for the Browns, with Atkins producing and Anita Kerr arranging. While editing the master to be sent to New York for pressing, Porter accidentally hit the wrong controls on the tape recorder and stretched the tape at the beginning of the song, distorting the pitch. Without telling anyone, he spliced a different take with a good intro onto the beginning, and sent that version instead. Four decades later, Porter recalled his quick fix: "this was a need-to-know situation and I figured nobody needed to know. I had been in the business three months or something like that. You're not a good engineer until you destroy a master and hopefully live to talk about it." In July, the song went to number one on the U.S. country and pop charts, and Porter's reputation rose. Porter served for four years as the chief engineer under guitarist and producer Atkins. Porter became the engineer big-name artists wanted to work with, and he was influential in creating the Nashville sound. Record producer Owen Bradley once asked Atkins how he got his sound, and Atkins said, "it was Bill Porter." He recorded more than 579 records that charted—49 were top 10, 11 were number one, and 37 were certified gold records. Most were recorded at RCA Studios in Nashville, where Porter was responsible for the sound. (At the time, there was only one studio, with no letter designation. In 1964, when the larger RCA Studio A was built, the original studio was renamed as "Studio B".) The studio's acoustics were problematic, with resonant room modes creating an uneven frequency response. To lessen the problem, Porter took $60 from the studio's petty cash and bought fiberglass acoustic ceiling panels which he and Tommy Strong, his assistant engineer, cut into triangles and hung from the ceiling at varying heights; these were called "Porter Pyramids". When Porter left RCA in late-1964, Atkins said, "the sound was never the same, never as great." Adjacent to Studio B was a utility room containing a plate reverb device made by EMT, German makers of similar effects units installed in other recording studios around the world. The EMT reverb was an electro-mechanical echo chamber used to add artificial reverberation effects to recordings. Porter arranged to have the dedicated echo room cooled down as much as possible with an air conditioner, and he adjusted the ten springs on the EMT plate to be