Michael Beinhorn

Beinhorn started his professional career as a musician, playing synthesizer (Micromoog, EML Synthi AKS, Prophet-5, Roland SVC-350 Vocoder, etc) and co-founding the seminal New York band, Material with Bill Laswell (originally the backing band for Daevid Allen's New York Gong LP, 1979) during the early 1980s. He worked with the jazz musician Herbie Hancock as co-writer and co-producer on Hancock's Future Shock album, which contained the hit single Rockit. Like most tracks on the album, except for the title track, "Rock It" was co-written by Beinhorn and Laswell. "Rockit" quickly became a Billboard #1, and is regarded as one of hip hop's seminal hits; it was the first recording to contain the legendary "Fresh" sample (which Beinhorn had created 2 years prior on a recording by the New York hip hop artist Fab Five Freddy/Beside called "Change The Beat" on Celluloid Records).

In 1998, Beinhorn received a Grammy nomination for "Producer Of The Year" for his work on Celebrity Skin by Hole and Mechanical Animals by Marilyn Manson. In that year, he became the only producer in history to have two recordings enter the Billboard Album Charts Top Ten in the same week (September 15, 1998), with "Celebrity Skin" at Number 9 and "Mechanical Animals" at Number 1.

Looking for the best way to capture a broad frequency range during the recording process, Beinhorn devised the Ultra Analog Recording format. This process utilizes two inch magnetic tape, running on a custom built 8 track head stack.

Beinhorn has since produced the albums of such artists as; Korn, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden,[1] Soul Asylum,[1] Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hole, Raging Slab, Ozzy Osbourne, Mew, Social Distortion, The Golden Palominos, and Aerosmith.

In 2015, Beinhorn wrote a book called Unlocking Creativity (published by Hal Leonard) which outlines his personal experience with the creative process as a record producer.

In July 2017, Beinhorn detailed the process of recording Soundgarden’s 1994 album Superunknown while appearing on The Pods & Sods Network. And he shares his reaction to first hearing Black Hole Sun during that time, “I think for the rest of my entire life, until I draw my last breath, I’ll never ever forget how I felt when they started playing that song. From the very first few notes, I felt like I’d been hit by a thunderbolt. I was just absolutely stunned. What in the world is this? I get goosebumps thinking about it now.”[2]

In 2018, being a staunch advocate of album pre-production, Beinhorn started a new business to address the changing music industry climate and the lack of reasonable budgets available to most musicians. Including such services as Song Analysis and Pre-production, he sees this as a way to help musicians achieve their greatest potential while pursuing a return to excellence.