Emerick, studio engineer for the Beatles, dies

LONDON — Geoff Emerick, the Beatles studio engineer who entered the music business in his midteens and by his early 20s had helped make history through his work on such landmark albums as “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” has died. He was 72.

Abbey Road Studios, home to the Beatles and many other recording artists, confirmed the death Wednesday and vowed to ensure that Emerick’s legacy lives on. Colleague William Zabaleta told Variety that Emerick collapsed and died Tuesday while they were talking on the telephone. He said Emerick had suffered from heart problems in recent years.

His first album as Beatles engineer was “Revolver,” the 1966 release that marked the band’s full embrace of such studio effects as backward tape loops and double tracking. In one famous story that Emerick told on numerous occasions, he came up with a unique solution when John Lennon told him he wanted his voice to sound like “the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop 25 miles away from the studio” on the tripped out “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Emerick found a way to process Lennon’s voice through a revolving speaker to produce a landmark of psychedelic music.

Paul McCartney, in an online tribute Wednesday, wrote that Emerick “had a sense of humor that fitted well with our attitude to work in the studio and was always open to the many new ideas that we threw at him. He grew to understand what we liked to hear and developed all sorts of techniques to achieve this. … We spent many exciting hours in the studio and he never failed to come up with the goods.”

Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, tweeted that she was “shocked” by Emerick’s death.

“He was the best engineer,” Ono wrote. “Not only was he the best engineer, he was very, very kind.”

In 2006, he published his memoir “Here, There and Everywhere,” which received some criticism at the time from Beatles fans for its apparent bias toward McCartney at the expense of the other band members, especially George Harrison.