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Dan Walter's Collection

Grateful Dead   06/26/1988

Civic Arena, Pittsburgh, PA
Source SBD:Mcass>Sound Forge>CDR
Media CDR   2 discs
Notes all,plus remix
Tech Notes Fuji,bot SBD Mcass and Remix-not the Gan's SBD>Sonic Sense
Tom Donaldson tree 9/2001

the story...

The Right Place at the Right Time

Where were you at 7:30pm on June 26th, 1988? I was in Pittsburgh at the
Civic Arena. While I don't remember it, or most of the 100+ shows that
Jerry shared with me, I hope it somehow qualified me to take on the
following, sometimes seemingly impossible mission.

A friend of mine, Tom Donaldson approached me one day and said that he was
given a cassette tape that was the only soundboard-sourced master tape of
that Pittsburgh show. A friend of his had recently been given the tape by a
Dead crew member, who just found it after 10 years of storage. Healy had
spun the tapes originally from the board and they were adorned with his
personal stamp of approval. Tom asked if I'd put them to CD for him to
bring
into circulation.

Tom brought the tapes over to the studio one evening and we popped in set II
to have ourselves a listen. I made a trip to the wine cellar and grabbed a
magnum of fine New Jersey "White Table Wine", (nothing but the best for my
good friend Tom).

We first noticed that the tape, suffered horribly from low levels. The
peaks were around -10db and it hung mostly around the -25 to -20 level. As
a result, analog tape hiss was evident throughout, but you could still hear
the awesome genius of Dan Healy and the boys trying to come through.

We drank, we listened, we talked, I commented it was too bad the levels
weren't a little brighter. Oh well. A few glasses into the listening, Tom
asked, "Can you give me some 'mo Phil"? I replied that we were going
virtually straight from cassette to power amp and that I didn't have any EQ
in line. Tom
glared out at the multitude of studio gadgetry, sporting more controls than
the cockpit of a 747, and glared back at me. Whatever. So, I patched it
through the mixer and with a few twists of it's 5 knob EQ, Tom was much
happier.

"Can you make it sound like this on the CD"?

My first reaction was one of heresy. I mean, who am I to add my own
personal EQ to an "official" release of the Grateful Dead?????? Men have
died for lesser sins.

"Yeh, no problem", I replied.

"What else can you do?", Tom asked.

The first thing that came to mind was digital noise reduction and
compression....

Tom's first reaction to compression wasn't positive. I assured him he
wouldn't hear it but that it could easily buy him another 10db or so of
volume. I really like my music loud. We stuck a portion of it into Sound
Forge and messed with it. Added even more Phil, etc., it seemed good.

Around the end of the set, the magnum was empty and it was pretty much
decided that I'd be doing two copies of the CDs, one enhanced version with
all the bells and whistles I could spare, and one straight off the cassettes
giving the home audience a chance to fuck 'em up in the comfort of their own
living rooms, just like I had.

I spun the unenhanced version and gave 'em a listen. The first thing I
found was that a portion of two of the songs had a slight problem. During
Cumberland and Gentlemen, there was a 25 second section where you could hear
the other song in reverse, through the tape backing. Major suckage.
Further examination
showed that a portion of the tape had gotten flipped around inside the
shell. A classic case of tape abuse. This was remedied easily but left two
momentary crunches in each of the songs. Not much I could do about that.

Might I point out that this entire process took a couple of months, of which
Tom was most patient, despite his being eager to get the tunes out to the
public, (that would be YOU). The delay was due to my having to give the
priority of my time to my *paying* clients. :-) And so I embarked on the
"Mo Phil" version. The first thing I noticed being sober was that the Mo
Phil EQ curve kinda woofed out Jerry and Bob's vocals most noticeably in the
first set. It was about at that point that I nearly gave up on the enhanced
version citing that any change to a Healy mix should be punishable by death.

The chain of affect was from a Sony TC-KE500S cassette deck into a Tascam
M2524 mixer straight through a Sony PCM-2600 DAT machine with single bit
mapping at 44.1K into Sound Forge via a Digital Audio Labs digital only
card. Using the mixer's EQ close to the specs Tom and I had agreed on, I
added about 6 dbaround 110hz, another 2 db around 1.5K and 2 db high
shelving at 5k. Unlike the unenhanced version, I rode the levels trying to
keep the panning balanced. I also at points noticed a better imaging when
panning the right channel slightly towards center. Both of these anomalies
could possibly have been credited to the cassette medium itself. I captured
that image and began playing in Sound Forge.

Using SF's noise reduction I captured noise prints of tape hiss from the
ends of each of the four sides and applied them to the images. I messed
around with lesser amounts of reduction, lesser amounts in two successive
steps, etc., but with each, while almost completely eliminating hiss, caused
a very noticeable artifact. It sounded like little high pitched gremlins
running around insideyour head. While pretty much unnoticeable during the
music, it's rather obvious between songs and only somewhat during quiet
passages. It is of this writer's opinion that it was a positive thing, a
good alternative to a high level of tape hiss throughout. I also used the
SF ND's default high shelving EQ, +3db at 7K.

I then applied SF's four band paragraphic EQ, +4db@61 1.9 octave, -3db@146
0.4 oct, -1.1@248 0.5 oct, +2.3@5K 2.5 oct. A curve I learned from a local
Grammy winning mastering house. The first boost is Phil, the second two are
to help eliminate the woofiness, and the last to make it pretty.

After this, I normalized, and then compressed with a two point curve that
only affected points over -12db, of which there weren't many. Most of it
was during space. I know this is a touchy subject for many, but from my
experience with professional mastering, I've found that most people like
their music loud on the CD. I wish I had a dollar for everyone that came
back and asked me why their CD isn't as loud as others, and they have no
concept of compression.

So there was an image ready to burn. If I wanted this CD to be more
listenable then the unaffected, I figured eliminating the tapes flips would
be cool. Hence the real magic. The first flip was between songs,
so a mix-crossfade wasn't a big deal. The second set flipped during the
intro to Fantasy. I synced the two halves of tape such that the beat and
the musical phrases blended and mix-crossfaded the two
together. This took several attempts and revisions before getting something
that was fairly unnoticeable. I'm hoping folks will only be able to find it
if they listen to the unaffected version. Again, while it seems heresy to do
this to a record of the Dead, from an employee-client point of view, it in
my opinion produced a more listenable product. All in all, I think we lost
about 4.878 seconds of Fantasy. Please forgive me. :-)

So, time to throw it all together. I spun a copy to listen to at the
office, and that revealed continuing problems with the woofiness, most
noticeable on Bob and Jerry's vocals during set one. One final paragraphic
of -2.8@141, .3 oct for the first set and -1.4db for the second is about as
good as I could
get it. SF's paragraphic EQ bandwidth minimum is .3 octaves. Something
thinner might have been better. I figured I'd leave the rest up the
listener.

Please be warned that I've donned my flameproof suit. I realize that there
are things that could have been done better, NAK?, sampling freq., fewer EQ
steps, etc. I recommend you get copies of the unaffected "as is" version,
and perform your own magic. I wish you the best of luck and hope you all
like what I've produced.

Love ya,
pUNK
Cunningham@psc.edu

Stephen "pUNK" Cunningham is the owner and engineers at Pittsburgh Sound
Productions as well as a thirteen year member of the Internet Engineering
Task Force. He has been performing live music for over 30 years with groups
that include Relix Recording artists Sandoz, Fungus and The Flying
Cunninghams.
Trades Allowed Yes   Traded from: Ed Dybalski ?
Owned by Dan Walter · Last Updated May 23, 2023