also invented the parametric equalizer.
In other words, we’ve all heard their work, and its influenced our lives. As Niko Bolas said, “The really sincere thing that we all share is, [we] get to be there from when somebody walks in with an acoustic guitar or a piano and they play you a song idea, to when it streams millions or billions and you realize that you've done something to affect the soundtrack of somebody's life. And that is a gift that I can't explain. It still gives me goosebumps.”
In November a group of people were invited to a preview event to hear these engineers tell some of their stories. As you can imagine, they have a lot of stories that shed a lot of enlightenment on what it’s like to work in recording sessions with some of the world’s greatest artists. Their stories are anywhere from being laugh-out-loud funny to leaving you wondering how they got through the session unscathed – and sometimes they didn’t. As Nico Bolas said, “[Artists are] from another planet. Artists are artists for a reason. They are wacky, they are unique, and they can be really, really temperamental. They can be really scary and they can be really, really beautiful at the strangest of times.”
Frank Filipetti added: “I've been fortunate enough to work with some of my favorite artists of our generation. Working with these artists is something that can't be really described. Some of them are amazing people. Some of them can be really hard on you and some of them can be a total pain in the ass. But, except for one I will not name, as hard as they were on me, always made me feel like they were pushing me towards something greater, something more than even I could imagine at the time.”
Sylvia Massy talked about working at Larrabee [Studios] in L.A. in the early Nineties. (See our articles about her in Issue 128 and Issue 134. “There was a lot of really big artists coming through and a lot of big records. In 1990, I started working with Prince. He was a piece of work and anyone who's worked with Prince has stories about him. I was sitting in the back of the studio while they were mixing the song, ‘Gett Off’ for [the Diamonds and Pearls [album.]
I had an attitude about this song because I didn't like this song. I'd been working on this record with Prince for months now, and he was taking good songs off the record to replace them with this ‘Gett Off’ song, and I just didn't like it. But of course it's not my place to tell him, don't do this song. I'm sitting in the back of the room, I have nothing to say, but I had my journal and I was just writing [about all of this] in my journal. There is Prince sitting on his purple throne and he's taking this perfectly good record and he's ruining it with this song, ‘Gett Off,’ and I'm writing this down.
The engineer says, ‘Hey Sylvia, can you patch something in?’ So I put my book down; I go over to the other side of the room. And while I'm patching, there’s Prince sitting on his purple throne and I hear Prince's voice reading [from my journal]. Oh my God. I ran across the room and grabbed it out of his hand. I was so terrified and knew, I knew, I knew I was so fired; my whole career was over.
But instead he just started laughing. He loved it. And from that point on, he started being very nice to me. He started giving me way better gigs.”
Jimmy Douglass reminded us that you never know what record will be a hit. He passed around an acetate, a test pressing that can be listened to before committing to vinyl production. “You literally put this [acetate disc] on the lathe and you cut your tape to this, and then you could take it home and listen. It feels a little different than vinyl. It smells good too.
This [was in] the late Nineties. I was always working. We were finishing a new artist's record, trying to figure out what the single should be. My wife would go to these boat parties. [The] boats would go around Manhattan and there’d be dancing and DJs and everything I just didn't like. But this one night she's like, please come. I was [thinking], I can take the acetate to the boat and have the DJ play it and see how everybody reacts. And that way we can figure out if it's going to be a single or not. What a great idea.
She and our friends all know the DJ. I'm like, this is going to be a piece of cake. They take the record to the DJ. Half an hour goes by. He doesn’t play the record. An hour goes by, he doesn't play the record. An hour and a half goes by. He's not playing the record. Well, Jimmy's going to get in the middle of this. And I jumped over there and say, ‘Hey, man, what's up with the record? Play the record!’ He took that thing and he threw it into the Hudson River.
But here's the thing. That record that I gave him to play was ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ by Missy Elliott. He could have been the hero. He could have broke a record that was about to be out, huge record, and he could have been the DJ to break that record, but instead he was the donkey.”
Jimmy Douglass says: never throw acetates like these into the river!
