Earle Mankey (sometimes misspelled "Earl" in credits) (born March 8, 1947 in Washington, United States) is an American musician, record producer and audio engineer. He was a founding member and guitarist for the band Halfnelson, later called Sparks. He became a record producer, predominantly for Los Angeles area bands like The Pop, 20/20, The Runaways, Concrete Blonde, Jumpin' Jimes, The Long Ryders, The Three O'Clock, The Tearaways, The Conditionz, Adicts, Durango 95,Leslie Pereira and The Lazy Heroes, and Kristian Hoffman. His brother James Mankey is also a musician.
Mankey's route into studio work began formally with the demo recordings he engineered for Halfnelson. Using two stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders (a Sony quarter-inch and a Panasonic quarter-inch) he painstakingly built up the tracks by recording onto the first recorder then playing the results back into the second recorder along with a simultaneous performance either by himself on guitar or Ron Mael on keyboards until a finished backing track was completed, to which Russell Mael then added vocals. Mankey describes these early experiments as "fussing around with tape recorders" though he admits he took pride in the "cutting edge" nature of the home recordings he made at this time.
On his approach to recording and making music, he says: "About the only thing that can really excite me is to try to think of something I haven't thought of before and then try to do it - which is the satisfying part."