The band’s latest ‘unfinished’ release, No Line On The Horizon, was the result of sessions lasting almost two years, beginning in June 2007 in Fez (Morocco), then moving on to The Edge’s place in the South of France, to U2’s Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, Platinum Sound Studios, New York, and finally, in late 2008 and early 2009, to Olympic Studios in London. It involved U2’s customary process of writing, recording, editing and mixing, followed by ceaseless rewriting, re-recording, re-editing, and remixing, in any possible order and often simultaneously. At least 20 people were directly involved in assisting the band during the sessions, including a posse of engineers, mixers, assistants, drum, guitar and studio techs, and so on, plus, of course producers Daniel Lanois (see box) and Brian Eno, with help from Steve Lillywhite.

Central to the technical side of things was Dubliner Declan Gaffney, who engineered three songs, mixed ‘Get On Your Boots’ and ‘White As Snow’, co-mixed five others, and has additional engineering credits for almost all the tracks. It’s fair to say that No Line On The Horizon was a jump into the deep end for 27-year old Gaffney, whose previous CV constitutes mainly assistant credits. Gaffney spent three and a half years working with Van Morrison, followed by a year at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, and another year at Metropolis in London, and was asked in February 2008 whether he’d be willing to work in U2’s studio in Dublin as an assistant engineer, where his role quickly became more important.

 

“The only thing that’s tricky at the studio here is that we still manually patch everything; there’s no such thing as routing. So when the sessions move at a million miles an hour, which they do, it can be really frantic to re-patch things when they suddenly decide to work on another song. The outputs of the mixing desk are split to go to the Radar and the DAT, and I made notes of everything that was going on. Sometimes you get a directive, like ‘Mark so and so on the DAT,’ but for most of the time you need to use your own initiative. Literally months later someone will turn round and say ‘We did this Joy Division-like bass line on this song one day, can you find that?’ You then need to go through your notes to see if there is a reference to a Joy Division-like bass part, and use your own memory. It may sound like looking for a needle in a haystack, but funnily enough, the system works. The assistant engineer makes notes of absolutely everything, no matter how insignificant it may seem. The band comes up with millions of ideas all the time, and everything gets a name. After we moved the project to Pro Tools the comments fields were also always full with information, so that if three months later someone wanted a hear the hook in a chorus of such and such a take, you could go back seven Playlists and find it.”

As Daniel Lanois explains, ‘Get On Your Boots’, the first single from No Line On The Horizon, was a case in point. “It came from The Edge’s workshop. He had that riff all along, and he was very excited about it, and we served it the best we could. Almost all the other material came from the sessions in Fez and France, and their beginnings were rhythmic. Brian came in with a lot of rhythmic computer preparations, which he piped into Larry’s headphones, and Larry then improvised a beat running in tandem with these Eno beginnings. This immediately brought us to a fantastic rhythmic place, and gave us the opportunity to approach our instruments in a way that we had never done before.

“Bono’s singing is fantastic these days, so we were also afforded the luxury of some great vocal performances, live with the band. The best emotional tracks are always recorded when you have the singer in the room with you, and that was the case on this record. We don’t like living with a promise: we pursue something because we are excited about it. So a lot of the effects get printed along the way. We only ever operate on excitement, and it’s not a good idea to try to recreate effects on another day. We also don’t want to wait for the mix. For example, I’d do all kinds of things to The Edge’s guitar sound, putting it back through an amplifier and re-miking it, and so on. He also did some nice slide guitar solos on the record that I processed through various outboard boxes to make them as exciting as possible.”

“Generally speaking, the last thing to be added to a U2 track is the lead vocal, so when we were in France, Bono worked extensively on the lyrics, the phrasing and getting the right vocal approach. Of the other tracks I was involved in mixing, ‘Fez’ came out of Edge playing this cool guitar sound in Fez, and Danny sampled it and chopped it up and remapped out the guitar part, and put some kind of rhythmic element behind it. Then Brian treated it and added atmospherics — you can hear a Moroccan marketplace, for instance. Brian, Dave Emery and I mixed the track in relay fashion; the two of them started the mix and I finished it towards the end of the project. Dan and I mixed ‘Cedars Of Lebanon’ together, live, with everyone in the room, on a K-series SSL at Platinum. Dan insisted on doing this as a performance mix: we redid each mix pass from scratch, rather than use automation and tweak previous mixes. Dan and I also mixed ‘Moment Of Surrender’ and ‘Unknown Caller’ at Platinum on the console, and we then used stems from these mixes to tweak them when we were at Olympic in London. But the mixing work on ‘Boots’ in Olympia was done in the box. When we came to Platinum we had these huge analogue SSL desks and we decided to run some of the in-the-box mixes via them, and compared that to the in-the-box versions, and we decided to stay in the box where we could.”

Lanois has always advocated the idea of mixing as a performance, and unsurprisingly, his two studios, in Los Angeles and Toronto, are each built around a console, a 38-channel Neve 8068 and a Midas 4000 respectively. So how does he retain that performance aspect while working in the box? Lanois: “It’s difficult, but I found a way of working with it that still allows me to take advantage of my instincts. I don’t sit behind the screen myself, but work with an engineer, like the mighty Declan, and I get very specific, saying things like: ‘Go to this section, take this out, put this in, make this louder, make that quieter, pan that hard to the left,’ and so on. So no tiny moves, only quite broad strokes. And I work in sections. Once a section has radical moves, it usually dictates what happens in the next section. The potential pitfall of working in the box is that the changes are very tiny and take a long time. So I prefer to stick with a broad stroke philosophy. That seems to work. And one of the advantages of mixing in the box is that you can go back to where you were at the push of a button.”

