Remixing/Mastering “The Song Remains the Same” and Other Great Live Albums

[LSW]

I’ve never engineered or mixed anything for surround sound, only stereo, but I am often amazed at just how great it sounds whether it’s for a movie or concert DVD.

It’s been about ten years since I got my first bonafide home theatre set up, HDTV and a mid-range out of the box audio system. Elton 60 on Blu-ray, the live show at Madison Square Garden to celebrate his birthday was just great. Uncompressed audio, 1080p and a lot of the more obscure tunes added to the experience. Plus, it was recorded and mixed for surround. Before that, many concerts on SD DVD with Dolby Digital were also very good, like Hell Freezes Over.

And going back even further, back to 1973, back to the Garden, was Led Zeppelin and “The Song Remains the Same”. There were also many great live albums that came out throughout the decade, but not for the purpose of a feature film. I know about as much as remote recording as I do about surround recording, very little. I knew there was usually a van parked outside, maybe with 48 tracks but most likely 24. The target format was stereo and vinyl. I would imagine at least a few submixes in stereo pairs. Crowd noise was easy to capture, I’ve seen SM 58’s just dangling from high above on several occasions.

I suppose we’ve all heard stereo recordings through surround systems, where you choose some preset faux-surround setting that doesn’t sound all that great. I would think it’s that center channel that causes problems – the amp just wants to put the lead vocal there like it’s movie dialog. But that’s not how a concert sounds, or a well-mixed surround recording of one. Not unlike those old vocal eliminators they used to sell to give us cheap karaoke. But in reverse.

So without the video, there’s not much need to convert the old live albums to surround. But for the movie, it’s needed. And how is it done – do they remix (I hope) or just remaster? How close can they get it to today’s technology – are the multitrack tapes still viable, and did they get enough separation when tracking?

I’m speculating a lot here – for all I know, maybe they didn’t bother with gates or uni-directional mics. Maybe the just had an eight-track machine. Maybe Page’s guitar was almost as loud as Plant in the lead vocal track. Maybe that’s what they wanted in order to capture the actual live sound and the sound of the venue.

By the same token, when recording Elton at the same venue over thirty years later, maybe they had it set up for just as much isolation as they could get In a studio. And the “sound” of the venue was all artificial, all done in post to still give it a live feel, just less raw.

Does anyone have experience with live recording from back in the day, from today, or remixing? What about remastering and how many times have some of these albums (live and studio) been remastered for the latest technology? (ya know, I actually thought that cassettes were starting to sound pretty good there towards the end, but that’s also when they finally started getting CD’s right).

Ending on a side note – if I could pick just one of those live albums from the seventies to have a film to go with – All the World’s a Stage, hands down.