Following a four-year apprenticeship at
EMI's Hayes facility, Townsend was hired in 1954 as a
recording engineer at
EMI Studios. Townsend worked with
the Beatles throughout their entire career at EMI. 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 album
Abbey Road. Later described by producer
George Martin as one of the "backroom boy[s]", 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. 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.
ADT 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 first
automatic 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 of
Revolver . ==References==