Comments on: Funny, Artistic, Analog v. Digital–Many-splendored Bob D. At 92Y

By: eruke

eruke — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:35:49 +0000

Thank you very much–this is greatly helpful and I hope you won’t mind if I share this with the people in the class. I begin to have sense of what can happen to the sounds of different instruments when they are recorded on one track, in terms of the *live* recording experience that Dylan prefers. When I finally got hold of a CD of the mono Blonde on Blonde, my experience of the album utterly changed. Gone was the shrillness and separation that I had grown used to with my standard remastered stereo CD. The songs sounded denser, warmer, richer in mono. Did I lose the thin wild mercury sound? Or do I finally really hear it? Was I confusing the shrillness of the digitalized, stereo separation with “thin” and “wild’? I pretty much only listen to the mono now.
I had the pleasure of hearing Sean Wilentz deliver a talk on the recording of Blonde on Blonde, which he then published. Here is a link to that paper, and it is a wonderful portrait of Bob At Work, as well an excellent and valuable appreciation of the musicians who were equal to his vision and made it real for the rest of us.
http://theband.hiof.no/articles/mystic_nights_tmobob.html
Thank you again.

By: John Gibbens

John Gibbens — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:37:43 +0000

A. On frequencies.
According to an article on The Bridge website (http://www.two-riders.co.uk/bobpt2c.html), Blonde on Blonde was recorded on 4-track. I’m no expert on vintage recording equipment, or what Columbia’s Nashville studios had, but this article – http://www.jamcast.co.uk/early-recording-techniques/ – describes the set-up the Beatles were using at Abbey Road in the mid-60s, and I’d guess Bob Johnston was using something roughly analogous in producing BoB.
The Abbey Road set-up has ten separate channels, which means ten different sound sources, although they all have to be routed ultimately to only four tracks on the tape. Each of the ten channels has its own EQ (equalisation) in three bands, just like your old home stereo back in the pre-iPod age: Bass, Middle, Treble. So the engineer or producer can make an incoming sound more trebly or more bassy as it passes through the mixing desk to the tape recorder.
As the number of tracks available in recording studios multiplied – by the mid-70s, 24-track was industry standard – the general rule would be not to apply EQ to the sound as you were recording it. Since there were enough tracks on the tape to record every sound source separately – for example, three different microphones on the drums, recording onto three different tracks – you could do all the tweaking of frequencies afterwards, in the mixing.
But with four-track you would probably have to be recording several separate sound sources together onto each track. For example, the Bridge article suggests that for “Fourth Time Around”, an acoustic guitar and bass were recorded onto one track, the drums and an organ onto another. The drums would probably have been miked with several microphones, and each of those – one in front of the bass drum, say; one overhead recording more of the “top” sounds of the kit, the splash of cymbals, the hiss and crack of snare – could have its signal adjusted for more treble, more middle, more bass as it passed through the mixing desk. But any adjustments you made in your sound couldn’t be undone afterwards – they were on the tape. So you had to know what you were doing – know your microphones, know your room, know your musicians and their instruments.
You had another pass of EQ-ing when you came to mix your four-track recording, to make the master for the record – or in the case of Blonde on Blonde, two masters, one for the stereo and one for the mono LP. But if you have several instruments or sounds together on one track, there are limits to how much EQ-ing you’ll want to do. If the bass is with an acoustic guitar, you may want to boost the lower frequencies of the bass sound, but that will also give you more bottom end in the acoustic. (For this reason, vocals were almost always kept, as far as possible, to a track on their own, so that they could be tweaked in isolation.)
Another important factor in the recorded sound in the Sixties would be compression, which is an electronic treatment of sound that is fairly simple in principle (though this isn’t perhaps the place to try explaining it), but can have a wide range of effects, from subtle to extreme, on what we end up hearing.
I’d say that the lovely results that we hear in Blonde on Blonde have a lot to do with familiarity. Bob Johnston knew the Nashville studio, the engineers, the musicians. That gave good chances of making good choices. And however radical Dylan’s songwriting, his sounds were not particularly radical: it’s not as though he was trying to record Hendrix or the Mothers of Invention.
B. On the Trickster…
… follows shortly

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:14:48 +0000

Well, I’ll share a funny story with you. I watched Dylan’s 1979 Saturday Night Live appearance (the one where he sang 3 songs from Slow Train Coming) with my 2 daughters and Peter Blue Cloud, a Native American poet who specialized in semi-original Coyote tales (semi-original in the same way Dylan’s tradition-steeped songs are only semi-original). Anyway, I had been trying to persuade Peter that Dylan’s Jesus (on the album) was a trickster–and thus a version of Coyote. After hearing the songs–on the album; none of the SNL songs were Jesus-oriented–Peter allowed that I was not crazy but he remained unconvinced. I felt somewhat vindicated, however, a couple years later, by “Jokerman,” a song about a trickster manque that was widely perceived–correctly I think–both as a self-portrait and an expression of wariness about the Jesus myth. (Interestingly, Dylan had been here before, in “All Along the Watchtower, where the joker & the thief are a trickster manque and a genuine trickster, respectively.)
I also played Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote” for Peter. He was unimpressed–until she came to the line about Coyote picking up her scent on his finger, while watching the waitresses legs–Peter shot a broad grin, pointed at the stereo and said, “THAT’s Coyote!”
One last thing: the trickster doesn’t lie. He (or she) just redefines the boundaries of the truth. He literally does make stuff up.

By: eruke

eruke — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:00:24 +0000

I agree that learning about the science of acoustics offers astounding chances to get into the records. There’s nothing reductive or mechanizing about finding out what choices could have been made to make Paul Griffin’s piano sound just that jewel-like on One of Us Must Know. Alas for myself, math is involved here. I think that for Dylan, sound waves have always been obviously physical, whether this means breath or something you and I aren’t physically calibrated ourselves to register. And he just *gets* that analog recording is a physical process he can follow at some subliminal level, that transports sound waves into different kinds of packages. And he can’t physically follow digital recording. This sounds nuts, but someday someone will de-nuttify this. Someone who’s good at math.

And thank you for prodding me to get that Lewis Hyde book. Absent Mr Dylan, we live in times when it seems especially appealing to be able to describe the difference between a trickster and a liar.

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:05:29 +0000

Thanks for the report. Lewis Hyde’s Trickster book is a genuinely great book, and I’ve always thought that trickster mythology shed a lot of light on Dylan. Hyde has another book, The Gift, that is almost as good.

It had never occurred to me that the “thin wild mercury sound” might emanate from the recording rather than (or even in addition to) the music being recorded. It makes me wonder what exactly–acoustically speaking–is being “manipulated” to enhance the sibilance. It seems like it would have to be something in the sound wave being made sharper–i.e. literally thinned. It would be fascinating to know.

As for Dylan’s wanting the (sense of the) sound of the room to be captured in his recording: I don’t think he’s just being a traditionalist here. I think at some level his motive for singing is for his voice to become the weather of the room he’s singing in, so that without that sense (or illusion) of the room–even an open-air room–it makes no sense for him to sing & he loses his way. That’s my take, anyway.