Legendary Beatles Engineer Geoff Emerick Dies at 72

Emerick recorded such classic records as "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Drummer Ringo Starr of English congratulates EMI recording studio audio engineer Geoff Emerick (left) on his Grammy Award at the EMI studios in London, 7th March 1968. Emerick recently passed away at the age of 72. (Photo by Monti Spry/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Drummer Ringo Starr of English congratulates EMI recording studio audio engineer Geoff Emerick (left) on his Grammy Award at the EMI studios in London, 7th March 1968. Emerick recently passed away at the age of 72. (Photo by Monti Spry/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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Geoff Emerick, the audio engineer responsible for recording some of the greatest albums the Beatles ever made, has died. Emerick suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 72.

Emerick was something of a boy wonder, serving as engineer on the Beatles’ Revolver at only the age of 20. He was 15 when he first starting working for EMI Records, a label where he would become one of the most respected audio engineers in history.

On Revolver’s final song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John Lennon requested that Emerick turn his voice into “the Dalai Lama singing on a mountain,” Emerick said in a Variety interview last year. Emerick was instrumental on several of the Beatles albums that came after Revolver, from Sgt. Pepper’s to Abbey Road, despite the fact that Emerick temporarily quit during the famously combative White Album sessions.

Giles Martin, whose father George Martin worked with Emerick throughout the 1960s as the Beatles’ producer, called Emerick “one of the finest and most innovative engineers to have graced a recording studio… We have all been touched by the sounds he helped create on the greatest music ever recorded,” Martin said on Twitter.

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