The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound".*

Nope, first WOS show was 3/23/74, most of which is on DP 24. The "prototype" for the WOS was accidentally conceived at the Boston Music Hall on 11/30/73, when the crew discovered that the stage was too small for the normal PA and speaker layout; they were forced to make everything more vertical, approximating a line source. Everyone was so impressed by the sound quality that the engineers (Wickersham, Curl, Bear, etc) decided to go all out with what ended up being the WOS. The Feb '74 Winterland shows allowed them to refine the concept a bit before the official introduction.

I saw 2 outdoor shows in '74. Except for the thin (bass-shy) vocals, the sound was exceptional, even pretty far away. No other amplified concerts at that time even came close in any respect.

 

The only Dead show I ever saw was the '74 stop in Seattle. An audiophile/Deadhead friend took me to the show, and was gushing about how great the sound was going to be.

I was underwhelmed; the sound was murky, and not terribly punchy as I recall. Nor was it terribly loud, which I was actually beginning to appreciate (I saw ELP's Brain Salad Surgery tour around the same time, and my ears are still ringing from that sonic assault ...!) The show was at Hec Ed, not an acoustic wonderland by any means ... After the show my pal said the show he'd seen earlier in San Francisco was much better. I later attended Pink Floyds' Dark Side of the Moon surround-sound show, now that was great sound.

 

It actually was very loud, measured by peak levels. Distortion was low and there was no compression, so the perceived loudness may have been less.

 

Guys!
Perceived loudness at a Dead show is perceived by the amount and or the grade of pot you smoke before and during the show. Acid, shrooms, mescaline, etc, play a heavy role too.

Come on man, ya'll know that.

 

Around 40 reels of Dead came in a few years ago. It wasn't the mish-mosh of decibels usually equated with concert sound. It was actually quite good, clean and very enjoyable. I wish I still had them in the archive!

 

The 1st w.o.s. show was actually at Maples Pavilion at Stanford University in 73.

 

The prototype yes; and about 1 to 10 seconds in the tweeters blew. It is a good distinction though as admittedly I always felt the Boston Music Hall PA was the progenitor. It was a year later 3-23-74 Cow Palace that most people consider the debut of the working version.

This may be it if accurate.

 

Epic first show no doubt about it. I feel bad, like asking what a new acquaintance does for a living, but I am curious, how many did you end up seeing and when was the end?

 

That seems quite a rich and fulfilling experience indeed.

 

And you get a G-D DVD commemorating it! Lucky duck.

 

I drove by the Cow Palace but never got to see a show there. Wish I had.

 

I guess that some of the PA gear was used in the Studio, too. If you compare Wake Of The Flood with From The Mars Hotel and esp Blues For Allah the improvement in fidelity, resolution and esp. depth of the music are easy to spot. Even today the CD of Mars Hotel sounds wonderful, the original 1877 LP of Bleas For Allaj still amazes me ! It was around that time when I got my first decent headphine- A nce YAMAHA on ear type (brownish) and I appreciated sound quality . The records that I remember to sound best were the first JOURNEY LP and Blues For Allah. With Shakedown Street and the signiung at A+M that certain quality was lot. They had to use the stuff found at the studios. Before they could take their time and produce everything by them selve. Lowel George produced shakedown Street and he cound + musical style changes to Rock R'nB..

 

I agree with you but just playing devil's advocate, I would not expect much PA stuff to make it into the studio. Now guitar amps and speakers yes; and the guts of the guitars probably greatly improved over those three albums, but I have to think the studios themselves, the consoles and outboard gear were really where the fingerprint comes. Record Plant, CBS which supposedly had a great live sound, then Weir's with Barncards custom console. I also think Blues For Allah benefited from unlimited hang time it being at Weir's place. Barncard always has great photos and he does not disappoint on this front.

Phase 1 before Weir wanted it bumped from 10 input 4 bus to 20 - 8


Final


Many more here: http://barncard.com/gallery3/index.php/HISTORY/SQB_WORK/STUDIO_BUILDING/WEIRS

Notice the band photos, not a lot of non-guitar PA gear IMO.

