81–90 of 130 posts
What is weird is that they don't talk about this. There is a graphic on products that can do this that show the speaker behind the mic. That's it, no text at all. I think the moral of this story is that marketing is weirder than engineering...
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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…
To add to this, John Perry Barlow, one of the Dead's two main lyricists, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Barlow was also big on the WELL, an early influential time-sharing messaging system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL a Bay Area legends from a time when the Bay Area dominated in both technology and music). In many ways Hacker News is an intellectual inheritor of the WELL (along with Usenet and Slashdot).
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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.
I mean if you look at this effects it's not surprising he can get all those tones. He's got multiple signal paths that get split and recombined with various effects applied to one or the other (being played thru speakers that are miked), a Leslie (rotating speaker in a cabinet that adds some interesting warbles), a bunch of different gains with distortion, along with a bunch of "digitech" that does real-time complicated distortion. All of those run in chains so effects compound.
Some day I really want to have the time to build my own guitar similar to his as well as my own pedals. I've spent various bits of time in the background working on related things, but haven't allowed myself to really focus on it, because I tend to get a bit obsessive until I've fully explored my interests.
Here's a nice example of looping to make one instrument sound like many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsBINddmVcY
and here's a person who runs her harp through various effects pedals (she has a library of them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Uv7JcnhhI
For those wanting to listen to free legal taped audio of Dead shows, head over to https://relisten.net/grateful-dead or install Relisten app for iOS. All fan supported and open source.
Hey! I created this website and have been maintaining it along with my friend Alec for the last decade. Fun seeing it pop up here on HN. Thanks for sharing!
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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...
I was thinking more in terms of the Wall of Sound as shown in the article. Were they also doing vertical stacks per channel/instrument or were they doing arrays of speakers arranged in a grid per channel/instrument? From what I take it was the later as line arrays weren't a thing at that point, right?
The bass guitar gets its own pile of speakers. The lead guitar gets its own pile of speakers. The vocals get their own pile of speakers. (And so on, and so forth, until everything on the stage was covered -- maybe with some mixing on a stack to fit something else in, but probably not for things like Jerry's guitar and Phil's bass).
So, yes: There were aspects of the Wall of Sound that absolutely behaved like modern line arrays do (even though "line arrays" as we know and use them today did not begin to gain wide popularity until somewhere around the middle of the 1990s).
There's no magic necessary to implement a line array: It can just be an array of speakers that are arranged in a line.
(Of course, it can also be much, much more complex than that -- but that complexity isn't an inherent part of what a "line array" be. It can involve things like phase-steering and per-element EQ and 3D predictions [and 3D measurements!], but it does not have to be that way in order to be a line array.)
One should not, of course, trust fifty-year-old memories, especially about something so subjective as sound quality. But, for what it’s worth, my recollection of the Hollywood Bowl in particular is very positive—clear, solid sound with distinct separation of the instruments, while not so loud that my ears rang afterwards (as they did after other rock concerts I attended in those days, until I started wearing earplugs to protect my hearing).
Th' Dead not only allowed taping, they encouraged it: at the shows I attended, there was invariably a small grove of microphones set up near the soundboard, in the middle of the audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taper_(concert) (a disadvantage to too much ethology reading: I can't remember "Bill Graham Presents" without thinking of baboon behaviour)
The most incredible sound system to hear a band play out of tune and out of key for 90 minutes.
90 minutes? At a _Dead_ concert?! That’s enough to cover a typical Playing>Uncle John’s>Drums>Space, and probably not get all the way through the reprises. You’ve easily got another two hours of jam.
"I went to a Grateful Dead Concert and they played for SEVEN hours. Great song."
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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…
That is my kind of tickler/teaser. Thanks for the share.
On the same pole facing down at the entire band, you have the omnidirectional mic trying to capture the whole thing as good as possible, suitable for live broadcast from this other channel alone. They didn't have stereo radio yet anyway.
Afterward back in the studio, starting with only the two channels on reel-to-reel tape, the "difference" channel can be phase-inverted to an auxiliary tape, then you have three channels suitable for mixing.
And with analog techniques like this they can be mixed "down" to 5.1 surround sound.
From a single mic stand and only two live signals.