Mike Shipley

Michael Shipley (7 October 1956 – 25 July 2013) was an Australian mixing engineer, audio engineer, and record producer. He mostly worked in Los Angeles during his career of more than 30 years. At the Grammy Awards of 2012 he won the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for working on Paper Airplane (April 2011) by Alison Krauss and Union Station. Shipley died in July 2013, aged 56, of an apparent suicide.

Career

Michael Shipley was born on 7 October 1956, in Sydney. As a teenager he moved with his family to London. He became interested in a recording career while at school in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. He later recalled, "One of my teachers at grammar school there was a musician who asked me to come down and sing on a record he was making. I walked into this thing called the recording studio, and it just blew my mind. It was, 'This is home,' and I knew instantly and from that point on that all I wanted to do was to work there."

Shipley returned to Australia and completed secondary education at Camberwell Grammar School (class of '74) in Melbourne. He then went back to London, where he started as an assistant at Wessex Sound Studios and worked with the Sex Pistols and Queen. His first engineering sessions were during the punk rock explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s and included recordings with the Damned. He worked alongside Robert John "Mutt" Lange for decades. The cause of death, as stated on 9 August 2013 at the memorial service, was an apparent suicide.

Discography Recorded work credited to Shipley:

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s