Elliot Mazer, the longtime producer and engineer who worked on albums for Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt and more, died at his San Francisco home on Sunday at the age of 79.

Mazer’s daughter Alison confirmed the producer’s death came as a result of a heart attack following years of battling with dementia.

Born in New York in 1941, Mazer was hired by jazz label Prestige when he was just 21. The first album he worked on was Standard Coltrane, a collection of John Coltrane outtakes.

Mazer’s career as a producer stretches back to the early 1960s, when he worked on Dave Pike’s Bossa Nova Carnival LP and jazz records by Clark Terry. He began to shape albums by Gordon Lightfoot, outlaw country icon Jerry Jeff Walker, and Linda Ronstadt before his working relationship with Neil Young began.

Mazer is best known for producing multiple albums by Young, starting with 1972’s Harvest. It was Mazer's idea to assemble a group of Nashville studio musicians to record the album in the city and at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch barn in California's Redwood city.

Went on to produce the 1973 live LP Time Fades Away, his lost 1975 album Homegrown (released last year), 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and 1985’s Old Ways. He also introduced Young to digital recording.

“Elliot Mazer was in the right place at the right time,” Young explained to Jimmy McDonough in his Shakey biography. “He let me do my music and recorded it.”

“We all knew there was something very special going on,” Mazer told McDonough of Harvest. “Looking back, I don’t really think I felt at ease with him, even though we spent hours and hours in the studio. The serious amount of pain he was in and his mood shifts — greatly controlled by drugs — kept everybody at a distance.”

In 1978, he engineered the Band’s iconic live album The Last Waltz. He spent the ’80s and ’90s producing a wide variety of groups, from Dead Kennedys to the Dream Syndicate to Emmylou Harris.

"To me, rule number one is that there are no rules," Mazer told Sound On Sound in 2003. "I make records when I can visualise a finished product. I dream arrangements and mixes. Some engineers claim to use the same mic, same compressor, same EQ every time they record a snare, for example, but I don't have any rules and I do not have any favourite ways of recording things.

"To me, there is no line drawn between what is being played and how it sounds."

Mazer’s family has requested that all donations be given to MusiCares.