There are fun threads to discuss what Grateful Dead we are listening to at any given moment, also threads discussing new releases from the vault, and even a thread discussing the Wall of Sound; but this thread will be the catchall destination to discuss everything that goes into the Grateful Dead’s superlative live sound and recording legacy. So just what would that entail exactly, well to kick-start things with a short list off of the top of my head, Bear’s, Betty’s and Healy’s recording techniques, “hey you forgot Kidd!”; the band were one of the first to multi-track record a live show and their approach to minimizing electronics and processing in the recording chain is pretty unique. We have their innovative approaches to recording live albums including overdubs. What about their live show archival recording methods and philosophy? Who are the best mastering engineers for the official live releases? What are the best official live releases? We have a whole legacy of tape trading and now electronic trading to discuss. Who was the first band to allow tapers at their shows and then round them up in a section near the FOH position? Were you a taper? I have always wanted to know more about the taper culture. What was your taping rig; please show us a photo or two. Tape collector much? How big, what was your preferred brand of tape, got any pics of your tape collection or hand-made J cards from back in the day? Tell us stories of the trading culture and who the heavy hitters were if not you. Soundboards, audience tapes, and now these new-fangled matrix tapes. Charlie Miller. Who else is doing great tape mastering on the Archives? What are the better Archives alternatives? What traded tapes are better than the official releases? Post here any newly released traded-tape remasters that knock down tape generations and sound much better; what if you have a question about the best tape source for something? Betty Boards; WBOTB? Maybe this thread will break the news. Since what they laid down live and on tape started from the ground up we can talk about the gear that made it happen; Bear’s contributions to the PA, Wickersham and Alembic for both recording, instruments and PA contributions; the dozens of other groundbreaking sound engineers and electronics wizards, John Meyer, Healy’s Ultra-Matrix mixes, Don Pearson; how Healy used CAD to pre-design PA layouts tailored to the venue. How about time-aligned snakes? What venues sounded the best on the night, and then those that sounded best on the tapes? So much of their live sound reinforcement happened before and after the Wall of Sound and also did not quite fit into the Gear Book, so now it has a home. So there is a lot to discuss. I continue to be amazed by just how much I still learn about them thirty-two years in, and there always seems to be new people getting on the bus. So now that I have clearly flooded the engine, somebody please take the wheel of this live sound bus to never-ever land.
GD were not the first to multitrack record a live show. Beatles did this at Hollywood Bowl in 1964, albeit with a 3 track, and in 65 at Hollywood Bowl and Shea. And included overdubs on the released film of Shea. I believe the Stones overdubbed some parts on Got Live If You Want It (65) too.
Fixed and well we can dispel many a good number of myths on this thread as well, and you are surely right. Maybe it was first 8 track or nothing was first. I think there is a good story about how the studio sent their engineers to the gig to baby sit the multi-track recorder and their experience was mostly recording big bands. Edit: From Two From The Vault liner notes: "When we originally recorded this back on August 23-24, 1968, our record company then was Warner Bros. Records. 1" - 8 track was the very rage and State-of-the-Art of the recording industry. Because our approach to recording was then considered controversial (years ahead of our time), Warner Bros. would not entrust this new equipment to us without their engineers chaperoning. The engineers they sent to us were accustomed to recording Big Band style and were not familiar with Rock & Roll close microphone techniques. This together with the fact that Mickey and Billy's drums were premixed one to a track and the vocal and audience microphones were also combined, gave an immense amount of leakage." It was a cool technique how they fixed it here, and the results show up great on that release, probably not many better rock recordings from 1968.
The "first live multitrack" reference may be to 16 track and Dec. 31, 1968. It's mentioned here (excerpted below), Grateful Dead Guide: Live vs. Studio Dead 1967-69 », and also in the recent oral history book. Once the Dead started using a 16-track in the studio, naturally they felt their live album had to be taped in 16-track, too. (‘The more tracks, the better!’ was their attitude.) At the time, the Ampex 16-track recorder was a large, expensive new item, and the idea of carting it to live shows frightened the manufacturer. According to Bob Matthews, “Ampex said, ‘You’re crazy; you can’t do that. It’s not portable’… They lost that round, and we put it in the back of the truck and took it over to Winterland for the Dead’s New Year’s Eve show.” The first tryout did not work so well, as the recording turned out distorted. Dave Lemieux says this about the tape, the first live 16-track: "The reels of 12/31/68 were erased to record the January '69 Avalon shows (hey, tape was expensive!), with one lonely Midnight Hour left on tape, featuring all of the musicians who performed that night in an all-star jam. The sound on this 16-track recording is very poor, filled with distortion." Unfazed, the Dead tried the 16-track again at their Avalon run from January 24-26: “We got ten people with ropes and we carried it like a sedan chair up the stairs into the Avalon.” Lesh tells the story of how (in the first set on the 25th), Weir’s guitar was lost in the mix, to the band’s great frustration. However, it appears our circulating copies come from Bear’s 2-track tapes, not the 16-tracks, as Lemieux notes: “the master 16-tracks from the first two Avalon shows were erased” to record the February Fillmore shows!