Barncard talks about how he though he would be engineering Blues For Allah but Healy nabbed it. http://barncard.com/barncards/sqb/Interview/Barncard_Interview_Pt2.html

 

So I am trying to learn more about any mixing consoles generally used for the 2-track recordings in the 70's. Maybe someone here knows more, so to get things started... in the early Alembic days, so 70-71, Curl and Wickersham built a solid state mixing console but Curl says it did not sound that great and was never adopted and instead they stuck with the stacked Ampex MX-10s for a few more years. They used those for Europe '72, not for the 16 track, that was controlled by the gain switches at the inputs of the Ampex MM-1000, although presumably just keeping them out of the red; but Betty made 2-tracks as well, so perhaps MX-10s were used for that or maybe they used them to mix the PA as well. So somewhere that changed to likely some custom console stuff maybe in 73-74 land; I will have to track that down, but in the meantime I am learning about the MX-10s. http://www.davegroupjapan.com/ekoukoku8.html

 

Ok the MX-10s acted as the FOH mixer in '71, my guess still '72 maybe '73. Betty talks about recording rehearsals for Cats Under the Stars at Front Street and she says she brought her MX-10s and Nagra, and those rehearsals turned into getting the studer 16 track and a neve console which Jerry bought. So in late '77 it seems her recording M.O. was MX-10s and the Nagra of course; On the FOH console front after the hiatus they rented PAs, hooked up with FM Productions who built a parametric eq console, Clair brothers who had a custom one, then Ultrasound, so after hiatus seems pretty covered on FOH other than some pics which would be nice. Now I guess '71-'74 for any FOH changes is still an open question.

We have pictures of Betty 6-4-78 and this seems a custom console. I will steal someone's joke and confirm upfront that is Mickey and not Freddie Mercury.



http://www.musicimages.com

Edit: It occurs to me to point out the MX-10 were tube amp, so likely giving us that sweet sound we love so much. Now that 6-4-78 board looks solid state of course, and I have to say I just listened to the 6-4-78 Betty tape for the '78 college show tournament we have going on and I have to say there is something funky/grainy/sizzly going on with that tape, not so good; yes it as a cassette gen in it, but I think the problems are beyond that.

I am listening to 4-14-78 now, Miller's master reel >PCM, and I don't know who recorded it but it sounds like a '77 Betty board for sure, nothing like 6-4-78. Maybe 6-4 was a once off thing, I know Bill Graham was involved; I'll have to spend more time listening to '78 Betty boards, darn.

 

Ok I am debunking that photo, a case of someone probably making a tape cover with the wrong photo. Dead.net has this as as Cow Palace 3-23-74. Here is a better photo from there:



Now here is PNE 5-17-74 and they have the center cluster going at least by then.

 

I'd sure like to go back in time and be at the 5/17/74 show!!!
That would be fun....

 

At the bottom of the ’73 newsletter here is an interview with Rick Turner, published July ’73. Ampex MX-10 mixers, and Altec Acoustivoicette graphic equalizer seem to be the FOH set up. He mentions a Nagra for recording the shows but no talk of a separate mix; in fact he notes the mic feeds are slit into two, one one monitors and one for PA—so it seems then the recording was possibly just the FOH mix, unless something happened via a patch from the FOH mixer for additional adjustments.

Lots of WOS components get brought up, pink noise analysis, stacking cabinets, Phil’s quad setup, out of phase mics.

Here is a schematic Mary Ann Mayer did of the ’73 PA


The whole thing is http://www.gratefuldeadfamilyalbum.com/#!page-102-and-103/c1t4w

I could never find a 2-9-73 Roscoe Maples photo but it does look like:
Kezar in May

Fairground DeMoines May '73


Kezar May '73

 

RFK June '73


I believe this is the Band opening at Roosevelt Stadium July '73

 

No FOH setup for the Wall of Sound, that was part of the point of it. There was a mixing console for taping, though.

 

I have been spending a good amount of time learning about the Ampex MX-10. It seems this was their FOH mixer pretty early on, and my guess is it stayed pretty much until after the hiatus. I thought maybe something custom was done for the WOS but I found something John Curl said that he was off in Switzerland with Meyer around that time and he only mentions building the solid state board that was rejected.

Using this users manual here (the MX-35 was essentially the MX-10 with different cosmetics) you start to get a sense of the simplicity of everything. For example there is no pan pot; that helped from degrading the sound, but in another sense just left full left right or center; so no real messing around with things and everyone seemed to employ full left or right which helped create a nice stereo image. I wonder in the 1 drummer days if some part of the kit was centered, maybe vocals? So you have 4 mic channels and 2 line channels of which you could use 4 of those; you could couple 4 units together; Bear used 3 units for 12 channels for early FOH. Here are some quotes about and from him.

"The final stage of signal flow before the tape recorder was the mixer. The twelve microphones needed to be summed to a two-track (stereo) L-R image. Owsley used a very sonically pure mixer, usually several Ampex MX-10s. Simple in design and high in quality, the MX-10 allowed multiple microphones to create a coherent stereo output. The mixer had no pan pots, which degrade the signal, and a microphone was assigned left, center, or right-and here too, none of the mics were equalized; all sounds were pure. The end result was a “picture” of the stage, with the positioning of the instruments spread across the stereo field just as they were heard from the audience’s perspective." http://www.owsleystanleyfoundation.org/page4/page4.html

"In those days quality mics were expensive, and the kind of mixing boards used in most venues for live sound- such as baseball stadiums and churches- had limited sound quality. Not satisfied with this situation, I searched for quality components to assemble my own mixing desk.

