Bob Dylan Time Out of Mind Recording Process

When producing Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind Daniel Lanois aimed to achieve a dark and mysterious “depth of field.” He went about achieving this the old fashioned way: by arranging the musicians throughout a single room and tracking live. Dylan was placed in one corner of the room with the band, a major affair with two drummers, organ, guitars, and lap steel, in a semi-circle around him. Arrangements were developed during tracking, which ran 12 hours per day for 9 days. Lanois embraced the leakage cased by this setup, especially in the vocal mic, which was heavily compressed to bring up the room sound.

Vocals

Dylan sang into a Sony C-37A condenser mic through a UREI LA-2A compressor.

• On “Love Sick” the vocal was run through an Eventide 3500 stereo flanger.
• On various tracks, the vocal received a 180 ms delay from an AMS harmonizer to create a classic, Elvis-style 7 1/2 ips tape delay.
• Dylan’s vocal overdubs were recorded with the recorded track playing through speakers to imitate the sound of the live-with-band vocals.

Acoustic Guitar

Dylan’ 1930′s baby Martin acoustic was picked up by a Lawrence sound hole pickup and run into a 50′s Fender Tweed Deluxe. The amp was recorded with a Sennheiser 409 dynamic mic. Tracking the acoustic guitar this way allowed Dylan to perform vocal overdubs without competing with the original vocal leak into an acoustic guitar mic.

Mixing

Mixing engineer Michael Brauer stated that he struggled with giving the mix of “Love Sick” impact because the drums were played so lightly.