Great and rich topic. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Dead’s live sound and recordings have motivated and influenced my own interest in good sound. I had the chance to hear the Wall of Sound, and the Winterland shows I attended sounded absolutely stellar. I also remember being wowed by hanging out with friends in the ‘70s who were playing amazing live tapes via big JBL speakers, long before I ever owned a decent hi-fi myself. Listening to the Dead through high-quality gear became a long-term goal and a strong element in my pursuit of hi-fi. I also remember being deeply impressed by the well-know 1993 feature in the Absolute Sound, in praise of the Dead’s sound: The other night I experienced the finest large-scale High-End audio system I have ever heard. It shattered my preconceived notions of what the state-of-the-art in High End sound reproduction is capable of. This system was clean from fewer than five Hertz (according to its designer) to beyond the range of human hearing. Never at any time did I hear distortion. The stereo imaging was pinpoint and extremely accurate, with no bunching, "hole-in-the-middle," or problems at the extreme left and right. (This was accomplished with no room treatment whatsoever.) The tonal balance was almost without flaw (though the highs were slightly too prominent at close range), simply that of the instruments it was reproducing, especially drums, cymbals (which were reproduced with a purity which had to be heard to be believed), and gongs. Its reproduction of the lowest bass was unparalleled—the bass from the Infinity IRS woofers is feeble by comparison. The same can be said about this system's dynamic capability: It could reproduce a clean 120 dB at distance of over 50 feet. Soundstaging? The depth was almost perfectly accurate compared to the locations of the instruments on the stage, and the speakers were capable of generating width in excess of 100 feet. There was an excellent balance of direct-to-hall sound. It was easy to see the instruments on the stage. Not "see" the instruments, see them. Most important, the emotional connection between the listener and the music—the ability to convey the emotion and feeling inherent in a musical performance being the measure of a truly great High End system—in my opinion was absolute, total, complete. The stereo to which I am referring is the Grateful Dead concert sound reinforcement system. Another super-cool aspect of the Dead’s audio history was the collaboration with the incredible Meyer Sound Laboratories of Berkeley, California. Here’s a great conversation with John and Helen Meyer from SiriusXM’s “Tales from the Golden Road”: John and Helen Meyer Talk Audio on Grateful Dead Radio Show | Meyer Sound News »
I always found Bear's mixing approach - vocals in one channel, instruments in the other - to be very interesting. Here's a good essay on his work: Grateful Dead Guide: Bear at the Board »
Excellent point @Stone Turntable and I agree they had a big influence on the type of stereos I would build, and for a good spell there I would take my best GD tape along with a few other albums when going on auditioning trips to stereo stores along the east coast. JBLs were my first speakers but that was before I was introduced to the Dead, I don’t think I knew they ever used JBLs until much later. Remember it was pretty rare to get any info on them back then, not like you can get now with the internet or frankly the ability to put an email question into one of the engineers involved with the scene. I think this was pretty much the first thing I can remember that provided anything close to what you can dig up on their history these days on the internet. No I don’t have mine anymore. This is my pick for the “Wall of Sound” home version although I have never played along and built it: NAGRA IV-S Reel-to-Reel > Levinson JC-2 Straightline Preamp >McIntosh MC2300 Amp > JBL Speakers One plus of this thread will be pooling the resources that are out there, and you reference pretty much the best write up done on the latter day PA in that Absolute Sound article; frankly I consider it must read for any audiophile who does not have a sense of just how sophisticated their attention to live sound was and became. Since JBL became such a big part of their PA for years and Jerry’ rig alone, here is a good history of how they jumped Altec JBL History In Professional Sound Make sure to use the menu bar up top to advance the story.
I am going to one up you, only one megaphone here! Nice floods Bobby. Those and the hat in your photo.
I don't think I had seen @davmar77's so I was inspired. My two are Human Be In City Park Denver 9-24-67 from Jerry's site.
