[ad_1]
Geoff Emerick, a sound engineer who recorded the Beatles among other things, helped shape the band's ever-changing music on such essential albums as "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper 's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "died Tuesday. He was 72 years old.
Abbey Road Studios posted the news of his death on his website, but did not specify his place of death. A video posted on Mr. Emerick's Facebook page indicated that he appeared to have had a heart attack.
Mr. Emerick had just left the modern modern Crouch End School in North London in 1962 when he was hired for a beginner position as an assistant engineer at the EMI studios at Abbey Road. In his memoir, "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles' Music" (2006), written with Howard Massey, Mr. Emerick described his second day of work, when he saw the producer , George Martin, enter his recently signed quartet – Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – for an early registration session.
Mr. Emerick wrote, "It's almost embarrassing to admit today, but what struck me the most when I saw them for the first time was their thin knit tie. "In no time," he wrote, "everyone at EMI wore them."
Mr. Emerick has collaborated on some of the Beatles debuts and other studio projects, including classical recordings. In 1966 he was chosen to replace Norman Smith (now producer) as the group's chief engineer.
His first record in this capacity was "Revolver", the 1966 album that included "Eleanor Rigby", "Yellow Submarine" and the supernatural "Tomorrow Never Knows". The following year, the "Sgt. Pepper's, one of the most innovative and influential albums of the time.
It was Mr. Emerick's engineering job to figure out how to create and capture the sounds the band wanted. The Beatles reaching new levels of musical complexity, it was not easy.
"If there was to be a piano used on a track or a guitar, it was always John, Paul or George who was saying," Well, we do not want it to sound like a piano or a guitar "Mr. Emerick told The Boston Globe in 1987." I did not have a gadget box with which to play, like today. We only had tape recorders and four tracks. "
Mr. Emerick has also created other Beatles albums, including "Abbey Road" (1969), as well as Mr. McCartney 's solo albums and Elvis Costello' s albums, as well as his own. Art Garfunkel, from the America group and many others.
Mr. McCartney, a tribute to his website, said, "We have spent many exciting hours in the studio, and he has never failed to find the merchandise."
Mr. Martin's son, Giles, wrote on Twitter: "We have all been touched by the sounds that he has helped to create on the greatest music ever recorded."
Geoffrey Ernest Emerick was born in London on December 5, 1945. His father was a butcher, his mother a housewife. There was no information about the survivors immediately available.
As a child, he surprised his parents by writing on his grandfather's piano songs he had heard on the radio, playing them by ear. As he gets older, he takes a close interest in the electronics behind the turntable and the radio. As a teenager, he makes a fateful trip to an annual trade show where the latest technologies are exhibited.
The BBC broadcast live an orchestral broadcast and the young Geoff was particularly fascinated by the mysterious console guy who turned dials and dials – the sound engineer that he would come to learn. He would soon tell his school guidance counselor that he was interested in a job in this field. This is the advisor who has heard about the creation of jobs for the first time at EMI.
In his sessions with The Beatles, he was an experimenter – repositioning the microphones of their standard alignment, for example, to get a more complete drum or bass sound. In his book he explained how he had acceded to Lennon's request to make his voice heard "as if the Dalai Lama were singing from the top of a mountain" on "Tomorrow never knows": he pumped it through a rotating speaker normally used for an organ.
In the studio, Mr. Emerick did not necessarily want everything to be perfect.
"Often, when we recorded some of these Beatles rhythm tracks, an error could be incorporated, and you'd say," This error sounds pretty good, "and we'd like to say more about it." told the New York Times in 2011. "When everything is perfectly right now, your ear or your mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock that turns in your bedroom – at the end from one moment, you do not hear it anymore. "
Mr. Emerick's engineers tended to have a D.I.Y. quality; the sounds can be found anywhere. Speaking of clocks, in his book, he said the alarm clock was halfway to "A Day in the Life," Sgt. Pepper's, came from a programmable clock on the piano.
"Lennon had one day taken away as a gag, saying that it would be useful to wake Ringo when he needed an overdub," he wrote.
In an interview with Variety in 2017, Mr. Emerick called the complex and laminated "A Day in the Life" one of the highlights of his years with The Beatles.
"The night we put the orchestra on it," he said, "the whole world has gone from black and white to color."
Mr. Emerick helped the Beatles create discs for the late 1960s that were easy to make with synthesizers and more. He added that the fact that the albums were not made in this way helped them survive, especially "Sgt. Peppers. "
"Maybe it's the human aspect," he told The Globe in 1987. "Everything about the album was done humanely. It was not there. from electronic gimmickry on, everything was done with mechanics and imagination. "
Mr. Emerick won a Grammy Award for the engineering of this album, as well as for "Abbey Road" and Mr. McCartney's 1973 album "Band on the Run".
Given the sophistication of "Sgt. Pepper's, "it's easy to overlook the fact that Mr. Emerick was barely 20 years old when he was instructed to make sure that the Beatles' vision was recorded," he said, 50 years later. in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a daunting challenge.
"John walked into the control room the first day and said:" We will never tour again and we will make an album that will have sounds and things that no one has ever heard before. " Mr. Emerick remembered it. "And everyone has watched me and I know what I have. I have nothing!
Doris Burke contributed to the research.
Source link
