Vulgar sorts! Right now I am trying to figure out why Archtop thinks 7/8/71 sounds like King Crimson...it must be a case of the terroir having a huge effect on the performance...
Well, I realize that. My point being that my AUD has sound that is nearly the same as that on the SBD/houseboat tape. Given the magnitude of that Truckin', it should have been cleaned up and included on DP 35.
Absolutely, I’ve been listening to it off and on all day today! I took a little break while I was out for some errands to do 3/23/72 PITB and 3/22 Sugar Magnolia > Caution from the Rhein bonus disc, but now I’m back at home and finishing off the rest of the 3/28/72 show from “Hurts Me Too” onward. Thanks for that link, interesting write ups there.
The Playin' on that Bonus Disc is 3/22/72. The only track from 3/23/72 on that BD is Dark Star (and it's a top 5 all-timer). For Playin's from that run, we have official releases of 3/22 (RtR BD), 3/26 (DaP 14), 3/27 (DP 30) and 3/28 (DP 30).
Wikipedia must be inaccurate then as I looked it up there. I have the disc itself but it doesn’t say what date it’s from.
Y'think? Grateful Dead Family Discography: Grateful Dead releases by recording year Grateful Dead Family Discography:Home
Yes, I already checked your claims there , and the same info is also listed for 3/22 on the page that pbuzby linked earlier.
Yes, a magnificent pull by Kaslow and Todd. That team made a number of important recordings over the years, including the December 1970 run at Legion Stadium in El Monte, and the Universal Amphitheater on 1 July 1973.
3 April 1982- The Scope, Norfolk. A new SBD circulated by C. Miller & Associates. Sounds very nice (laptop review), and a beautiful Scarlet > Fire is unfolding as I share the news with you.
After searching high & low for months to try and find the Beyond Description Bonus Disc I finally broke down recently and purchased it on eBay. It arrived yesterday and I sat down this afternoon to take in the set from 3/23/75. I noticed that the disc does not light the HDCD LED on my disc player, and a quick rip with dBPoweramp confirmed that the disc I have is not HDCD encoded. This seems quite odd to me for an official release from the early 2000's and would be one of the first discs from that era not to be HDCD encoded (regardless of the use of PE). Now I'm wondering if I got scammed on the disc since these do go for high dollars and I'm sure it would be worth it for an eBay scammer to have some of these pressed. So... can anyone else who has the bonus disc confirm whether their copy is HDCD encoded?
Ah sorry about that! I hear it a little - maybe a little Matte Kudasai. When I think Discipline era Crim I think of The harder polyrhythmic stuff, so I was expecting to hear the Dead break off a little Thela Hun Ginjeet or something - haha!
My copy does not have the HDCD symbol printed on it, nor does it light the HDCD indicator. I think you are good to go!
Well, I solved the grassy knoll mystery. There were actually two second recordists for the Hollywood Palladium show. A couple of fellows by the name of Kaslow and Todd. Someone in an archive review of their AUD mentioned that in listening to DiP35, he couldn't tell where the AUD ended and the SBD began, and referred the reader to the liner notes for DiP 35. I only have the download of DiP 35, but in going back and comparing the beginning of TOO on the SBD, DiP35, and the Kaslow/Todd AUD side by side, it's clear that the AUD is patched in at the beginning of the TOO on DiP35. So there is no second recorded mix. Just that hell of an AUD. Anyway, basically all I know regarding the mixer(s) used for recording SBDs is based on (1) Jeff Norman saying that Betty used an Ampex MX-10 for her mixes and (2) a few passages from the excerpts of Blair Jackson's Dead Gear book available on the web. Everything else is surmise by me. (Betty has done interviews, but nobody -- to my knowledge -- has talked real tech with her.) The MX-10 is a 4x2 mixer, 2 RUs in size, with 2 mic inputs and 2 mic/line inputs and a pan pot (actually a slider) and level pot for each input. Blair Jackson quotes Dennis Leonard as saying that the FOH mixer in '71 "was still a stack of [chained] Ampex MX-10s." I would guess that in '71, they stacked/chained at least four of them. Four would have provided 10 inputs and five would have provided 12, since each successive MX-10 would have to accept the stereo output from the previous MX-10. So I've further guessed that Betty (or Rex, whom she learned from and who was doing the recording in '71) used their own stack, probably of four or five as well. Ten MX-10s at 2 RUs each would take up just over half of a rack. The AX-10 that Wickersham built was, according to Blair Jackson in the E72 section of his book, "about the same size as an Ampex MX-10 and allowed [Wickersham] to split off a monitor feed and highlight the four vocal mics." I don't know when Wickersham built it originally -- Jackson implies it was for the E72 tour -- but I'm assuming you're correct and that each mic feed hit one of these boxes and could be split from there (including to the recordist's mix). Although from the way the passage in Gear is worded, it sounds like they came off of each feed to the monitor mix. This is where it gets fuzzy. However it worked out, the recordist got their own feeds into the stacked MX-10s.
