Producer Phil Ramone.

AP

In the late 1950s, a young Juilliard-educated violinist named Phil Ramone walked into a recording studio to cut his first demo record. He walked out knowing what he wanted to do with his life. Not play the violin: Make records.

Nearly 50 years later, Ramone has won 14 Grammy awards for his producing and engineering. He’s worked with the likes of Frank Sinatra (including his comeback 1993 Duets album), Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Stan Getz, Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett. He produced the most important records in the careers of Billy Joel and Paul Simon.

Now he’s put his experiences down in the book Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music. It’s a professional memoir of Ramone’s life in the recording business, from sweeping floors to hanging microphones to rolling tape to critiquing songs to winning Grammys. It’s shot through with anecdotes about how his receptionist’s high heels made it onto a Billy Joel record, and how Ramone hung up on President Kennedy. And if you read the book looking for the Phil Ramone formula, well, you will and won’t find it.

The formula is that there is no formula. As the diverse roster of artists above shows, there is no Phil Ramone sound. Throughout the book, Ramone attributes his success to the technical knowledge he gained as an engineer, and to his dedication to giving the artist the sound he or she is after.

“I have only one job to do,” he says by phone from his home in Connecticut, “and that is obtain a goal that you’ll be personally happy with.”

The role of the producer has changed since Ramone started in New York with his own studio, the now-legendary A&R. Ramone came in at the right time, as there was plenty of work to go around. “It was the Wild West,” Ramone remembers. “New York was the center of its own singles, its own overnight successes.”

After spending most of the ’60s as an engineer, he made the move to producer in the early ’70s, and his way of working fit the times perfectly. “The singer-songwriter [era] is where it explodes for me and gets me into the game.” 1972 was a big year, starting with Paul Simon, “and I probably had a better shot at [working with such artists] because I had their confidence as an engineer. And there was conflict with the producer types, whose authority was being contested.”

Early on, producers were taskmasters sent by the record company to keep performers in line and crank out records whose sound met supposedly objective standards, all under budget. On the other hand, the voice of the ’60s auteuristic producer, such as Phil Spector, “didn’t make sense to me,” Ramone says. Ramone, following in the tradition of George Martin with The Beatles, was artist-centered. The 14 months it took to make Here Comes Rhymin’ Simon, for example, was considered ridiculously extravagant at the time.

“I went against the grain a lot, but I found independent record companies that would let me do it, because it saved them a lot of money to have an engineer/producer. And it worked for me.”

The role of the producer continues to change, and many feel the technological aspects of making records dominates the process. But Ramone says of hip-hop and pop production, “It’s clever, and there’s so much going on, and it’s very street. It’s not coming from another school, because the school came up through the street. Any art that stretches out and tries to make a new statement is very important.”

Not surprising, actually. Ramone has never been shy about using the technology at hand: His book contains descriptions of how he adroitly mixed live singing and lip-synching in Liza Minnelli’s Liza With a Z TV special in 1974, and how he used fiber-optic telephone technology to make Sinatra’s Duets album without any of The Chairman of the Board’s partners in the room with him. “Recording has just moved light years ahead of itself in the last 10 years,” he says now. “It’s fun.”

He makes an analogy to his first love, the movies. “A lot of people make movies that are all computer-generated,” he says. “You can’t do what your parents saw in the ’40s and ’50s in movies, or in records. It’s a different layout.”

The dividing line, he says, is whether the use of technology — auto-tuning a word, re-recording a line — adds or detracts from the overall emotional punch. “I’d rather take Take Two, that has some errors that have to be fixed, than Take Eight, which is starting to become contrived. I pushed the envelope for the performance. That’s what I’m after.

“Because you can’t lie. You can put it together and do all kinds of tricks, but there’s a difference between something that’s really handmade and something that’s done with electronic blocks.”

Ramone’s job requires as much in the way of personal skills as musical, he says.

“Is it a psychological test? Yeah. Is it good manners? Yeah. And it gets into really close friendship at some point.” (Not for nothing are two of his children named Simon and BJ.)

Sometimes there are disagreements, which Ramone says he solves with tact. “You say, ‘Let’s do it your way. Let’s get that accomplished. And then, if you don’t mind, let me try one with an alternative look to it.’ ”

It’s a personal process that requires mutual trust and a lot of openness. Artists are opening themselves and their work up to criticism for the first time, and it has to come out for the best. “They’ll turn to me and ask, ‘Do you think I have a better one in me?’ And that’s when you say, ‘Yes.’ And that’s failure and success in a couple of minutes. …

“You have to win their confidence. That’s 90 percent of it. It somehow says it all when you accomplish something with someone, and they turn to you at some point and say, ‘Wow. That’s really cool.’ ”

Phil Ramone will speak at the Cabaret Theatre at the Mohegan Sun Casino, in Uncasville, Conn., Saturday at 1 p.m., followed by a book signing at 2:30. Admission is free.

rmassimo@projo.com