This long bearded production wiz has stuck his finger in just about every genre pie and pulled out the biggest of blockbuster releases from a star-studded list as lengthy as his whiskers. Renowned as one of the best in the biz due to his magician-like ability to turn a record gold, Rubin’s signature sound is usually stripped back, ensuring that clarity and refinement are paramount.

Rubin is as big (if not bigger) a personality than those he works with. Once a co-president of Columbia Records, he’s the founder of both Def Jam and American Recordings, as well has having consistently worked over three decades with an unbelievable list of artists, from Beastie Boys to Australia’s own Angus & Julia Stone. Then there is Rick Rubin, a man who’s legend almost proceeds him. When it comes to a music producer, one typically thinks of some nerdy man or woman hidden away in a studio, a face forgotten. It could be your first step into shaping the sound of popular music the way these six figures have.

If you’d ever like to see your own name splayed alongside this hallowed half-dozen, you need to start honing your production work, and what better way to start then by investigating the courses offered at the Australian Institute of Music in Melbourne. There’s as many great producers as their are bands, artists, and genres, but here we’ve whittled it down to six names that have shaped the sound of modern rock as we know it today, thanks to their influential sound techniques and production methods, living the rock star infamy as much as the huge bands and records they’ve worked on. They’ve shaped entire musical movements (such as Berry Gordy did with Motown, or Jerry Wexler with Atlantic), sat side by side with history’s best bands (imagine The Beatles without George Martin of Radiohead without Nigel Godrich), cultivated all those great pop songs over the years (from Max Martin and Quincy Jones to Pharrell Williams), to the hallowed halls of hip hop innovation (take a bow Dr Dre and Wu-Tang’s RZA).

Butch vig producer