Hopefully this thread provides the opportunity to do some deep diving into more specific GD topics people want to explore. For me at least, one pet hobby of being a fan is researching those PA and live recording setup questions that don’t seem to get much coverage. While researching more about the mixing consoles they used for the PA, it naturally led to those used for the 2-track recordings. As I learned more about those, it became a little clearer maybe why so many of them sound so great. Of course Betty seems to be most everyone’s favorite 2-track mixer; and while I knew she used the Nagra IV-S and preferred Ampex 456 tape, it was always a mystery to me what mixer she used along with any other style descriptions. This post will get a bit into this, but will ultimately become a two part-er to try and answer yet another question that arose. From the very early years Bear used an Ampex MX-10 mixer for FOH and he taped off of that mix. A couple of key points if you are as unfamiliar with them as I was, it is a 4x2 tube mixer/mic preamp from the 50s; they would stack 3 or 4 depending on how many channels they needed. There was no pan pot, it was a knife switch that gave either channel, A, channel B or A+B. The manual of the MX-35, same guts different cosmetics, is an interesting read, http://ampex.com/images/Legacy/Audio/mx35man/mx35.manual.pdf and here are a few pics. Now the important thing is, in what if any way did it contribute to the good tapes made. “Simple in design and high in quality, the MX-10 allowed multiple microphones to create a coherent stereo output. The mixer had no pan pots, which degrade the signal, and a microphone was assigned left, center, or right-and here too, none of the mics were equalized; all sounds were pure.” From Owsley and his Sonic Journals » “I chose a setup of four rack-mounted Ampex MX-10 mixers. They were 4 mic (tube) preamp mixers with nice big rotary faders. This small quality mixer was made for classic location recording. It was simple and very quiet. It had quite a good dynamic range. When connected together the four units allowed me twelve mic (or line) inputs with a simple choice of left, right or both channels- from each input. There was no eq, no panpots. I rarely used the both-channel feed option, preferring to have each mic feed just one of the two channels. I relied on mic placement to bring each voice's presence to the other side of the PA. The single channel feed is a very important key to creating a sense of real 'space' or dimension, as even one mic into both channels brings a kind of 'fuzziness' into the mix, like a film on a mirror. Too many mics in both channels (by switch or panpot) quickly burys and destroys the 'space' entirely.” From DiP 36 liner notes which is very good for Bear’s sound theories. Dick's Picks Volume Thirty-six » Jeffery Norman talks about the benefits decades later. “There’s something to be said for that live-to 2-track sound. As much fun as it’s been to mix these multitrack projects and tailor the mix…when you record to multitrack it goes to tape through a board [mixing console] and then it sits there on the tape, and then when you mix it, it goes from the multitrack through the board back to another tape machine, so there’s all this path of electronics that can be good or not so good. But when you do the live 2-track that Betty and Kidd and Bear did, it’s just going from microphones through a simple little mixer — an Ampex MX-10, where you had center, left and right at a pot — and that stuff’s really clear. Sometimes the mixes aren’t perfect, but considering how they were done, they’re pretty amazing. A lot of them sound fantastic.” Mixing and Mastering the Dead’s Archives with Jeffrey Norman | Grateful Dead » So things are chugging along, mostly good sounding 2-track tapes from the get go. John Curl talks about building a solid state console in ’70 but it was ultimately rejected as they returned to the MX-10s. In a Rick Turner 1973 interview he says they are still using MX-10s for FOH, and taped off of that mix; Grateful Dead Sources: September 2012 » ; however, the Winterland ’73 box liner notes say Kidd had a split feed and used the Nagra IV-S, so at some point they incorporated split feeds. Winterland 1973 - The Complete Recordings » What did Kidd use to mix those tapes; unknown but a good guess is probably the MX-10s. Of course for the WOS no PA mixer was used; for the 2-tracks, still a guess. After the hiatus they started renting PAs and those companies had consoles notably FM Productions and Clair Bros. before teaming up with Meyer Sound then Ultra Sound and they ended up with the Gamble consoles; more on that another time I suppose. So back to Betty, what was she using for the coveted Betty Boards? We know she used a Nagra IV-S, and so one aspect to throw in the hopper of why they sounded so good with her at the helm may be this comment from a Taper Compendium v2 Interview, “That’s particularly true of 15 ips tapes because they were recorded with the Nagra Master equalization curve. Just love that Nagra at 15 ips NM. That’s the best.” As far as mixers she used goes, this is the only thing I can find from that same interview, “I purchased or built my own equipment; my Nagra, the MX1O mixers, the Allen & Heath’s mixers I used late:; mikes and monitoring, etc., including my splitters and cabling.” Internet Archive Forums: Re: Another history question: TMNSP » So it seems the tube MX-10s were a part of Betty’s recording rig until the Allen+Heath showed up. When was that exactly? She says in the gearbook she took her MX10s and Nagra into a nascent Club Front to record Jerry’s rehearsals for Cats Under the Stars, in late ’77. In the DiP 25 5-10,11-78 liner notes Bear tells the story of patching into Betty’s board and choosing which mics to patch for his tape done parallel to Betty's; well if you have checked out that MX-10 manual, not the most flexible looking thing so probably the Allen+Heath by then. Albums » The only thing I have found definitively so far is this 6/4/78 photo. That is an Allen+Heath Quasi 248, under her elbow is the 8x4 or 10x2 and the other two look 10x2 and add additional channels. http://www.allen-heath.com/media/QUASI-USER-GUIDE.pdf So did the sound change dramatically when that console was changed. Would going from tubes to solid state have any impact? Sure there are tons of other factors but still we are GD damned listening pros here. When did the switch happen? Maybe someone here knows already, maybe it is written on a tape box in the vault or a trunk somewhere, or even better someone here knows who to ask. I think everyone will agree it was not switched before Spring ’77, the tube-iest sound of them all; but maybe before fall ’77 or maybe for Summer ’78? Part II a little later.
