George Chkiantz
George Chkiantz is a recording engineer based 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 Small Faces (eponymous), recorded for Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate. Chkiantz was a staff engineer at 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]
Credits
Engineer unless otherwise specified:
- Beatles, All You Need Is Love (song) (second engineer)
- Blind Faith, Blind Faith
- Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Down South In The Bayou Country
- Family, A Song for Me
- Hawkwind, In Search of Space
- Hawkwind, Masters of the Universe (producer)
- High Tide, High Tide
- King Crimson, 30th Anniversary Edition
- King Crimson, Concise King Crimson
- King Crimson, Red
- King Crimson, Night Watch
- King Crimson, Starless and Bible Black
- Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II
- Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV
- Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy
- Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
- Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock 'N Roll (overdub engineer)
- Savoy Brown, Street Corner Talking
- Slade Old, New, Borrowed and Blue
- Small Faces, Small Faces (Immediate Records)
- ( The Soft Machine, Volume 2
- Ten Years After, Anthology 1967-1971
- Ten Years After, Cricklewood Green
- Ten Years After, Ssssh