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The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

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Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#41

Post by standardly »

dekhn wrote: post #33
buildsjets wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some techniques require this. Ted Nugent wouldn't have gotten the crazy howling feedback out of his semi-hollowbody Gibson Byrdland had he not been standing directly in front a pair of Fender Super Twins pushing 4 15" drivers. If it doesn't make your pants flap in the breeze, turn it up!

I believe most musicians these days achieve this using a nearby monitor speaker, for example Trey Anastasio from Phish, although I believe he may have adopted newer technology (see https://treysguitarrig.com/2023/08/31/2023-summer/ for more details). He could sustain notes for a long time with his custom hollowbody (like, minutes at a time).

That dude is a wizard. A lot of guitar players look down on fancy pedal setups, but watching his rig rundown video on youtube was mind blowing. I've heard Anastasio get tones and effects you just won't hear anywhere else.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#42

Post by joezydeco »

zer00eyz wrote: post #18
jMyles wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear more about your experience and observations of taping at the shows. Not only did GD (and particularly Jerry Garcia and John Perry Barlow) eschew the 'intellectual property' model of music, their thought-leadership has lived on to become much of what we today consider fundamental internet technology and methodology. Early decentralized crypto-economics, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the founding of t…

It's almost impossible to talk about The Dead and not talk about LSD. Owsley (wall of sound engineer) was one of the original major LSD manufactures... and a dead show was always where you went to score ACID if you lived on the east coast. This remained true well into the 90's. I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD. The Dead, Bill graham, hells a…

Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the caaaarrrr...

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#44

Post by JohnBooty »

amlib wrote: post #22
jtriangle wrote: post #13

Dave Rat, of Rat Sound/RHCP/Bassnectar/etc fame, has some very interesting takes on the wall of sound idea using modern equipment. The core of it is that speakers are bad at polyphony, so if you can avoid it, you can produce something that sounds more natural to human ears, and do so in a larger area. The way to avoid it is more speakers, more stacks/arrays/etc. You don't necessarily need an array per instrument, bec…

I wonder how do they deal with the phasing over so many speakers? Wouldn't an array of speakers require you to do something about that? Specially so if you are stuck with 70s tech.

   deal with the phasing over so many speakers?
Each performer had their own vertical stack of speakers. So, no phase issues / comb filtering on the horizontal axis.

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine...

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#45

Post by JohnBooty »

TylerE wrote: post #38
bongodongobob wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, compared to today it's not great but no one had tried anything like that before. They delayed the sound to distant speakers with tape delay . It's cool as shit and was the groundwork for how we do things today. It's like saying relay computers were dumb... Boolean logic was new and no one had ever attempted stuff like that before.

No, the whole point of the WoS was that there were no distant speakers. Everything was single sourced, to the point where each speaker only carried a single instrument.

I know you probably know, but:

    each speaker only carried a single instrument.
Each vertical stack of speakers only carried a single instrument; not each individual speaker.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#46

Post by TylerE »

JohnBooty wrote: post #45
TylerE wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the whole point of the WoS was that there were no distant speakers. Everything was single sourced, to the point where each speaker only carried a single instrument.

I know you probably know, but: each speaker only carried a single instrument. Each vertical stack of speakers only carried a single instrument; not each individual speaker.

The routing wasn't nessisarily full spectrum though. There were a lot of crossovers in use.

I also believe I heard some of the precussion mics were targetting only one or two speakers.

At least in the case of the speakers for Jerry, they had a a seperate McIntosh hi-fi amp for each speaker, being fed out of a Fender-derived preamp and a many-way splitter. Owsley basically bought the every one that model amp that was in stock at dealers on the west coast. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just on those amps - they were something like 2 or 3k a pop even then.

The only reason they were even able to afford in the first place was that Owsley (Yeah that Owsley, who was also their primary sound engineer) had so much illegal cash from a decade of making most of the LSD consumed in the United States. Band never even paid for most it. It was more this crazy idea Owsley had and mostly paid for that they kind of rolled with.

That sort of thing was more than a bit of a pattern in that camp, and was a large part of the band's downfall. It got to a point where it seemed like half of Marin county was on the payroll, and there was so much money going out that they had to tour constantly, wether they wanted to or not. The heavy touring clearly had a major toll on Jerry both physically and mentally. A two or three year hiatus around '91 or '92 would have done him (and probably some of the other guys) a world of good.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#48

Post by bongodongobob »

TylerE wrote: post #38
bongodongobob wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, compared to today it's not great but no one had tried anything like that before. They delayed the sound to distant speakers with tape delay . It's cool as shit and was the groundwork for how we do things today. It's like saying relay computers were dumb... Boolean logic was new and no one had ever attempted stuff like that before.

No, the whole point of the WoS was that there were no distant speakers. Everything was single sourced, to the point where each speaker only carried a single instrument.

They definitely used distant speakers, but yeah, not part of the WoS. I'm just saying that was cutting edge at the time.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#49

Post by bombcar »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #35
insaneirish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a fun one. I'm involved in maintaining the audio system for an auditorium used by a non-profit. After a flood and remodel, including replacing some audio components (like microphones), it was observed that the microphone on the main podium always had a 60 Hz hum. The hum depended on where the microphone was facing. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it was not. Being a non-profit facility, there are no fancy DS…

It's been quite a few years since I last worked in live show production, but on any show at a venue where we couldn't be sure of access to clean power, humbuckers (not the guitar pickups, a nickname for what I believe was just a dumb 60hz notch filter or ground loop isolator inlined on house power taps) were a standard pack out in the road kit. I would have expected that this decades-old and well established componen…

Nonprofit and church auditoriums and halls are often about fifty years out of date and are somewhat around “barely working”.

Re: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)

#50

Post by bombcar »

bongodongobob wrote: post #26
JohnBooty wrote: post #6

You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine... For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers. 3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from…

Another cool thing you can do with line arrays is beam steering, you can direct the sound to a certain extent. There are tradeoffs, but I always thought that was pretty damn magical.

Isn’t the audio setup in that LED ball in Vegas a bunch of beam steering?
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