Copied a post of mine from another thread, Thought everyone here would enjoy these 1981 American Radio History article on the band's sound and recording during the 1980 RCMH shows, it begins on page 48 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Modern-Recording/80s/Modern-Recording-1981-02.pdf And 1983 retrospective on the band's live sound, http://www.prosoundweb.com/article//...concert_sound/
Here are the other 3 photos, I was given these (plus the two above) by friend from Denver (no longer incarnate), who got them from the negatives: They had played at the Family Dog in Denver the prior two nights, and then did this free show in the park. This is the last show the boys played before Mickey Hart joined the band that the Straight Theater- 27 September 1967.
Let's not forget Rex Jackson, who was manning the recording console for many of the 1971 shows. And Dennis Leonard, aka. Wizard, who recorded E72 along with Betty.
Wow those are great. I have never seen those padded amps before, and in the earlier picture it looks like Pig Pen's organ has an amp and then speaker in the front of it. The guy in last picture looks like someone I should know. I knew someone would take the bait! I admit I know very little about Rex Jackson. Wiz tells some great stories about that E72 tour in this video during the slide show. I was a bit surprised to see him doing the Fare Thee Well recordings, I was expecting Cutler.
Those American Radio History articles are the best. A bit more in-depth than the '74 newsletter on the Wall of Sound by Wickersham starting page 24 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-DB-Magazine/70s/DB-1976-04.pdf And also a great one that after some history gets into their first time-aligned multi-way PAs in '79, lots of Meyer and Pearson and Ultra Sound by now, starting page 52 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Recording-Engineer/80s/Recording-1980-12.pdf There are so many other great articles in those as well.
Betty's New Console Part II Last weekend I listened for any potential console-driven differences across portions of about two dozen shows from Spring ’77 to Summer ’78—official releases and flacs of known Betty recordings. The goal being, simply for the fun of sleuthing it, to see if by ear one could maybe hear when Betty changed from the tube MX-10 to the solid state Allen+Heath Quasi. There is of course no way to account for the scores, maybe hundreds of variables across so many shows either though guitar setups, rooms, mics, Betty’s cables, power, on and on and on; but in the end I did still feel there were enough instances of the same differences occurring to arrive at reasonable guess if anything. Let me clearly state however that by doing so I am in no way saying the product of the solid state mixer is any worse in my opinion, contrary to what one might believe about solid state. The differences are pretty slight in the final analysis, and they should all be loved the same as before regardless. Things broke down for me where Fall ’77 was consistently similar sounding to Spring ’77 the vast majority of the time; and ’78, while very close to '77 in more ways than I would have expected, had different enough qualities when you really focused on finding them, enough so for me to guess that Betty went out on the road in early ’78 with the new console. On the odd chance I am correct in any of this, what comes across in the A+H mixer is a good bit more headroom, those ’78 recordings sound more like how average live recordings are usually arranged vertically; the MX-10 ’77 shows being more singularly unique in how their sound is bunched up into a warm ball rather than being arranged more top to bottom from the highs to the lows. The ’78 shows having more headroom is something I can imagine Betty liked the most about the A+H console; and there is very little penalty, not too much thickness or too much warmth is lost, the bass is as well represented as ever. With the A+H there is more visibility into the midrange band that the MX-10 shows often had bunched up. To use a torso metaphor, the bass and drums on the A+H shows reside more just below the chest, there is a lot of openness from there upwards above the shoulders now, you can hear Phil and drummers interrelate much more. The greater headroom seems to allow Jerry’s guitar to live more on its own up around head level, and there is now even more going on up at head level, you hear more cymbal work and that extends higher now, the vocals live up in that head area as well and so they and Jerry’s guitar stand out more with the drums and bass happening now more so at a lower level. All of this adds up to a mostly well defined layering structure for the ‘78s, Jerry, vocals and cymbals up top, then the snares and toms with some Phil, and below that kick and bass, so things around the shoulder area are now not as congested; you can often feel as if you are hearing more of the room if not