2002 Hall of Fame Inductee Geoff Emerick

He was the right person in the right place at the right time. Geoff Emerick was still a teenager when he first went to work at EMI's Abbey Road studios in London, first as a disc cutter, then as an assistant to engineer Norman Smith. By the time Emerick had turned 20, in 1966, he was a full-time engineer working with the studio's biggest client—The Beatles. And what a time it was to get deeply involved with that band: Emerick cut his teeth helping The Beatles and producer George Martin shatter the conventions of the recording business on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road, revolutionary works that elevated the status of pop albums to high art. The sonic experimentation that marked those brilliant albums fundamentally changed the way records were made—the studio and its equipment became "instruments" for the artist, as important in their own way as guitars and drums. Young engineers coming up today still study and debate the clever and adventurous techniques Emerick and his associates used to make Beatle albums from Revolver through Abbey Road. "The great thing about that time," he once said, "was that the application of engineering was more artistic—working with sound was working with colors painted on a canvas."

But Geoff Emerick's career has encompassed so much more than merely figuring out how to make John Lennon's voice sound so strange on "Tomorrow Never Knows" (he fed it through a Leslie) and how to construct the trippy sped-up/slowed-down ending of "Strawberry Fields Forever." In fact, The Beatles took up a mere fraction of his career. In the 1970s he engineered six albums by the popular group America, worked on Paul McCartney & Wings' greatest records (including Band on the Run), produced and engineered discs for Robin Trower, mixed Jeff Beck's superb Wired, and cut albums with Badfinger, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Nazareth, Mott the Hoople, Steeleye Span, Supertramp and many others.
In the '80s he lent his studio expertise to albums by Elvis Costello, Cheap Trick, Paul McCartney, Split Enz, UFO, Ultravox and more. And in more recent times he's worked on projects as diverse as Elvis Costello's All This Useless Beauty, McCartney albums such as Run Devil Run, Robin Trower's last few records, Carl Perkins' Go Cat Go, and Ringo Starr's Vertical Man. And in the middle of all that '90s activity was untold studio time working on The Beatles' best-selling Anthology series—coming full circle, but still moving ahead. Past Hall of Fame Award Winners.

Past Hall of Fame Winners

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2006 David Hewitt

Past Winners:
2005 Arif Mardin
2004 George Lucas & Elliot Scheiner
2003 Eddie Kramer
2002 Geoff Emerick
2001 Roy Halee
2000 Sam Phillips
1999 Tom Dowd
1998 Colin Sanders
1997 Al Schmitt
1996 Willi Studer
1995 Phil Spector
1994 Frank Zappa
1993 Rudy Van Gelder
1992 Bob Moog, Bill Porter, Phil Ramone
1991 Ray Dolby, Bill Putnam, Bruce Swedien
1990 Deane Jensen, Quincy Jones, George Massenburg
1989 Wally Heider, George Martin, Rupert Neve
1988 Bob Liftin, Les Paul