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U2 & Robbie Adams Recording In Mysterious WaysPublished in SOS March 1994Young Irish engineer Robbie Adams played an important part in the recording of U2's popular and critically-acclaimed albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa. Here he gives PAUL TINGEN a fascinating insight into the exciting and unorthodox recording methods they used....Lanois has become known for recording in houses, mansions or castles, and rolling in rented equipment to further the elusive feel and atmosphere factor. At the same time he likes to record in the impromptu 'control room', furthering communication and band confidence.This can obviously lead to problems with acoustics and seperation, but for Lanois a good performance will always take precedence over these traditional studio objectives. As he summarised it: "a good performance equals a good mix." He introduced U2 to this philosphy on The Unforgettable Fire, which was recorded in Slane Castle near Dublin. Backing tracks were always recorded live by the whole band, and tape-recorders were kept running virtually all the time to capture spirited moments, whilst band and producers were couched in the inspiring and characterful surroundings of the ancient castle....Sessions for Achtung Baby started in late 1990 in Berlin, where the band worked for six to eight weeks, after which they took a three-month break, resuming work at Elsinore in February 1991... Overdubs did take place in the control room upstairs, where two enormous EGV monitor speakers were used at very loud playback volume. Apparently the band hate playing or singing to headphones. The obvious question is how Adams and Co dealt with spill: "Mixing, like music, is a very personal thing. It's the people that are important, and the machines and the quality of them is very secondary.""There's one golden rule with these guys and that's 'never erase anything'. You simply record everything and put it in storage somewhere. Obviously the problem with 24 tracks is that you're going to run out of tracks if you're doing 10 vocal takes or something. What we do instead is record overdubs, which we're not sure whether we're going to use, to a Fostex timecode D20 DAT machine, that's linked to the Otari with an Adam Smith Zeta 3 synchroniser. The Fostex functions as an infinite 24-track. Later we pick and choose the right takes and fly them back in onto the multitrack."Unlike Achtung Baby, where the band played in a separate room, at The Factory U2, desk and engineer were all in one big room, which had its consequences. Adams: "At Elsinore we'd placed Edge's guitar amps and Adam's bass amp in separate rooms, so that we got a degree of separation. But in The Factory there was too much spill so we had to screen things off with flightcases and made little booths out of pieces of wood. Because of the way they work, recording many overdubs, you still end up with a lot of separation on tape. The main problem with spill usually came from vocal monitoring, because Bono often wouldn't have the lyrics ready yet, so you knew that he'd have to overdub that. Spill, what about it? They didn't worry about it and neither did I. Once the band felt that they had a finished arrangement for a backing track, Bono would ease back on the vocals and just give cues, maybe playing guitar just to get a vibe going."Mixing, explained Adams, was very much seen as an engineer's performance, an attitude especially adopted by Lanois: "He'd often sit in the back of the room, shouting encouragements like: 'yeah, come on, louder!', just to get your excitement going and put you on edge. Band members would also sit in on mixes, and do a kind of cheerleader thing. It all induces a nervous energy in you and creates a lot of pressure, and gives the whole thing a performance feel. The reason we work like that is that mixing, like music, is a very personal thing. It's the people that are important, and the machines and the quality of them is very secondary. It's like recording Bono's vocals with an SM58 and loud wedges. The important thing is the way he sings, not whether there's spill or not. It's possible to deal with the latter."
