Time Out of Mind

[RMcFarland]

Can you talk about some of the equipment and techniques used on Time Out of Mind? I am mesmorized by the vocals and organ sounds.

That album has such an incredible vibe. Along with Teatro, they are two of my favorite recordings.

[Daniel Lanois]

Time Out Of Mind and Teatro are similar. They both had large groups of people playing at once in big rooms. The art of making records this way is all about balancing the sources of sound so that there is not any one ingredient too loud in the room at a given time. These recordings are like Jazz recordings really. The singers in the room were never drowned out by the instruments acoustically. All kinds of curious automatic placement of instruments happen naturally when you open a lot of mics in a room. At a certain point you become slave to the situation and accept the fact that spill is part of the formula. The vocals are full of instrument leakage. Doing vocal repairs and overdubs becomes tricky. A simulation of the presence of the band must be built for vocal repairs. In the case of Dylan, if he wanted to repair a vocal line I'd pipe the track into two huge Altec Lansing speakers set at just the right volume to mimic the presence of the band around Bob. The thing about Bob's vocal is that he puts out a lot of mid-range. The microphones are friendly to this quality. Any mic on Bob sounds good. Time Out Of Mind features a vocal reprocessing thru a small guitar amp that we mic'd and put back in the mix. Bob wanted his vocal to sound like rock and roll recordings of the 50s. There was definitely overdrive happening on those records. Preamps have gotten a lot cleaner since and so the vocal into a guitar amp was my way of getting to the sound of the old days.