 

“After that, Bono put down his new vocal performances in France. We didn’t work on the song at Platinum, though I would sometimes open up the file and listen to how it sounded in that room, and tweak it accordingly. When we were at Olympic, we changed and added some sections, and put the final hand on the mix. In May 2008 Steve Lillywhite had worked on another version of the song, which was more rock & roll, and really good, but it wasn’t what the band was looking for. For the finally released version, the ‘let me in the sound’ section was changed; the band wanted me to make it a bit crazier, and one night when I was working on the song, when I thought everyone had gone home, Bono happed to walk by and came in, and together we realised that that section didn’t need fairy dust, but just to get the snare and kick f**king loud. We did some work on the outro as well, and finished the mix. But the end result is 90 percent the mix that I did on my own in Dublin. By the way, the work on the song in Olympia was done in the box. When we came to Platinum we had these huge analogue SSL desks and we decided to run some of the in-the-box mixes via them, and compared that to the in-the-box versions, and we decided to stay in the box where we could.

“There are loads of tracks in the ‘Boots’ [Pro Tools] Sessions — a lot more than you can see, because of the amount of ideas that people had during the recording process. The end result is essentially what happened live, but they are always trying new ideas. Working with U2 is an evolutionary process of constant writing, recording, and mixing all at the same time, and as soon as a decision is made not to use a track, it’s pulled down to the bottom of the Session and hidden, so it can’t play accidentally. But it will be labelled and have comments, so we can always revert back to it. We’ll have track culls now and then, when the Sessions become too big and unwieldy. We’ll do a ‘save’ marked as pre-clean-out, and then clear out the tracks and carry on. If you saw the Pro Tools Session folder for each song, you’d see hundreds of different versions of that Session, so the band can revert to a favourite balance or mix at any time.”

“If you were to look at the ‘Boots’ Mix window picture with the bass plug-ins, you’d see the Eno loop on the left, and all the main drum stuff to the left of that. To the right are two overheads and a bongo part. ‘Taurus’ is a Moog Taurus bass pedal — Danny is always into getting the low end right, and the pedal is doubling Adam’s live bass in the verses. ‘Edge Floor A’ and ‘Edge Floor B’ are the two mics with which his live take was recorded — ‘floor’ is a U2 term for a live take. You can also see the ‘Nu Riff’ track marked as ‘spirit of punk rock’. ‘Backwards loops’ is Dan’s backwards treatment of an Edge guitar solo, which you can hear in the outro. ‘Prime Time’ is Dan creating textures and atmospherics with delays and things. The Sessions are as organised as they can be, so you can understand what’s going on and quickly know where you are. I arrange and clean up the Sessions when the band isn’t there.”

“Using the Massey L2007 Mastering Limiter on bass is a trick I learned from Rick Rainey. It’s really good at getting an even bass sound. It flattens the bass, but it doesn’t make it sound compressed. It just allows you to set the level, and bang, that’s it. Finally, the Sansamp is automated to come in just for four bars immediately after the first chorus, where Edge plays an overdub called ‘James Bond Guitar’. Many other instruments drop out at that point, leaving the bass kind of exposed. The natural bass sound is so low that it didn’t really have any mids, so to make it cut through more, I dirtied it up with the Sansamp, to give it more guitar-like frequencies and to make sure that the James Bond guitar can sound quite small, which was the idea. The Sansamp plug-in comes in again during the ‘let me in the sound’ section, where it’s just bass, drums, vocals and a textural guitar solo, and it again fills the hole in that section.”

 

“There’s also a seven-band Digirack EQ that notches out around 245Hz and adds some top end above 10k for some sparkle. The Digirack De-esser and Echo Boy are on a separate track, because I wanted to hit the De-esser first, so that any kind of sibilance didn’t hit the echo. The echo is just a kind of warm ping-pong sound. There’s no reverb on the track, there’s not even any feedback on the delay, it’s all about the dry sound with a little bit of space on the side, provided by the delay. In fact, there’s no echo in the whole song. I recall Dan making a joke about how we were trying not to use any echo on this record. It didn’t require it. I’m not a huge fan of reverb anyway; it’s better to do the same thing with delays.”

“I printed the mix through an Aux track. The stereo mix hits the SSL compressor first, on a setting that lets all the transients go through, and yet makes it sound very punchy. It’s hitting the Massey L2007 mastering limiter after that, and the way the two act together works really well. While the SSL takes care of making the sound snappier, the L2007 takes off some peaks. The Massey has a very fast attack, which helps the vibe. I also tried the L1 limiter, but didn’t like it, and switched it off. Cranesong do this box called the HEDD192, and the Dark Essence plug-in is more or less a plug-in version of that. It simply makes the mix sound better. The Waves VEQ4 is a Neve 1081 recreation, and I add a little at 100Hz, 270Hz and at 15K, again to improve the sound and for some sweetness. It’s not surgery. The Neve is just there to make the whole track smile.”  0