The Napoli Brothers
Together, Jack and Joe have run the engineering on the vast majority of sessions at Cloud 9 Recording since the studio opened — building a body of work that spans genres, formats, and four decades of musical evolution.
Jack Napoli
Jack is the architect of Cloud 9 Recording in every sense. He drove the original vision for the studio, oversaw its construction, and has spent the years since behind the console engineering sessions across virtually every genre the studio has hosted. His instinct for the technical side of recording is matched by the ear of someone who has spent a lifetime as a musician — which means his engineering decisions are never purely technical. They're always in service of the performance.
That same instinct for problem-solving led Jack to launch Analog Alien Guitar Effects Pedals in 2010, after years of watching guitarists bring subpar effects into Cloud 9 Recording in search of a sound they couldn't quite find. Rather than continue working around the limitations of what was available, he built his own solution. Analog Alien has since become one of the most respected boutique guitar pedal companies in the industry, with endorsements from James Burton, Joe Walsh, Pino Paladino, Eliot Easton, Stevie Wonder, and Kenny Laguna, among others.
Joe Napoli
Joe came up as a drummer — recruited at twelve by his older brother and never looking back. Over the decades he has developed into a producer and engineer whose strengths lie in understanding what an artist is trying to accomplish and creating the conditions for it to happen. His ability to read the energy of a session, anticipate what it needs, and keep things moving without losing the creative momentum that makes great performances possible is a defining characteristic of how Cloud 9 Recording operates.
Beyond the studio, Joe co-founded Analog Alien Guitar Effects Pedals alongside Jack in 2010 — proving that a drummer's ear for tone is nothing to underestimate. The company has grown into one of the most respected boutique pedal brands in the industry, with endorsements from some of the most recognized names in music.
When Joe isn't behind the console or building pedals, he can apparently be found in the kitchen or making wine!
How It Started
Before Cloud 9 Recording, There Was a Basement
The studio didn’t start in 1994. It started earlier than that — with frustration.
Jack and Joe remember what it felt like to search for a recording studio that could actually capture what they had built as a live band. After spending significant time and money in a studio that turned out to be ill-equipped in both gear and staff, they made a decision that would define the next three decades: if the right studio didn’t exist, they would build it themselves.
The first version was a 4-track setup in their basement. Home recording is commonplace now, but twenty years before Cloud 9 Recording opened its doors, it was largely uncharted territory. Jack and Joe were among the first to go that route — not because it was trendy, but because they needed a place where the work could be done right and they couldn’t find one.
Twenty years and miles of tape later, that basement became Cloud 9 Recordig.
In 1994, two brothers and their father broke ground on Long Island and built a recording studio from scratch.
That’s not a figure of speech. Jack Napoli, his brother Joe, and their father — the original Joe Napoli — physically constructed Cloud 9 Recording, designing and building the rooms themselves using floating room, non-parallel wall construction. It wasn’t a renovation of an existing space or a buildout inside a commercial property. It was purpose-built from the foundation up by people who understood acoustics because they understood music.
Jack and Joe had been making music together since Joe was twelve years old. Joe tells it this way: “Jack announced to me that he was forming a band and that I was going to be his drummer. He made it sound really cool so I said sure, I’ll be the drummer. Jack handed me a pair of sticks and we never looked back.”
Nearly five decades of playing, recording, and producing music together gave them a precise understanding of what a great recording room needed to do — and the conviction to build one that actually did it. Cloud 9 Recording has been running ever since.