Discover the Top 10 Classic Rock Albums with Legendary Production Quality!

Rock and roll has never been a genre known for sounding pristine. For every great album that has everything firing on all cylinders, some of the most celebrated albums of all time tend to be from artists that wouldn’t know the first thing about production if it bit them in the behind. Sounding pretty is for classical music and other fancy genres, but artists like Fleetwood Mac knew how to bring some sonic sweetness into rock and roll.

Then again, there’s no rulebook when it comes to good production. Being a good producer is usually about being able to hear what every musician brings to the table and translate that to what’s on the tape, and these albums came as the result of a lot of listening to every member and finally having all of them capture that magic all at once.

That’s not to say that all of these albums are tuned to perfection. In fact, some of them have a lot of grit behind them, which is half the reason why they work. It is rock and roll, after all, and if you’re going to be micing a guitar, you’re going to make sure it sounds like it’s thundering from the heavens instead of someone jamming in their garage.

Whether it’s a prog rock masterpiece or just a decent piece of rock and roll, those behind the board help create a kaleidoscope of sound whenever you put on the headphones, almost like you’re dipped into a different sonic world when you’re listening. Rock and roll might be based on imperfections, but sometimes you end up making the perfect sound without even realizing it.

Let’s dive into a list of the 10 best produced rock albums:

1. 10. Boston – Boston

   For the first half of the 1970s, pristine production felt like a dirty word for rock and roll fans. Since the flavors of the day included acts like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin trying to make their music more aggressive, there was no time to clean everything up in the mix whenever someone hit the record button. Tom Scholz was always a producer first and a guitarist second, and when he finally got his sound, there was no one else who could touch him in Boston.

   Although the songwriting on Boston’s self-titled album is fairly by the numbers by certain rock standards, the real power behind it is just how much Scholz put into the background. Having invented his own guitar pedal to work on most of the songs, his guitars have a cutting midrange that sounds like a metal guitarist just randomly decided to show up on a rock and roll tune.

2. 9. Wildflowers – Tom Petty

   Tom Petty never concerned himself with making anything too complicated. While he initially got in trouble with his fans for calling his own albums “cheap shit”, he clearly took a lot more care in writing about his characters than he did about trying to make the perfect guitar lick every time he sang. Petty may have been a rocker, but he was a storyteller at heart, and once Rick Rubin understood that, they busted out an album that felt like the perfect rustic rock and roll weekend.

   Most of the songs on Wildflowers are meticulously recorded, but they sound like they took no time at all to complete. Just look at the title track. Even though there are a lot of great melodies on the final version of the track, it’s like a mini-orchestra when you hear it in context, especially when you hear Benmont Tench’s piano come in halfway through the song.

3. 8. Appetite for Destruction – Guns N’ Roses

   Hair metal was never a genre that really concerned itself with actually sounding decent. If you saw some random joker who happened to play the guitar walking down the Sunset Strip, chances are that you found your next big star, even if what you got in the studio was a tone-deaf imbecile. Guns N’ Roses weren’t about that sort of lifestyle. They were a street gang that brandished guitars, and they spent their days wasting away until they birthed Appetite for Destruction.

   Compared to other artists who could hardly put two decent guitar licks together, Slash was known to slave away on their debut album, even throwing an electric guitar through the windscreen of one of their vans in disgust when he listened to the initial mix. Once he got a Les Paul in his hands, the rest of the production was bound to be smooth sailing.