Grateful Dead Music Forum

Our gig at the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston from Friday night ... second set ...

http://www.archive.org/details/pd2009-1 ... rdrockcafe

I think they thought we were nuts when we bypassed their desk and plugged my little 16-channel board into their huge PA, but it sure sounded good! One of the better Terrapin's we've done, I think.

Still playing the backup Strat, waiting on Mr. Brawer. Confession: I haven't changed the strings since June.



I think I'm in denial about the whole thing. Good thing they are those coated Elixers.

As usual, just guitar straight into the AxeFX and then straight to the board.

As always...sounds fantastic. The envelope filter sounds real nice. I'd have to say it doesn't sound EXACTLY like the Mutron but it has some of it's own character that I really like...but the bottom line is that it is all crisp and clear and clean. I'm impressed with your rhythm guitarist taking on the Weir vocals at the end of Estimated (I guess you have to call those vocals)...I've tried those...it ain't easy...and I usually end up cracking myself up during it. Thanks for sharing.

That set made my day....sitting in my cubicle some Nickleback lover heard the muffle of the envelope filter and said "that banjo sounds great!" - I need my own office! haha

Great job man!

enjoyed that sounds great
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Thanks

There are still Nickelback lovers?

Rusty the Scoob wrote:There are still Nickelback lovers?

Oh I am afraid so....brought the headphones in today Sounds even better now Vic!

First set is up, too, now.

http://www.archive.org/details/pd2009-1 ... rocksetone

So when you upload your files are they .flac. Do you do any editing after the recording? How do they get stamped with title, track, etc?

You name the WAV files according to the etree conventions ... pd20091030d1t1 ... then convert them to FLAC files; when you upload to the Live Music Archive, you fill out the meta data in the interface when you check in your item ...

Vic,
what's the story w/ your Hard to Handle tone? It sound very different than your usual sound, like you jumped to another decade. I found that interesting.

It's still the same preset that I used in Terrapin, the base tone, middle pickup single coil. I dig in a little bit harder, use the overdrive during most (or all) of the jam, and kick in a regular wah pedal for a lot of it. I also don't finger pick certain lines, the way I do on a lot of the other stuff, like the Terrapin, it's all flat picking. The digging in hard and the wah pedal make it sound sort of 73-ish to me. It's very responsive and sensitive to guitar input, as you know ...

If you watch some of the older Dead videos, the few that are there, Jerry seems to play a lot harder and energetically than he did by the 80s. Not Pete Townshend, of course.

VIc,

First off, the band sounds fantastic! the axe fx sounds great and your playing is awesome!

Forgive me if you covered this before, but what are you using to record with? And - do you you any special processing on your voice? I noticed a difference at some of the shows. I talked to some folks a while back that said DSO was using vocal processors to help get the voices more in line with Jerry and Bob's voice.

I just got an alesis 16 channel usb 2.0 mixer and have been impressed with its ability to multitrack record 16 channels through a usb 2.0 cable!!! Again - Great playin!

I bought a Presonus StudioLive 16-channel Firewire desk to use at the live gigs. We usually connect it to the house mains and monitors; if that's not practical or the venue balks, we have a 16-channel insert snake that we plug into the house board for it. It gets hooked up to my MacBook Pro with a single firewire cable, we hit record and 16 channels plus the straight house mix gets written to the hard drive. Once I got a RAM problem with the laptop sorted out at the first couple of gigs, it's never hung up, crashed, etc. Works perfectly.

One of the nice things about the StudioLive is it can save "scenes" where it will remember every pot, fader, EQ, compression, limiting, high pass, etc. setting, so the first time we use it at a given club, we create a preset for it. The next time we play, we just mic it all up, then recall the preset and we have somewhere to start from, which is good, because there are certain clubs where we don't get much or any opportunity to soundcheck. It's also a remarkable transparent and versatile board, for the price. The Hard Rock has a Midas board, and their FOH guy thought our little desk sounded great.

When I remix, I'm starting from scratch with what got recorded straight off the microphones, pre EQ, fader, effects, etc. Compare 10 seconds of the 2-channel house mix to the remix:

http://playingdead.net/101009fireflys/vicmix.wav



The only effects on the vocals are a little reverb and sometimes a subtle slap delay. Lately, our FOH guy has been experimenting with some different microphones for me, so that could account for some of it. We're not doing anything to try to alter the sound of the voices; our rhythm guy already sounds a lot like Weir does. I just sound like me ... LOL

Thanks for the info Vic - what a difference in the two mixes!