Big fan of that particular S/F. Very intriguing and intricate segue. Good news about the upgrade, thanks.
FYI, even GD discs that are labelled as HDCD do not necessarily include all of the HDCD features. This has been discussed at some length here by folks who know much more than I about the reproduction end of things.
It is a wonderful Scarlet > Fire, and the Eyes is very fine as well. Estimated is typical of the period, more histrionics than singing, and the semi-Donna wails don't help. Donna did it better!
Nice work thanks for that. It sounds like you'd like and can add good info to this thread if you haven't run across it yet. The Grateful Dead Live Sound and Recording Legacy Thread I've never quite understood that "highlight the four vocal mics", was that stage monitoring maybe, possibly even extra speakers with vocals only to adjust; I mean I can see why it was done, but remember outside of that every mic was split into the modified MX1000 deck for E'72 anyway, so maybe the AX-10 was a different box for that vocal monitoring alone (I think you've convinced me to stop conflating the AX-10 with any of their first or common mic splits). In Phil's book he notes they had mic splits as early as the Avalon '69 multi-tracks: "Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor were the recording team. Bear also encouraged Ron Wickersham (a former Ampex engineer co-opted by the Grateful Dead) to invent the key piece of new technology we needed to make high-quality live recordings: a mike splitter, which delivered the signal from each microphone or instrument to both the PA and the record inputs without any loss of quality. It's easy to forget, at this remove, that many of the tools we take for granted today in electric music didn't exist in 1969. Back then, they occasionally had to be cobbled together on the spot." Page 80 of the Gearbook also references mic splits for Live/Dead. Rick Turner mentions in an interview they had custom transformer mic splits, and I can only assume Wickersham got it right the first time: "Our PA system and live recording system were closely integrated. Electrically they were separate, but the mikes were the same, and we used a custom transformer splitter box to send independent mike signals to the 16 track and the PA console."
Unfortunately, I already quoted the date from that page numerous times in several different posts so the misinformation continues. Thanks, Jimmy Wales.
The Crimson bit is TOO--> Dew from 12/31/72. my one and only time at winterland. guess I got a good one.
You caused me to finally check if what the Deadessay overdub post mentions about the first two discs being a new mix and the last two the Rockin' the Rhein mix. Maybe, hard to say exactly, but the the first half does sound a tad more like the rest of the box; recognizing however I think if the first two are a new mix they were done to match up. The second half seems a tad more open at top, a little brighter or less gooey in the upper mids maybe. Right now the best examples are comparing Tenn Jed and He's Gone, or Rider and El Paso. I've never heard any reason why this would have been done although they seemed to be in a time crunch in spots, or maybe some subsequent tape issue, but I'd doubt it. You are right about the consistency of the whole tour, amazing really with what maybe 5/7 Wigan a dodgy-weather outdoor festival about the only one with some consistent issues. @Gray Beard I've always found 5/3 Paris as the best sounding for some reason. 4/16 Aarhus I find that small space comes across great in the recording. Finally, I'd note I've only recently HDCD decoded these and it makes a really nice difference especially in the midrange where Keith is; it fixes a little bit of the gripe of him being low in the mix, although I realize it doesn't completely alleviate it; for me though it is a nice improvement I'm enjoying. If you are not decoding these or have a player consider doing this to your files.
The month only I would think. Don't really see a connection to August West. Each verse represents a season (non-linearly), the first being autumn; summer flies and August dies.
