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Ken Townsend | |
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| Born | 1932 or 1933 (age 92–93)[1] |
| Occupation | sound engineer |
Ken Townsend is an Englishsound engineer who played an important role atAbbey Road Studios. He worked on severalBeatles albums, such asRubber Soul,Revolver andSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1966 he inventedartificial double tracking (ADT). He spent his whole working career atEMI and retired as the Chairman of the Studio Group in 1995.
Following a four-year apprenticeship atEMI's Hayes facility, Townsend was hired in 1954 as arecording engineer atEMI Studios.[2] Townsend worked withthe Beatles throughout their entire career at EMI.[3] He was present on 6 June 1962 for the band's first session at the studio and in August 1969 as they completed work on their albumAbbey Road.[4] Later described by producerGeorge Martin as one of the "backroom boy[s]",[5] Townsend rarely worked directly with the band but instead as a maintenance engineer, responsible for helping develop many of the studio inventions first used by the band.[3] After being promoted to the studio's general manager in 1974, he began a process of rebranding the studio to capitalise on its connection with the Beatles. In 1976, he oversaw its official name-change from EMI to Abbey Road Studios.[6]
I got the idea ofdouble tracking the vocals in order to cut down on the amount of time we spent double-tracking. Using various pieces of equipment I was able to create a system whereby we could record two sets of voices at once and then space the second voice at any required time interval either side of the original.[7]
During the recording of "Tomorrow Never Knows",John Lennon complained that he had always hated doing a second take to double the sound of his vocals, so Townsend, the studio technical manager, created the world's firstautomatic double tracking system by taking the signal from the playback and recording heads and delaying them slightly, thereby creating two sound images from the original signal. By altering the speed and frequencies he could also create other different types of effects, which the Beatles used throughout the recording ofRevolver .[8]
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