RSR518 - Trina Shoemaker - From Maid to Grammy as 1st Woman to Win Album of the Year

Recording Studio Rockstars

Lij Shaw

Music

4.8 • 543 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 142 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it take to rise from cleaning studios to shaping some of the most iconic records of our time? Trina Shoemaker's story is not just about breaking into the music industry—it's about breaking through it. As the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Trina paved the way for a generation of female producers and engineers, and she brings her powerful voice and razor-sharp insight to this inspiring and unfiltered conversation. In this episode, Trina shares how she went from mopping floors at Capitol Records to earning Grammy wins for her work with artists like Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris. She tells the behind-the-scenes stories of working on Wrecking Ball and how that album helped define the sound of Americana. We explore her years in London learning the art of engineering, her move to New Orleans to join the legendary Kingsway Studio, and the deep musical and personal lessons she learned along the way. Trina also pulls back the curtain on the realities of being a woman in a male-dominated field—how she navigated the industry, demanded respect, and held true to her belief in capturing raw, honest performances. She discusses her approach to vocal production, why she avoids auto-tune, and how crafting backing vocals is one of her secret weapons. Beyond her life in the studio, Trina opens up about her love of writing and her dream of publishing a novel and having actor Will Patton narrate the audiobook. Whether you're a seasoned engineer or just starting out, this episode offers a powerful reminder: authenticity, persistence, and a deep respect for the artist's process will always rise above the noise.

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My guest today is Trina Shoemaker, who was born in 1965 and raised in Joliet, IL, southwest of Chicago. Over the past three-and-a-half decades, she has produced, recorded and mixed hundreds of records. A four-time Grammy® Award winner and six-time nominee, she is the first woman to win the Grammy® for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Her credits run the gamut from Queens Of The Stone Age, Rodney Crowell, Charley Crockett and Iggy Pop to Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile and Tanya Tucker. Although audio engineering is a passion, writing songs and playing musical instruments are not. Instead, while her ears are busy in the studio recording music, her imagination is busy creating characters, narratives, plotlines and dialogues as she travels through the hidden workings of songs. These stories have culminated in the creation of her debut novel, Bury Me Alive In Your Sugar. Trina lives on Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Alabama, with her husband, singer-songwriter Grayson Capps. Thank you to Tyler Bryant for the introduction!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of Recording Studio Rockstars is brought to you by Isotope, Native Instruments,
0:06.8	Atom Audio, and S-A-E Institute. You're hearing my voice right now mixed through isotope,
0:13.5	ozone, and velvet on atom audio monitors and headphones. Make sure to get my free mixing course
0:20.1	at Mixmasterbundle.com, and please check out our
0:23.8	awesome sponsors using the links in the show notes, and please like and subscribe to this YouTube
0:29.7	channel because it's a great way to help support this show. Now get ready to rock.
0:34.8	There's a lot of singers that are quite famous that can be very insecure in the
0:39.3	studio, especially if they don't feel that they're singing on their game. And it's my job as a
0:44.5	producer to not, you know, coddle them, but to let them know that I have your back, because at the
0:50.4	end of the day, if you want to know the truth, all I care about is the vocal. The rest of this is just there to frame you. This is just there to thrill your vocal, for your vocal have a place to exist. So I spend an enormous... It's true. It's difficult to swallow sometimes as a guitarist, but it's true. It is true. Well, if it's not true, I mean, that's not to say that the guitars aren't so important, but most people really are listening to the vocal.
1:15.7	The vocal tells the story.
1:17.4	The vocal tells the story.
1:18.6	And even if it's the kind of singer that doesn't really, truly doesn't care about their vocal, I care about their vocal. Welcome to Recording Studio Rockstars. I'm Lid Shaw, and this is the podcast created to help you become a rock star of the recording studio.
1:49.3	At Isotope, mixing and mastering just got even smarter.
1:54.9	Velvet gives you silky vocals with sibilance learn D-Sing, dynamic tone shaping, and D-Click, all in one plugin.
2:04.2	And Ozone 11 now includes clarity, upward compression, and AI-powered STEM focus to help you master like a pro.
2:12.5	Use code Rock 10 for 10% off, ozone or any of Isototopes incredible plugins at Isotope.com.
2:21.8	Howdy Rockstars, it's your host, Lidge Shaw, and welcome back to Recording Studio Rockstars,
2:27.0	bringing you into the studio to learn from recording professionals so that you can make your
2:31.0	best record ever and be a rock star of the studio yourself. My guest today is Trina Shoemaker, who was born and raised in Joliet, Illinois.
2:39.9	Over the past three and a half decades, she has produced, recorded, and mixed hundreds of records.
2:45.7	A four-time Grammy Award winner and six-time nominee,
	...

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