feeling some relative thinness up top. By comparison things in '78 shows are a bit thinner in the gut and hips area for sure; things go as deep to the knees as the ’77s; it is not a question of not low enough, but more just not as thick or wide down there. When any small hint of solid state effects does arise, it does so mostly on Jerry’s guitar, maybe the vocals to a lesser degree, and more so when things get wild and woolly; those crazed sections on average tend to have a more metallic edge to them, and as the mixer seems faster and more revealing now, those nasty edges are not rounded off as much as they are with the slower tubes, or lost within the more congested midrange band of so many of the ’77 shows. So to keep the metaphor going, with the MX-10 almost everything is happening all the time at shoulder level, things are also a lot thicker and wider in the gut and hips, but it is pretty much a thick mix of bass and lower drums all jumbled together, less visibility into the interaction between Phil and the drums now, not that you are complaining of course. Jerry’s guitar now rests more at the same level as the top of Phil and the snares and toms, vocals rest in that same band mostly, cymbals happen mostly there as well. The high-end of the cymbals don’t rest on top of anything, there is very little upward going on with the ’77 shows, treble things pop out from this thick shoulder band, and the same treble frequencies are reached-- nothing is topped out or rolled off-- just that they happen within that shoulder to chin area popping more through things towards the listener rather than upwards on top of things. Things are a bit warmer in ‘77 yes, but the thickness of it all does have the penalty of burying things at times, more a sense of compression in the middle; this does work very well when the nasty bits and metallic edges start flying in the wild and woolly times as those harder edges get rounded off in a more pleasing way by comparison. It is kind of silly to point out specific songs for comparison given the scores of other factors involved, but just to give a flavor by example of the kind of things I was noticing across the range of shows-- and just to keep within the same general mastering philosophy-- I would use the Sampson from 30 Trips ’77 and the Sampson from 30 Trips ’78. Some sample shows that stood out for displaying their respective general characteristics were DiP 18 2-5-78, which surprised me a bit as I always thought was as thick and tube-y as any ’77. On the other end of the Spectrum most anything from May ’77 of course, but again I found DiP 34 11-5-77 still displayed those ’77 characteristics. Thankfully you rarely get a sense any major different mix approaches were taken, and more importantly the same can be said for the results, yet another credit to Betty; but when you really spend some time drilling into this, that is the guess I come up with for what the different characteristics might be, and they seem to be of a nature that could be explained by a change in console, pretty much the only major change in her recording rig that I know, at least since she went with the Nagra IV-S. If anyone ever runs into her, ask her for me a) when did she first start using the Nagra IV-S, and b) when did she switch from the Ampex MX-10 mixers to the Allen+Heath Quasi console. Of course this is a bunch of through-the-ears speculation heaped upon guesswork, so any opinions or better knowledge is always welcome.
nice old article about alembic. I like the part about how they configured the towers at Watkins glen for delays. I know a guy who was working for the Allmans at the time. he said when the dead's crew showed up, everyone else cleared out to make way to let them do their thing. Alembic: Sound Wizards to the Grateful Dead »
The Allmans' Feb 1970 Fillmore show that came out on Grateful Dead Records has detailed technical notes by Owsley about the recording equipment and techniques used, no word on why there are none of the famous Dead/Allmans jams on the label (or maybe there are and I lost track?)
That is a great image about stepping aside for the Dead crew @davmar77. There is a lot to learn about the Alembic gang for sure; true pioneers in this field. The article you cite is the best one I have found explaining their Watkins Glenn delay tower set up. I think it used the first digital delay unit produced, the Eventide 1745, Bobby used it in his guitar rig for a while I believe. Check this pdf for the Watkin Glenn setup at FOH, note FM Productions, Bill Grahams outfit right? Clair Bros. Audio, Lititz PA and Carlo Sound, Nashville TN supported it. http://neo.eventide.com/marketing/DDL500%20AD/Old%20ads/ddl500-ad-SoS.pdf Here is the Watkins Glenn delay tower, I wonder who’s dog that is? Delay towers also used at their outdoor ’73 shows, Kezar and RFK come to mind. RFK:
I spent most of the rfk shows about 20 feet from stage. still one of my favorite weekends of music ever.
