the album," as Aspden recalled, and the band removed clocks from the walls, covered up the windows, "set up oil projections on the walls and ceiling, and used no other light apart from a strobe," to create a suitable atmosphere for recording. The guest musicians were brought in "to improvise on sections without hearing the full track. With just a basic chord structure at most, they were encouraged to try out anything their hearts encouraged them to, and then, thanks to the emerging digital technology, any results felt appropriate were employed, sometimes in places for which they had never originally been envisioned." Most of the music recorded never made the final album, with Brown commenting "it takes a strong discipline to erase 80% of the music you record. Few have the discipline to get rid of 'stuff'." As with previous albums, Hollis alone chose what parts of the recordings to use and in what context. Compared to Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock was recorded with "a more conventional '80's set up." Brown and the band worked with a Studer A800 24-track recorder with Dolby SR noise reduction, which, to make editing simpler, was run at 30 inches per second. Harris' drums were firstly set up against the far wall of the studio's main recording room, Wessex Studio 1, and were microphoned in "the usual rock arrangement", using "about ten microphones all close to the kit – bass drum, snare, hi-hat, tom-toms, overheads, ambient etc." Following this, Brown and Hollis rented the Telefunken U47, a large-diaphragm condenser valve microphone manufactured by Georg Neumann GmbH during the years 1949–1965. They chose it from an offering of several valve mics, which besides the U47 included a Neumann U48, M49 and "Tube", alongside "the old Wessex Collection" which included three AKG C12As. They carefully listened to each before settling on the U47. However, they placed it "30 feet away from the kit near the control-room window," which became an issue as the physical distance triggered a delay of 26-32 milliseconds. Having by that point created backing tracks, they "made up Mitsubishi Digital masters" as they had done with Spirit of Eden, although this time they operated five analogue slave tapes, which gave them access "to over 120 tracks for recording ideas." From this point, they continued to overdub further textures and instruments, including cellos, pianos, harmoniums, guitars, double bass, violas, harmonica, percussion, Melodica, Hammond