Fatcats
Lancaster Tavern (Upstairs)
January 28th, 2006

Setlist:
01. Sing Me Gently Home
02. Song for St. Jude >
03. Fatman Walks Alone >
04. Down Again
05. Speedballs (fade)
06. Montana Haze
07. Sweet Loraina
08. Stand Back (Allmans)
09. Disco
10. Doobie Break
11. Frontier
12. Burden & Misfortune
13. Rotan
14. Not Fade Away (B. Holly)

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Technical Notes:

Source: 16 channel Split recording > Alesis HD24
Lineage: 16 Channel Multitrack> Alesis HD24>optical in RME Digiface>Vegas 4.0
Mixdown via 4 Stereo Stems through Neve/Filtek/Siemens EQ's and Bass through DBX 160VU
Taped by: Eric Warren
Transfered by: Eric Warren

Now this was an experiment...

I arranged the donation of the Sound System from my work for this show...it quickly got a little excessive (4000watt QSC/JBL VRX rig if you wanna know) and set-up took much longer than anticipated. The recording rig was a 16 track split using custom mic preamps and an Alesis HD24 Hard Disc recorder. All the tracks were recorded at 24bit/44.1kHz, from the mics to the pre-amps, straight into the recorder. Bass was Avalon U5 DI.  No Compressors/Limiters or EQs on the way in. The mics were typical stage mics, mostly Sennheiser. The pre-amps, which are somewhat of a passion/hobby of mine, are a portable setup that I helped build with another fellow, and consist of kick-ass Neve, API, Siemens and Langevin preamps from the 60's and 70's that have been restored and racked with all the bells and whistles...

So after flailing my way through the opening band with mis-patched mics and dead channels I was all ready to go for the 'Cats...but the $%^&# HD24 recorder kept screwing up and kicking out of record mode.  It wasn't 'till near the end of the night that I finally caught the message, the root cause was the Hard drive that was too big for the machine and couldn't write data fast enough after the file size got large (ATTN: HD24 users - no 200GB drives!!) ...so unfortunately 5 songs were left with serious time slices and dropouts, the worst, a kickin' 'Shakedown Street' had 3 cuts in it at the worst places...very unsalvageable... As I struggled with not drop-kicking a piece of technology an amazing concert continued....and I was determined to capture as much as possible.  A total of 4 tracks were lost, and 'Speedballs' fades out as it's drop-out was closer to the end, although you can hear it was really just starting to rip when the fade starts...

The outcome - the final collection of songs was around 90 minutes with crowd noise and thank yous and intros and drink calls and tuning, etc...great timing for a cassette, not so much for CD...so I started whittling out the crowd noise and tuning first...got it down to 84 minutes, then the extended ending thanks went and it was 82 minutes, then the crowd bits started to get shorter, down to 81 minutes, finally every non-musical bit was reduced to it's essence, with a couple necessary tricky fades and a brief 'thanks' at the end.  What resulted is the leanest, meanest FatCats disc I've heard in a while.  The rapid-fire songs create an insistence, almost a lean-forward-and-listen-to-what-the-hell-is-going-on kinda vibe.  It reminds me of 'released' live shows you'd buy on CD more than a documentation of a concert experience...that wasn't the intention going into this, but I think it is the best way to present the tracks that were left from the recording.  And it's fricking great in the car-

But I digress...now back to the geekery...

Mixdown was also an experiment.  This was mixed OTB (out of the box) via stereo stems through various analog EQs.  All corrective/subtractive EQ was done on a track-by-track basis via plugins within Vegas, but all sweetening/additive EQ was done externally.  Processors included Neve 3126 EQ(drum mix), Siemens 295b EQ(gtr/organ mix), Filtek MK3 EQ(vocals) and DBX 160VU(bass).

Soooooo....after all that, the output of the EQs and compressor were mixed via a Rane SM82 Line mixer back into a Stereo Vegas track.  This then had a Waves L2 Limiter placed across it and noise-shaped/dithered down to 16 bit.  Chopped up in CD-Wave and here you go.  Now stop reading and start listening!

January 27/07
tungstengruvsten_at_hotmail.com
