George Chkiantz

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George Chkiantz is a recording engineer in London who has been responsible for the engineering on a number of well-known albums, many of which are considered classics, owing in part to the high-quality of the recordings.

Chkiantz was the recording engineer of the Small Faces album There Are But Four Small Faces, recorded at Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate, Olympic Studios at the same time that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was recording Axis: Bold As Love. During the session with the Small Faces, Chkiantz engineered the song "Green Circles", which represented the first use of mono phasing on a pop record; he subsequently perfected the technique on their landmark 1967 single "Itchycoo Park".

Upon hearing the result, Jimi Hendrix and his engineer, Eddie Kramer applied Chkiantz's concepts, creating stereo phasing on the songs Bold As Love and Little Wing.^[1] Deciding to utilize Chkiantz' abilities more fully, he was hired by Hendrix for Axis, for which he customised the studio's equipment to provide a wide range of new sounds.^[2]

Chkiantz also worked with the group Family, who appeared on the bill with the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in July 1969, before assisting Glyn Johns on the Stones' Let It Bleed. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he worked with The Soft Machine, Savoy Brown, Ten Years After, King Crimson and Led Zeppelin.^[3]