Peter Gabriel
Apollo Theatre
Manchester England
29 April 1977
“MUPPET09”
Matrix of two audience recordings; rated ‘B+’ at http://www.genesis-movement.org/php/showdetails.php?uid=2508 (Artwork available)
I received this show from the MUPPET trading group years ago. I believe it was in shn, which I converted to wave and burned to cd.
Lineage: CDr > EAC > Wave > TLH > FLAC (level 8)
cd 1
01 Here Comes The Flood
02 On The Air
03 Moribund The Burgermeister
04 Waiting For The Big One
05 A Little Song For Little People
06 Excuse Me
07 Ain’t That Peculiar
08 Solsbury Hill
09 Band Introductions
10 Humdrum
cd 2
01 Slowburn
02 All Day And All Of The Night
03 Here Comes The Flood
04 Modern Love
05 Down The Dolce Vita
06 Back In N.Y.C.
Peter Gabriel – Piano, Flute, Tambourine, Vocals
Dusty Roads (Robert Fripp) – Guitars
Steve Hunter – Guitars
Tony Levin – Bass, Stick, Tuba, Backing Vocals
Larry Fast – Synthesisers
Alan Schwartzberg – Drums, Backing Vocals
Phil Aaberg – Keyboards, Backing Vocals
Jim Maelen – Percussion, Backing Vocals
Included in inreason’s 2009 upload on Dime (Jesper’s original notes?):
original notes:
“For MUPPET06 I did the September 27, 1977 show at the Manchester Apollo. After
the MUPPET06 release kotti passed me on some information, and made me aware that
David Lowe had a tape of the April 29, 1977 gig, which also happened to be at
the Manchester Apollo, and was in fact the very first rock gig at that venue! 🙂
Soon I discovered there was a second version of this recording circulating, from
a 1st gen. tape, transferred by Nigel Butterworth.
After examination I found that the two versions both were from different tapers,
both with a very different sound. The DL source was very distant, but did have
the very low and high frequencies (great bass drum, and those cymbals were
present as well). The NB source was quite compressed with lots of the mid-range,
giving a more raw sound. Both were far from perfect, but the disadvantages of
each could be covered up by each other. Thus came the idea to try a matrix. More
about that in the WHAT WAS DONE? section.
Back to the show:
MUPPET06 came from the second leg of the tour, this show comes from the first
leg. There’s some differences. Mostly in the order of the songs, but there’s
some other changes. Peter covered Marvin Gaye’s I Heard it through the Grapevine
during the second leg, but here he does another song by Gaye: Ain’t That
Peculiar. Also, where the second leg had a more polished version of Indigo, here
we get an early version of the song under the working title A Little Song for
Little People. Also, instead of the encore of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,
this time it’s Back in NYC.
WHAT WAS DONE?
This release is a so-called matrix, which uses two sources simultaneously. One
source had lots of lows and higs, the other mostly mid-range frequencies. They
covered each other perfectly, giving the recording a very rich full-spectrum
sound, and giving me the chance to have a little more control over the sound
than usual: kind of like working with a very simple multi-track 🙂
It also caused me a lot of head-ache and trouble though 😉
Speed correction was obviously the first step, since the two sources had to be
perfectly synchronized. This wasn’t as easy as I thought at first: there seemed
to be some miniscule speed-fluctations which would result in the two sources
going out of sync each minute or so. What I had to do therefore was
synchronizing the two sources every minute. Some of the loud songs were
painfully difficult to do: All Day and All of the Night and Back in NYC turned
out so bad that I decided to use one source only for those.
You’ll find that at a few places the two sources seem to go out of sync: I
regret this, but since the majority turned out very nice I hope it can be
excepted 🙂
The DL source was mono. Since it was very hissy, I killed some of the ultra-high
frequencies that didn’t contain music, but did contain hiss. After that some
further noise reduction was done, albeit slightly and manually altered. One
channel was copied to the other to get two identical channels. After that
equalization was done to get an optimal balanced sound.
The NB source was mono as well. I found the right channel to be the best so
copied that to the left channel, to get two identical channels again.
Equalization was done here as well.
The matrix was ‘mixed’ in the multi-track feature of Cool Edit. 80% of the show
was a mix of the two sources. I balanced the volumes of the two, also did some
very slight panning to left and right to create a little stereo. When there was
two sources at the same time I also used some additional equalization for each
of the sources to accentuate their strengths. Very slight reverb was used as
well, with one of the two getting a little more than the other to create some
artificial stereo-space again.
The two sources each had some little bits missing, where I would use the other
to cover it up. The NB source was missing the first few notes of the Here Comes
the Flood piano intro, the beginning of Humdrum, and some audience noise
inbetween the encore. The DL source was missing the end of Humdrum, the middle
of Slowburn, and also some audience noise inbetween the encore.
As said before, All Day and All of the Night and Back in NYC only use one
source: this was the DL source.
After the 32-bit mixdown of these two sources, multi-band compression was done,
to create some more dynamics, to flatten some of the excessive bass, and fiddle
a bit with the stereo image.
Some final equalization was done and the stereo image was expanded a little
again.
Some slight reverb was added as the finishing touch. Hard limiting was used to
flat some of the extremely high peaks, the recording was then normalized for
optimum dynamic capability on the final CD. Fade-ins and fade-outs were applied,
and the recording was converted back to 16-bit with the use of dithering.
Finally, this was cut in tracks.
A FINAL NOTE OF IMPORTANCE
On some systems this recording sounds as was intended by me, with a great rich
sound, and on some dynamic parts like the intro to On the Air, the loud-quiet
contrast in Waiting for the Big One the raw power should really kick in, when
all instruments join in.
However, you may find that the bass is way too loud on your system. I found this
myself on one system.
What you can do is turn off the ‘loudness’ button if that was on, and probably
the sound is very good then. Else, just lower the bass with the help of your
equalizer.”
enjoy!
Lamb79
themidnightcafe.org 