EQ Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 20)

IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY TRACKING) drums up on the console and mix the sets as the song evolves. And that can happen in the space of two takes.” Shaw also tries to balance Dylan’s preference for “mush” with the need to create some definition between individual instruments. “I’ll set up some gobos and Tube Traps while the band is setting up, maybe a blanket over something,” he says. “I try to sneak in as much isolation as I can before he complains.” ylan is nothing if not quirky, and Shaw is sensitive to that. “Bob sits in the circle with the rest of the musicians but he always sits with his back to the control room,” Shaw says. “He doesn’t like distractions. I watch him through the glass and I’ve had to learn to read his body language.” Shaw concedes he was never a huge Dylan fan growing up, yet could not fail to be awestruck at the thought of working with the most iconic solo artist since Elvis Presley. He seems to enjoy the unpredictability that characterizes Dylan’s sessions, as well as the gentle cat-and-mouse game he plays trying to make sure that each track has definition while still letting the “mush” be there in all its glory. Shaw laughs when he recalls the one and only time he didn’t hit “record” during a rundown of a song. “Bob never says ‘roll,’ so you always have to be sharp,” he says. “I was tweaking a sound while the band was running down what I thought was the intro, but that turned into the first verse and I realized, uh-oh, this is the take! I started waving my arms at the band through the glass and they were nice enough to cover for me—one of them ‘missed’ a note and we were able to start over again [laughs].” PARSING DYLAN ON TECHNOLOGY While Chris Shaw says Bob Dylan is not a technophobe, the singer is on the record as being somewhat contemptuous about how contemporary records— including his—sound in general. He told a Rolling Stone interviewer, “You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious . . . just like—static. Even these songs [from Modern Times] probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em.” Shaw interprets: “You have to know Bob to know what he means. He means that the way records are made today—individual tracks done one at a time and heavily layered and time-tooled and pitch-fixed to death—means they have sound but no performance. I was working on the soundtrack to Martin Scorcese’s No Direction Home and I got my hands on some of the old fourtracks from that time. You’ve got drums and organ on one track and Bob and his electric guitar bleeding into everything else, all mushed together. But it’s also magic. It’s all about the performance. Bob is constantly trying to get back to that sound.” D 20 EQ JANUARY 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.groovetubes.com http://www.groovetubes.com 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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