EQ Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 17)

When You Are Recording With Bob Dylan, You Never Know What’s Going to Come Next ecording Bob Dylan is an exercise in unpredictability, spontaneity, and early commitment—a journey into a land where experimentation is the only reliable certainty. On any given day, for any given song, Dylan’s group of top-shelf musicians (such as multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell, guitarist Charlie Sexton, and bassist Tony Garnier) will be handed an assignment that would cause anyone except the most seasoned of session players to cower in fear: Learn and execute a track with little to no prior knowledge of its workings. Within a 10-hour window, the song will be in the can, awaiting a final mix. And, according to Chris Shaw, who has served as Dylan’s go-to engineer for the past nine years, even the final mix won’t take very long. After all, how else can you explain one artist putting out 57 albums (including live recordings, greatesthits LPs and sanctioned bootlegs) in 44 years? “After we tracked the song ‘Things Have Changed,’ for The Wonder Boys soundtrack, Bob asked me for a quick mix,” Shaw recalls of his first session with Dylan. “I figured the final mix would be done by someone like Daniel Lanois. So I did a quick rough mix to DAT. Bob listened and said everything was too clear, too easy to pick out every instrument and note. He wanted to ‘mush’ it up.” According to Shaw, Dylan employed a trick of his own for ensuring his vocal track was tailor made to sit perfectly in what would become a delightfully murky mix: running his vocal back through a guitar amplifier to exaggerate its natural asperity. Shaw took it one step further and placed an Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz box in the signal chain (he also says that he ran the snare and the room mics through the unit as well). Nodding in approval, Dylan reached over and pushed the percussion track up nearly all the way, the shaker now a bayonet piercing the left side of the mix. “I thought, it’s just a reference mix and ran the DAT again,” says Shaw. “A couple of days later Jeff Rosen, Bob’s manager, called and asked me for the quarter-inch [tape] of the mix. I was stunned—it was just a rough mix, a very rough mix. Jeff said, ‘Oh, you don’t know Bob. That was the final mix.’ The DAT was the master. Two months later it was nominated for an Oscar for best song. Two months after that, it won the Oscar for best song.” R T he first full Bob Dylan album Chris Shaw did was 1999’s Love and Theft, which the engineer says was recorded at Clinton Studios in NYC—a studio that served the singer-songwriter’s needs well. “It’s a big, bright, airy room that has a nice, natural reverb that doesn’t slap back and decays evenly and naturally,” the engineer says. The console, a vintage Neve 8068, and a one-inch Studer A827 two-track for mixing (15 ips, no noise reduction), sealed the deal at a time when Dylan was recording exclusively to analog. “Bob is enamored with old Americana recordings like the Carter Family records,” Shaw continues. “He loves the idea that those records were made with one microphone that everyone leaned in around. So he wants the whole band in the room when he tracks. I’ll mic instruments and amplifiers individually, but leakage is a big part of the sound. In fact, I’d say three-quarters of the sound is just what leaks into Bob’s vocal microphone. People have asked me how I get that big thumpy drum sound and I tell them that most of it is coming from Bob’s vocal mic. Virtually all of his ‘pilot’ vocals are actually the vocal you hear on the records.” That puts a lot of pressure on a single microphone, in this case a Shure SM7. “The large-diaphragm condenser microphones that most people use on vocals would just be too sweet on Bob’s voice, and he’s also a surprisingly loud singer, so a dynamic responds better to that,” Shaw says of the choice to use an SM7 on Dylan. “A dynamic microphone is also good for Bob because his vocal sound is formed closer to his mouth than his throat. The SM7 captures the explosiveness of his singing better than, say, a [Telefunken] 251 might.” One collateral issue is what happens on the relatively rare occasions where Dylan needs to punch in a line on a vocal—not only is there a lot of band leakage on the vocal track, but Dylan dislikes headphones and won’t use a floor monitor. With neither, how could he be cued in to sing at the right moment and on pitch? Shaw’s solution, which he devised during Love and Theft, is quintessentially Dylanesque. “I have the band play along with the track at a lower volume while wearing headphones, and I have Charlie Sexton sing the lead vocal he’s hearing in the headphone and Bob follows along in the room,” he explains. “Then I punch in for the line. It gets the same spillover from the band on the punched part of the vocal track.” As a back up for the ambience, Shaw also sets up a second SM7 about two feet in front of Dylan’s vocal microphone and pointed in the same direction. “Just in case he has to do a punch without the band in the room, because when the ambient sound disappears, you really notice that it’s gone.” (Continued) by Dan Daley www.eqmag.com JANUARY 2009 EQ 17 http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - January 2009

EQ Magazine - January 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Bob Dylan The Killers Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Microsoft Windows Vista Apple Mac OS X "Lite" Software Roundup "Lite" Software Gadgets & Goodies Sounds Room With a Vu

EQ Magazine - January 2009

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