** AT WIFE'S REQUEST **
Pink Floyd
Providence Civic Center
1987-10-17
Recording Type: Audience
Taper: Balrog (Barry Rogoff)
Remastering: Lestat
Art: Gromek
Setlist:
Vol. 1
01. Shine On You Crazy Diamond I-V >
02. Signs of Life
03. Learning To Fly
04. Yet Another Movie > Round And Around
05. A New Machine I
06. Terminal Frost
07. A New Machine II
08. Sorrow (fades out)
09. (fades in) The Dogs of War
10. On the Turning Away
11. One of These Days
Vol. 2
01. Time
02. On the Run
03. Wish You Were Here
04. Welcome to the Machine
05. Us and Them
06. Money (fades out)
07. Another Brick In the Wall II
08. Comfortably Numb
09. E: One Slip
10. E: Run Like Hell
David Gilmour, guitar
Nick Mason, drums
Richard Wright, keyboards
Scott Page, saxophones
Rachel Fury, vocals
Margaret Taylor, vocals
Guy Pratt, bass
Tim Renwick, guitar
Source and Lineage:
1987: Sony ECM-150T Electret condenser mikes > Sony WM-D6C [Dolby B in] > Maxell XLII-S
2010: Maxell XLII-S > Nakamichi Dragon [Dolby B out] > RDL FP-UBC6 > MOTU 896 > Sound Forge Audio Studio > Wave [24/96] > Adobe Audition > Wave [24/48 and 16/44.1] > FLAC
Recorded at 96kHz and downsampled to 48kHz for editing.
Contrast Clause:
As far as we know, there is only one other source of this concert, which is not currently on Dime but can be found on
http://echoeshub.com/ I think you'll find this one to be an upgrade.
Barry's Notes:
This recording is the product of a great deal of painstaking effort to remove the obnoxious noise made by a group of four to five screaming idiots, led by one extremely irritating screamer (think nails on a chalkboard) sitting in front of my microphones. Because of these idiots, this recording has essentially sat on the shelf since 1987 and has never been circulated. It was discussed in the Dime group under the topic of getting rid of screamers.
This recording owes its sound quality to the acoustics of the Providence Civic Center, my favorite of all hockey rinks, and to the superb 360-degree sound system used by Pink Floyd. Omnidirectional mikes were able to pick up all the sound from all parts of the system, which created a listening experience different from that produced by typical directional mikes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
The methods and tools used to mitigate the screamers are described under Technical Notes below.
Lestat's Notes:
I can't adequately express my gratitude to Barry for handling the incredibly tedious process described below ahead of my work, which itself became the most difficult project I've undertaken to date and as such went way past the usual 1-2 months usually required to get that certain "BLG" sound.
Barry did a superb job too. There is no attack on music signal that even I can hear, except in a couple of spots so brief they really don't matter. The primary screamer in question was really bad, and is noticeably weird sounding now but that's just fine with me and even quite funny at times - sounds as if a helium overdose underway ;} What does matter: Pink Floyd themselves aren't overwhelmed as they were in the raw master.
My own work challenges stemmed from the type of microphone Barry had to start using around 1984 due to security increasingly wise to the possibilities of ARs rivaling industry "live" releases for sonic detail. Literally a "lapel"-style minimike, it was of excellent quality but would not capture sound in larger venues with a lot of reverb the same way a set of Nak cardioids would.
To make the usual long story short I had to start over on this one more times than I can count, and listeners already familiar with the "BLG" series should still not expect quite the same level of quality heard in captures involving Nak mikes even 10 years older. Nonetheless, enough of what we strive for is there to provide what we now find a most enjoyable listen and the sense of concert realism all too rare in other circulating ARs.
Technical Notes (Barry):
My first attempt at scream removal occurred years ago when I started creating digital transfers of my master tapes. I snipped out most of the worst ones, leaving behind noticeable artifacts, but there were some that I couldn't snip out without damaging the music. What I did was an improvement but the technology to do the job properly didn't exist and the recording went back onto the shelf.
This second attempt is more successful by far but it's not perfect by any means. You'll still hear some artifacts but they are much less obtrusive than before. It's as if I were able to pick up the worst screamers en masse and drop them all some distance away. I can't get rid of them altogether but the recording is now quite listenable.
The resurrection of this recording was inspired when I read an article about the auto-heal tool and healing brush effect in Adobe Audition. Anyone who has used the healing brush in Adobe PhotoShop knows what a miracle it can be when an important photograph is marred by small defects. I had dreamed of being able to apply visual effects to a waveform spectral display the same way I do to bitmap images for many years and it had finally arrived.
I started by using the spectral display in Adobe Audition to identify the visual representations of screams, which typically look like elongated, upside down U shapes at roughly 1-2 kHz, often with visible "echoes" (reverberations or harmonics) rising in frequency, or with "steam" rising from them. I found them to be most easily recognizable when zoomed way in, horizontally and vertically, using the default Blackmann-Harris windowing function at 4096 bands. A spectral display shows frequencies, not amplitude, so some shapes that look like loud screams actually aren't, and vice-versa.
The auto-heal tool that I had been expecting to use actually turned out to be useful only in a few instances where screams were very short and clearly distinguishable from the background. Most of the work was done with healing brush tool and the effects brush tool, each set to 10-15 pixels. Wherever the healing brush didn't work, I used a very narrow effects brush to apply one of several custom favorites all named "Eraser." I found that completely erasing a very narrow band gets rid of the worst part of a troublesome scream while leaving behind hardly any artifacts. In the worst cases, I had to apply the 96dB Eraser multiple times to remove particularly loud screams. These leave behind a little buzzing or hissing but the amplitude is much lower than the original scream.
There were a few screams that couldn't be removed without too much collateral damage. One occurs right after the lyrics "Now there's nothing more to say" at the end of Time. Others occur in On the Run. A few had to be snipped out. Many were snipped out seamlessly between songs.
Audition's drawing tools are worth every penny but, unfortunately, you have to pay quite a few pennies for them. (Audition is the successor to Cool Edit Pro, a product that used to be from a company named Syntrillium and has been available free for years.) The best price I've seen lately is $99.25 on eBay.
The tools open up a whole new world of possibilities for removing the obnoxious noises made by idiots who think that going to a rock concert is a license to scream and whistle and forget all about courtesy and civilized behavior.
