Daniel Lanois

A listener with a trained ear can easily identify the work of producer Daniel Lanois, but not because he uses a particular bag of sonic tricks or employs signature sounds. Rather, it is the atmosphere and sense of space along with the emotion and soul that he pulls out of performers that makes his work stand out. While Phil Spector may be known for his innovative "wall of sound" productions, Lanois makes music that sounds like it can't be confined by walls, creating an environment that seems as infinite and spacious as the universe while providing listeners with an intimate, passionate portrait of an artist in performance.

Lanois has given his unmistakable touch to some of the most critically acclaimed and influential albums of the last 30 years, including U2's The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, Peter Gabriel's So, and Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind. More recently Lanois produced Neil Young's fascinating truly solo effort, Le Noise, and he formed the band Black Dub, featuring singer/multi-instrumentalist Trixie Whitley (daughter of Chris Whitley), bassist Daryl Johnson, drummer Brian Blade, and Lanois on guitar. Lanois discussed all of these projects at the Hollywood Guitar Center during a taping of Guitar Center's new podcast At Guitar Center with Nic Harcourt.

"I always had a recording studio in my mom's basement since I was 12 or 13," says Lanois, recalling his early obsession with capturing sound. "At the same time I was playing the guitar, so the two always ran in tandem. Because I was a musician, I could help anybody who came into my studio with arrangements, harmony parts, edits, and any other musical advice if they needed it. Pretty soon people started asking for my help more formally and my name turned up on their records as a producer. After that people started asking to work with me."

Lanois was still working in the studio he built in the basement of his mother's home in Hamilton, Ontario, located about 70 miles southwest of Toronto, when he first experienced commercial success recording four popular children's albums by Canadian singer Raffi. Thanks to the success of those albums he was able to move the studio to a commercial location, where he continued to record demos for local artists like the Time Twins, who played their demo for Brian Eno during a chance meeting in New York City. Fascinated by the distinctive sounds he heard on the demo, Eno hired Lanois to work with him on Harold Budd's Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror in 1979.

"I appreciated that Eno was an experimenter," says Lanois, "but I could tell that he was not a studied musician. I helped him speed things along because I was musical. We developed a few angles together that really sped up the process, and we built a very nice work friendship. He just kept coming back and we made a lot of pretty cool instrumental records between '79 and '83 such as Ambient 4: On Land and Music for Films, Volume 2. Brian taught me about commitment. He was pursuing what might be regarded quite obscure instrumental music, but he made up his mind that that was what he was going after. He did not have commerciality tapping on his shoulder. He just wanted to make records that were true to him."

In 1983, U2 invited Eno and Lanois to Ireland to discuss recording the follow-up to the band's third album, War. Eno and Lanois agreed to take on the project, and in May of 1984 they set up recording equipment in a non-traditional environment, Slane Castle. Lanois had previously experimented with recording music in an abandoned library back in Hamilton, and he looked forward to experimenting further with the seemingly unlimited palette of sounds that location recording offered him.

"U2 had made good records up to that point, but they wanted to make a different record," Lanois recalls. "Luckily Eno and I had been experimenting with more symphonic type of sounds and so we brought something new to the table in Dublin. I think they appreciated that we were coming in with a different kind of flavor. We experimented with all kinds of things. Eno and the Edge were constantly trying to find new things to do on the guitar. I felt suffocated working in the dead, padded walls of a studio, but working at Slane Castle was a very inspiring experience."

Lanois continued to work in non-traditional environments and studios after that, including Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios, which is praised for its large, open control room where the musicians and engineers work and collaborate without the separation of walls. Lanois eventually built his own studios, including Kingsway, which formerly was a New Orleans mansion, and El Teatro, which previously was an abandoned movie theater in Oxnard, California. Currently Lanois works out of a studio he built in his home in L.A.'s Silver Lake district.

Although Lanois worked exclusively in the analog domain through the late Nineties, his current main recorder is an iZ Technology RADAR digital multitrack system. "I still keep all my favorite tools from every record I've ever worked on, including all my 2-inch analog machines," he says. "A photographer wouldn't think of throwing out a favorite lens. I feel the same way about microphones, guitars, and amplifiers. The sources of good sounds are very important so I make sure I keep the best tools from the best times."

