A music producer, an audio engineer and a baseball bat designer.

Elliott Scheiner's professional career is anything but run of the mill.

Scheiner, a Redding resident, sat down with Patch last week to discuss his career, past, present and future.

Originally from New York, Scheiner moved to Redding with his wife in 1983.

"I started out as a musician, beating around in various bands, mostly unsuccessful," Scheiner said. After a tour in 1967, where he played drums for some R&B acts, Scheiner found a different calling. "I didn't want to do that anymore. There wasn't much money. It was a lot of work, a lot of driving."

At that time, Scheiner said, his uncle was working as a studio musician in New York City.

"I told him I wanted to maybe consider getting into something in the studio, so he introduced me to [A&R engineer and producer] Phil Ramone," he said. "Back then, there were no schools to learn [sound engineering and music production] in. You had to learn from someone else who did it."

And learn it he did.

Working in various capacities — as a producer who oversees an entire project or as a mixer and engineer who concentrates on the sound of the music itself — Scheiner's got quite the impressive resume. He's worked on projects for many major acts: The Eagles, Paul Simon, Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Phish, Steely Dan, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Beck, to name more than a few. But the list goes on.

Since he started in the sound engineering and production business, Scheiner has seen the artistic craft and process of making music get watered down.

"The craft was more well-rounded; you had to know everything," he said. "It seems today, most kids are being taught how to work a computer. The engineering has gone down the drain. I get calls from a lot of younger guys who can't do certain things. They couldn't record an orchestra, they couldn't record players in the same room."

More likely than not, musicians today record an album as follows: The drummer will lay down a drum beat. After that's recorded, the bassplayer might then lay down the bass line. Guitars come next. And finally, vocals.

That might be one way to do it, but it's not the best.

"It's just more natural for guys to play in the same room together," Scheiner argues. "Stuff happens when they're playing live that doesn't happen when they're overdubbing."

Though he's self-employed, Scheiner said he's a "big supporter of commercial studios."

"I never really wanted to do something like this," he said. "Right after 9/11, I was supposed to go in the studio and record with Steely. But 9/11 happened, which sort of put everything on hold. People who had projects in New York just cancelled. I was stuck with a lot of time on my hands, and the whole industry just went into flux. The money didn't seem to be there as much."

Scheiner was doing a lot of work with surround sound, and during that time, decided to "build a room to do primarily that stuff."

A lot of the equipment necessary to do that sort of "stuff" was beta at that point, Scheiner said. And for that, he benefited.

"Basically everything was given to me," he said.

Scheiner said he's got a lot of projects that he calls his "favorite." He said he got Grammys working with Steely Dan, and enjoyed working with them a bunch.

"They are all friends, he said. "It was fun going to work. Sometimes you do a project and you are stuck for three months. You don't like going to work. You don't like who you're working with. [With Steely], I loved going to work every day. You never knew what was going to happen. They're just good guys, fun to be around."

Though most people don't pay attention to who produces the album and works on it behind the scenes, but give the artists lots of praise, Scheiner says he doesn't want any more credit than he deserves.

"They take the heat if it's no good," he said.

The music industry in 2011

Anyone who's followed the news however casually has heard that the music industry is struggling. Scheiner offered his insight as to why.

"It's a combination of Apple and Mac and greedy record companies," he said, adding "there's no way people should have to buy a CD for 18, 19, 20 dollars, especially when people usually want not more than one or two songs."

Scheiner said traditionally, an artist might get $1 or $1.50 an album. Now, when someone buys a song off iTunes, the artist makes "a penny or two."

"Basically, the artist got screwed," he said. "Record companies don't sign artists anymore. The damage has been done."

"It's just a different business now. You can't expect to make the same amount that artists made even ten years ago," he said. "Ten years ago, in order to enter the Billboard Top 100 at number one, you'd have to sell 300, 350,000 units that very first week. You could hit the number one spot now with under 25,000."

Sound systems

CDs, cassettes and 8-tracks became popular because of cars — they were all more portable than vinyl, Scheiner said.

"When [the music industry] started to fall apart, I was doing a lot of mixing" for surround sound, he said. "All those mediums started up because of cars, so I figured that would be a good place to put surround sound."

Scheiner said he "went to almost every electronics company around the world" who all basically asked "why do we need you." At that point, it'd never been done before that someone who's responsible for what music sounds like prior to it leaving the studio would also be responsible for how the driver of a car hears it.

"Those in charge of the car stuff, they have no idea about music," he said. "They're all scientists."

Eventually, Panasonic contacted Scheiner and said they liked his idea. Acura was interested as well. Scheiner co-designed a surround sound system for Acura's cars called ELS Surround.

"Now it's in like five of their cars," he said.

Scheiner said he had to reinvent himself a lot as a producer and engineer, so as not to get typecast as someone whose projects all sound one way. After the music industry rapidly declined, he had to reinvent himself professionally. He did so with ELS Surround.

"It was pretty important to me as the music market declined," he said. "I had that as a fallback."

Baseball bats

On of Scheiner's sons, Jordie, plays baseball in college at Colby-Sawyer College. He's a position player who throws a knuckleball well enough to get Major League teams to be interested in him, he said. 

"I wanted to get him something that he'd remember, so I decided to hand tool a bat for him," he said. "I'd never done it before and had no clue."

Scheiner's neighbor was a great carpenter. He asked him to lend a hand.

"We worked on the bat together," Scheiner said. "He was going through chemo at the time. When I asked him, his face lit up."

Scheiner said he gave the bat to Jordie, and all of his teammates went crazy.

"Seeing how happy [my neighbor was] making the bats and the good, positive energy it brought to [my son's] team, we started the business [Star Bound Bats] together," he said.

His neighbor since succumbed to the cancer.

"He was really, really proud of this accomplishment," Scheiner said of the bats. "He loved being at the shop. He loved making baseball bats. I'm determined to keep this business going."