Sure looks like The Doors to me.
Sure looks like The Doors to me.
I've got a bike you can ride it if you like
I think that figure is permanent seating and does not include the floor seats that would be set up for a concert.Originally Posted by Garion81
The hall size is 28k sq ft, 146' x 207', and the ceiling ranges from 45' to 90'.
Putting aside the quad question, I would think that they had at least 2 mics to record the audience and pick up the hall ambiance.
Also, regarding the King Biscuit, wouldn't it be likely that they only got the stereo feed going to the front PA stacks (and not the surround speakers or audience mics)? This would account for the difference in sound.
While all albums sound better at louder levels, this one really needs to be as loud as possible. While it doesn't sound great, it's a big improvement.
In addition, if you disregard the hall reverberance, certain instruments sound good: drums, acoustic guitar, grand piano.
Emerson had a reverb unit in his signal chain. Reverb is very seductive and addictive. It also sounds like Lake has added reverb on his voice. It's easy to go overboard with it in the studio, but in a "live" hall like a sports arena (which is built to amplify the crowd noise) is becomes overkill.
Here are images of Newcastle City Hall (seats 2100). You can see the pipe organ at the rear of the stage.
The entirety of the performance = band performance, venue acoustics, both live (speaker placement, tuning out the room's low frequency ringing - the most essential point of achieving great sound in a large venue) and recording engineer's skill (microphone choice and placement{ a team effort between the live a remote engineers}, eliminating poor interaction with the live sound gear {hum, buzz, distortions}, and audience mic placements as well are all essential. Failure in just one area diminishes the chances for a quality recording. Big venues and live performances can result in overdubs and worse.
Jubal is correct that Pink Floyd was the gold standard for live sound at the time and for many years to follow. Eddie Offord did a great job on earlier ELP tours but some of the FOH engineers who followed did not. I've mixed the Omni a number of times in my touring days and went with Eddie to see Yes there on the 90125 tour. We sounded a bit like Siskle and Ebert talking about the room that night during the show. Eddie had recently done The Police for the Synchronicity video at the Omni. He mixed the show at his studio in Buckhead. The Omni and other sports venues are not kind to music of any complexity. They favor nice long legato passages rather than the rifforamas often heard in prog and fusion. Live, the ear can do wonderful things by the cues they take despite poor acoustics.
I believe that live music is best experienced live. It helps the musicians, the fans and everyone else who love their music to thrive and survive.
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Google is your fiend.
No, they wouldn't have a "stereo feed". King Biscuit always did multi-track recordings (or so I understand anyway), as opposed to simply taking a feed off the front of house soundboard. This allowed the music to be mixed properly after the fact so that it would sound good while listening to it on the radio on whatever room in your domicile where you chose to listen to music. This was one of the reasons why King Biscuit was such a highly rated show, because they didn't simply "run a Nagra off the front of house mix" or whatever. They took the care to make sure everything sounded as good as possible.
And this again begs yet another question: if they already had the stereo mix done for King Biscuit, then why didn't ELP just use that for the stereo mix on the album, instead of folding down the quad mix.
Far out, I was at that show! I get the impression that place was a bitch to mix, but then all those arenas were, especially with the PA arrays of the day. My memory is that was about the loudest damn Yes concert I ever went to, but that was many years ago. We went to the Nashville show as well.
My guess is that ELP just wanted to make it their own.
So they put out an inferior stereo mix, when a better one already existed, for the purposes of "making it their own"?
Yes.
It isn't sure if the whole show was even mixed for broadcast. And of course, there might have been some kind of contractual things too. I don't know if ELP would have had rights to use mixes made for KBFH.
I don't believe it was
The King Biscuit shows are available at Wolfgangs Vault, and the ELP Anaheim is only the broadcast portion while most all of the other classic 70's prog shows are complete
BG
"When Yes appeared on stage, it was like, the gods appearing from the heavens, deigning to play in front of the people."
You're both wrong. The original KBFH broadcast was itself mixed in quad, not stereo.
Which raises (not "begs", improper use of phrase) the question, how did they get the stereo mix for the CD?
Also, did they just get ELP's quad PA mix or did they do their own?
Wasn't the KBFL disc newly remixed by Joe Mattis? At least the 1977 tracks were, with dubious fake applause.
Last edited by Doctor Flang; 10-23-2013 at 11:24 AM.
Are we really sure that KBFH is from a different source and not just remixed "ELP WBMF" - I had a bonus disc of "unreleased Anaheim concert" in that greatest hits package that appeared some years ago - white cover blue ELP logo, and I think it was just the KBFH release repackaged. So my point is that I suspect one set of tapes from Anaheim but a few mixes? I could be wrong.
There might have been two separate recording units, but that is highly unlikely. Most likely KBFH recorded the show and both ELP and KBFH did their own remixes afterwords. The songs on later CD's may be remixes, but i can't be sure, since i haven't heard the original broadcast.
And just checked the bonus CD attached to the Greatest Hits Sanctuary Release 2004. It is indeed the same as the KBFH release with the abbreviated 74 set and the 4 tracks from Works tour. Will have to spin this to see what the mix is like compared to WBMF.
Supposedly, KBFH is from the Tulsa Civic Center Arena a month later. Doesn't it seem unlikely that ELP and/or their record company would record a show for a live album and also let someone else broadcast that same show?
(BTW, Tulsa CCA is 5K sq ft smaller than Anaheim, is rectangular, and has a flat ceiling.)
I know it reads it's from Tulsa, but it's really from Anaheim. Unless there was a guy shouting "get crazy!" on both concerts during the intro of Lucky Man. Performances are identical too. It was not totally unusual for bands to use KBFH recordings for a live album. Genesis Live 1973 is another one.
I love that.
I've remember reading an interview with the mixing engineer, either Peter Granet or Andy Hendriksen, i can't remember which. Anyway, the engineer told that the mixing WBMF in quad was the most exciting mixing session he ever participated, with lots of hands on the faders trying to make the panning and levels. I tried to find the interview, but i didn't find it.
Considering how expensive it was to record anything, never mind hiring a remote truck to do a concert recording, I seriously doubt there were two separate recordings going of the same performance on the same night, other than let's say running a two track tape in addition to multitrack.
As i said, highly unlikely. That said, I think BBC and Pink Floyd did use separate recording equipments for Floyd's 1974 Wembley show, but unfortunately Pink Floyd's mobile didn't record Nick Mason's bass drum track.
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