Some of the best tools in his Silver Lake studio include a Sony C-37A tube condenser microphone -"I used that on Neil Young's acoustic songs," explains Lanois-and a Shure Beta 58 supercardioid dynamic microphone, which he uses frequently for vocals. "I find singers perform better when it's like they're performing on stage. The Beta 58s sounds great when the singer gets right on top of it and it minimizes drum leakage."

When recording drums, Lanois favors an RCA 44 ribbon mic placed just over the rack toms, a Shure SM57 or Sennheiser dynamic mic for the snare, and an AKG D12 placed close to the kick drum used in tandem with a Coles ribbon mic placed about three feet away from the kick. "Sometimes I use just the Coles on the kick," he says. "That eliminates the ticking sound, which I don't like very much. The Coles gives the kick more of a full-bodied, chesty sound."

Lanois offers the following tips for recording drums: "There are two philosophies for recording drums. You can completely isolate the drums or not isolate them at all. Lately I've been using the latter approach. I just did a recording with my drummer, Brian Blade, sitting right next to me. My amps were right by his kit, and we treated it all as one. We miked everything separately, but we didn't put the guitar amps down the hall to separate them from the drums like I'd normally do.

"I've discovered that musicians self-balance if you keep them close together," he elaborates. "Musicians try to harmonize and balance so everything sounds musical in its acoustic form. I seem to get my best results when people are close together. When I listen back to those recordings, they have more depth of field and the positioning just automatically adjusts itself so you don't have to do much fake positioning with mixing."

Lanois's favorite outboard and processing gear includes a custom-built mic preamp designed by his brother Bob and Mark Howard-"I used that on the Neil Young record and it's pretty much my exclusive mic pre now," says Lanois-and various classic compressors, including several vintage LA-2A leveling amplifiers, various DBX 160 compressors, UREI 1176s from the Seventies, and the compressors in his Neve 8068 console. "I like onboard compressors," says Lanois. "They're always strapped across the stereo outputs so at any given time I can just dial up whatever compression I want."

Besides the incredible sense of atmosphere and space that characterizes his recordings, Lanois is also noted for his rich, resonant bass sounds. "I love deep bass," he says. "I try to get the best bottom end possible for any record. There are more bass sounds in my toolbox now than ever before. Sometimes I use keyboard basses, but I also have a nice array of bass amp rigs. It's nice to surprise a bass player with a different rig. It's always been my thing to have various sound stations-a bass station, keyboard station, guitar station-so when people walk into my studio it's like a wonderful candy store. Any instrument can get an instant sound."

Bass is also an important factor of his band, Black Dub, which was inspired by the dub music Lanois heard on frequent trips over the last 15 years to his cottage in Jamaica. "Lee Scratch Perry did very inventive work in the studio," says Lanois. "I modeled part of myself after him even though I use very different dub techniques for my own work. The Black Dub recordings are rhythmic. I now have a better understanding of bass lines and how they intertwine with the other vital components. If the bass line is full of identity you can raise it up real loud in the mix. It's always an amazing force if you can hit on a great bass line"

For the Black Dub debut album as well as Neil Young's Le Noise, Lanois sampled and extracted individual parts such as Neil Young's guitar and then treated the parts with EQ, octave dividing, or flanging. "When I put that component back in it is in synch with the source," he explains. "That makes the sounds a lot more massive. I use echoes, like repeat Jamaican echoes, but I they're more like little samples that repeat. I stack them up, find the best bits, and erase the ones that are no good and celebrate the ones that are great. It's a very slow process, but it's one of the most exciting technical processes I like to use."

Although Lanois is best known as a producer, he says that production is the easiest part of his job in the studio: "Production kind of takes care of itself, really. I never think that I have a job at hand as a producer. I just get on with my mates, we have philosophical exchanges, and then the record gets made. I get more involved with arranging songs, although it depends on the circumstances. If a song is beautifully formed I won't meddle with it. But sometimes you don't know what the arrangement is going to be, ultimately. Maybe there's an exciting jam at the back end of a tape that I'll transport earlier in the song. I'll do a bit of chopping and surprise the band the next morning with a new layout for the song."

After working almost non-stop making records for more than three decades, Lanois is still as excited today as he was the day he completed his first recording. "It's a blessing to get to do what I love the most," he says. "Deep inside I'm still an insecure kid from steeltown Canada. That never goes away, so I'm very grateful that I've been invited to do so many projects."