Peter Gabriel released his fifth album, So, in 1986. He originally considered Bill Laswell and Chic's Nile Rodgers as potential producers but chose Daniel Lanois - who he had worked with whilst recording the soundtrack for the film Birdy. The name Daniel Lanois might be familiar, he has produced albums by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and collaborated with Brian Eno to produce several albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. With hits like “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes”, So is considered to be one of Peter’s more accessible albums, less experimental than his previous material. In terms of the studio equipment, he continued to use the Fairlight CMI synthesizer. Peter would also supply demos with a Prophet and Linn drum for the additional musicians in the studio to track to. Not specifically synth-related, but for vocals, here’s an interesting tidbit I stumbled upon via engineer Kevin Killen in a 1999 article on Mix Mag: [ “We used a tube (Neumann) 47. Peter always maintained that he'd used a handheld 57 in the control room on his previous records. Dan and I were skeptical, so we did a test. We set up a bunch of mics, and we blindfolded Peter and had him sing into each and tell us which one he liked the best. It came down to one, and he was sure it was the 57. When we took the blindfold off, of course it was the 47. But there was a funny sound to that 47. It had much more air than you would normally expect-very pleasing sounding, but not as much bottom as you'd expect. We had our maintenance guy, Neil Perry, take a look and it turned out that one of the cables had a little nip in it. It wasn't getting full contact on the shield, and when he reconnected it back up it sounded much fuller-but the presence that we loved was gone. So we rigged up a system where we plugged the output of the mic into the patchbay, and we took the shield off a regular patch cord and used a mult of the two things; we brought the mic up on two faders to duplicate that sound-the regular 47 and the dropped shield version of it-and we'd balance between them.”] References: How Peter Gabriel Conquered the World With ‘So’ - UCR, UnCut, MixMag, Wiki.