Photo: Peter Anderson
Brian really opened my eyes and showed me how you could manipulate sound. In those days [early ’80s], engineers were very conventional in their approach to sessions. You recorded everything as dry and flat as you could and then got everything right in the mix. But Brian had little respect for that theory, and everything he did went to tape already very manipulated and treated, and I thought that was a really interesting approach to things. So we had this way of using a 36-channel console, where from channel 24 to 36 would be effects returns, and they’d be bused not into stereo, but into two channels all the time so at any given moment I could print effects very quickly. At the time, it seemed like a very extreme idea because back then people only really monitored effects. So if something sounded good with an effect, within two seconds I could get it down on tape.
— Daniel Lanois, producer, musician (in Mix, February 1990)
