Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick dies

London — Geoff Emerick, the Beatles studio engineer who entered the music business in his mid-teens 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.

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.”

A London native fascinated by music and technology from an early age, Emerick wasn’t widely known to the general public, but he was an invaluable part of the Beatles’ legacy as they became increasingly ambitious and experimental in the studio and helped transform rock music into an art form.

He was on hand during the Beatles’ early EMI sessions, in 1962, as an assistant under lead engineer Norman Smith. He was promoted after Smith left to become a producer in the mid-1960s.

“Geoff Emerick used to do things for the Beatles and be scared that the people above (in the EMI hierarchy) would find out,” producer George Martin later said for a 1990s Beatles documentary. “Engineers then weren’t supposed to play about with microphones and things like that. But he used to do really weird things that were slightly illegitimate, with our support and approval.”

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.

On Wednesday, John Lennon’s widow, Yoko 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.”

He had other innovations on the Beatles’ most complex and anticipated album, “Sgt. Pepper,” which came out in 1967.