Elliot Scheiner worked with Steely Dan on a number of their albums. “Every time I worked with them, I would get divorced. We were working on Gaucho, and I just got newly divorced and was pretty grumpy. And Donald [Fagen] and Walter [Becker] were complaining about me. So I [asked them], ‘what do you guys think I should do?’ And Donald and Walter said, ‘you need to go out. We have a girl for you to go out with.’ And I sat there thinking, ‘this doesn't sound right.’
I made a date with her for Saturday night for a pretty fancy restaurant [in Manhattan]. I [thought], ‘Oh, I'll put a jacket on. It's going to be great.’ So I knock on her door and she comes out. She's a total punker. She's got an Afro, multicolored. It's yellow, it's blue, it's green. And I sat there and thought to myself, ‘this is not going to work.’ So we picked a place near her and had dinner. And during dinner [we talked and I was] thinking, ‘It's weird that she knows Donald and Walter and knows what I do. It didn't equate.
[So then] she wants to go to a club downtown called the Mudd Club. I'm wearing a jacket. We step in and the room’s filled. She knows everyone. So as she's saying hello to everybody, I sort of turned my back, walked out the door. [The whole thing was] a joke, apparently. When I got to the studio Monday morning, [Donald and Walter] were laughing. They thought it was the funniest thing that ever happened. I was 30, a [straitlaced] guy from Scarsdale and she was 19. We started to work on the next song for the album. It was ‘Hey Nineteen.’”
Elliot Scheiner says, “Hey Nineteen, no, we got nothing in common!”
Scheiner and some of the others present had worked for the legendary, late producer Phil Ramone (Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and dozens of others). Scheiner talked about how Phil Ramone was so encouraging to so many people in the industry and noted, “Phil would [tell people], ‘you have no experience, but you should do it.’ So he's doing a session and there's an assistant engineer, not unlike me, sitting behind him, terrified. You're on a film or movie [session], you don't want to make any mistakes. You’re just sitting there riveted. I forget who was engineering with me, [but he goes], ‘Man, the assistant is really nervous.’ Phil calls a dancer to come over to the studio, and [when she gets there he] doesn't look up from the console or look at the band. The dancer comes in and has a really great outfit on and just goes over and sits on the assistant's lap. Phil just stops and turns the volume down. He goes, ‘You still nervous?’”
George Massenburg related: “I had the very good fortune of being able to record Emmylou Harris, and the even better fortune to be introduced to her best friend, Linda Ronstadt. I spent 40 years working with Linda early on. It was clear that she was a lot smarter than I was and a lot prettier than I was. As we were working together, one thing that became apparent was that she really loved mixing, but she didn't really want to stay awake [during the mixing sessions]. So she would invariably ask to get a couch or a bed in the back of the studio. What would usually happen is that I would mix, and she would be lying on the couch. In the middle of mixing, I'd hear a voice from the back of the room. ‘Ewww, that's terrible. What did you do?’
And I would have put on a delay [on her voice] or a weird sound, and immediately have to take it off, and then she'd say, ‘oh, that's great.’ And go back to sleep.
One day we’re mixing, and she's dead asleep, and I'm getting away with murder. But at some point from the back of the room, I hear, ‘I want a pie, a cherry pie with a lard crust!’ And we're in a studio in San Rafael, California, and as you can imagine, lard is pretty hard to come by in San Rafael. But our cook, Mike Kirk, follows Linda's instructions and finds the right cherries and the right ingredients, and lard. And the next day, under Linda's exacting instruction, starts making a cherry pie with a lard crust. Linda's supervises, putting it in the oven.
We go back to work sometime later. Mike comes in and says, ‘the pie's not done, and Linda wants to take it out of the oven!’ She proceeds to take the pie out of the oven – and drops it right on the floor. And I'm thinking, ‘Oh my God, I better get out of here.’ So I went back to making the record and didn't know where Linda went. But sometime later, one of the second engineers came in and said, ‘I just went in the kitchen and saw Linda on her hands and knees with a fork eating a pie and [said] it was delicious.’”
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