I chose a setup of four rack-mounted Ampex MX-10 mixers. They were 4 mic (tube) preamp mixers with nice big rotary faders. This small quality mixer was made for classic location recording. It was simple and very quiet. It had quite a good dynamic range. When connected together the four units allowed me twelve mic (or line) inputs with a simple choice of left, right or both channels- from each input. There was no eq, no panpots. I rarely used the both-channel feed option, preferring to have each mic feed just one of the two channels. I relied on mic placement to bring each voice's presence to the other side of the PA. The single channel feed is a very important key to creating a sense of real 'space' or dimension, as even one mic into both channels brings a kind of 'fuzziness' into the mix, like a film on a mirror. Too many mics in both channels (by switch or panpot) quickly burys and destroys the 'space' entirely.

I have never worked in a studio, so I had no reason to think I had to isolate each instrument, after all- it was a complex three-dimensional sound I was trying to capture. By moving my few mics around a bit, I was able to define a nice clean, open sound. By getting the band to try different stage setup configurations we managed to tune the onstage sound to work as well for us as the equipment of the time allowed. Vocal monitors were a problem right up to the time in-ear units became available, although today's floor boxes are light-years beyond anything we had.

My two-track tape deck was connected to the stereo PA feed. I turned it on and forgot about it- except for changing reels as needed. The tapes represented a special kind of diary of my mixes. It sounded just like the show did on playback. The tapes of a show were fairly complete so long as I was not too busy with some crisis or other in the hall to fail to notice the amount of tape left. And trust me, crises seemed to be an integral part of rock and roll as we knew it. My journal was not a 'live recording, and was not made with the intention it would ever become a record. It was just an unusual diary, if it was not perfect and complete it still fulfilled its purpose. The journals provided me with a way to listen to any show later on and locate and analyse a problem so it could be fixed. Listening to them in the beginning of my sound career certainly helped my mixing art as well. After a while it got to where I rarely played a journal tape unless the musicians were interested, and very few were then and seem to be still in that mode.

I took care to make sure the signal on the tape exactly matched the sound I heard in the hall. During this process I checked that the hall sound matched the sound onstage as closely as possible. To bring into the tape signal a balance and presence missing from the pure PA signal input, I set up two mics which I plugged into the mic channels on the tape deck- these mics were not sent to the PA. By adjusting the placement and level of the supplementary mics, the sound on the tape could be matched to the hall, compensating for the in-hall sound the onstage amps provided. The tape's signal is thus designed to represent a 'balanced source' of the show sound. A pair of mics set up in the audience cannot duplicate the show on playback, it is incomplete- only a balanced source will provide duplication." https://archive.org/post/304527/bears-liner-notes-to-dp-36-essential

So it seems these might have carried over into the WOS where they would have mixed the vocals and the piano feeds to their sub systems, but everything else was perhaps controlled by the band with input from others out front possibly. I guess by the '73 Bear maybe relented on EQ according to the Rick Turner interview.

As it relates to Betty if she used these it could explain why the simple circuits, the tubes, and mostly full left or right pans and the Nagra give us such good results. I wonder if any EQ was ever used by her, but my guess is no.

Now, having learned the MX-10 more, I have a theory about Betty possible switching from the MX-10s to a console. If you remember she used the MX-10s late '77, then the liner notes from Bear about Dick's Picks 25 where he says he patched into "a pair of unused busses on her recording board"; well I don't think there is any such thing on the MX-10.

 

I am not sure if Lee Brenkman was involved with the WOS, the Dead, it seems he was at the Great American Music Hall anyway back in the day, I think he says the most definitive thing I have found.

"Mixer? I don't got to show you no stinking MIXER!

Actually there wasn't one. The vocals keyboards and drums, minus the kick, if memory serves were premixed to their respective sub systems, probably with the Ampex MX 10 rack mixers that were used in the previous band owned sound system.

Dr. Don or Dan Healy would know the particuars, but there wasn't a big FOH console as we now see all the time.

You might be surprised at the number of big shows that were still being mixed with rack mount mixers at that time. Remember this is at the time that a 16 channel Yamaha PM1000 was a big deal, and bigger sound companies were still trying to build their own consoles in house.

The idea was that the system and "monitors" were one and the same and that the band could "mix themselves" based on what they heard where they were standing. I'm sure though therre was input from the crew, light show personnel and others out front."
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