Atlantis The Omni
Atlanta, GA
November 30, 1974
The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
CD 1
1.01 Firebird Suite (1.46)
1.02 Sound Chaser (9.56)
1.03 Close to the Edge (19.30)
1.04 To Be Over (9.28)
1.05 The Gates of Delirium (22.33)
CD 2
2.01 And You And I (10.32)
2.02 Ritual (25.21)
2.03 Roundabout (8.44)
Yes:
Alan White
Chris Squire
Jon Anderson
Patrick Moraz
Steve Howe
Recorded, mastered, and remastered by TheTooleMan 1975, 2001 and 2004
Now that this recording has survived 30
years, I will try to document what I remember about the experience of the
concert and making the recording, and the work I did on the tapes in the
subsequent months and years and decades.
The Concert
The Omni in Atlanta is not a particularly
great place to go to enjoy music. It is large, and holds lots of people. Yes
was well-started on its arena-filling phase, and this show was early in their
third tour as a headline act. The Omni was full, as I recall.
I bought the tickets late and wound up with
nosebleed seats for my friends Mark, Barry, and me. From our seats we could see
the entire stage, but it was pretty distant, and we used binoculars to see up
close. At best, we could see two band members at the same time through the
lenses. The large mechanical monsters on either side of the stage were both an
aid and a distraction – they gave the audience more to look at from the
distance, but they also lent the show a circus-like quality. Their wobbly
motions and rounded design reminded me of characters in a Burger King
commercial. These were not the same creatures that you see on-stage in the QPR
video or any of the photos in the YesYears set, and perhaps they broke down and
were replaced early on in the tour.
Moraz was new to me. As a die-hard Wakeman
fan, Moraz had a lot to prove, and overall I thought he was a poor substitute,
especially during the older songs where he played his own improvisations
instead of the original keyboard parts.
I carried a Panasonic mono portable
cassette recorder with automatic level control and an ElectroVoice microphone
into the Omni in an army knapsack I purchased at a surplus store. I stashed the
knapsack under a navy pea coat carried under my arm. It got some looks by the
staff of the arena, but no inspections. The microphone was borrowed from a
defunct radio station where Barry and I had worked. It probably accounts for
the modicum of fidelity I was able to capture with this otherwise mediocre recorder.
I started out with the microphone in my hand,
but later put it in the knapsack under my seat. This probably accounts for the
reduced amount of conversation during the middle parts of the show.
I brought three BASF normal-bias cassettes
with me in the knapsack. After Close to the Edge, I flipped the tape over and
started rewinding. I was still fumbling with the machine when Jon made his
first comments and introduced To Be Over. Only when Steve started playing the
opening melody did I realize I needed to start taping again. This is why
several seconds of the introduction of To Be Over are missing from the
recording. I also missed Jon’s introduction of And You And I while changing
from the first to second tape. I flipped sides of the second tape during the
applause for the encore, so no music was lost, but the ovation was longer than
the recording suggests.
Occasional flanging can be heard in some
parts of the music, particularly in The Gates of Delirium and Ritual. This was
produced by deliberately moving the microphone in a circular motion. It seemed
like a good idea at the time, for any number of reasons.
We were pretty quiet most of the time, but
you can hear me asking Barry, “Want a toke?” at 6:42 into Sound Chaser (I was
shocked that he replied “Nah”). That’s me gasping at the end of the Firebird
Suite, when the drums blasted like gunshots through the Omni. I ask Mark if I
can see his binoculars during the introduction of To Be Over, and Barry talks
about his camera and light meter ad nauseum during And You And I. Eventually
the guys went for a closer look during Ritual. There are some bits of
conversation from the people in front of me, but nothing too distracting or
intelligible.
The sound in The Omni was not good. Bass
notes rang off the ceiling, particularly some harmonic frequencies. You can
hear this effect in the recording, where the dominating sound comes from the
bass. When these peaks occurred, the automatic level control kicked in and the overall
audio level dropped, leaving the bass very prominent.
The middle “war” section of The Gates of
Delirium was painfully loud, with Jon’s crashing and bashing effects blasting
off the ceiling. From where I sat, it looked like he was breaking glass in a
garbage can and pounding on other objects. It was incredibly violent, and I
think the recording captures most of this quality. Later performances do not
seem to be this extreme.
Most of the mastering of the recording was
done in the first half of 1975 at the University of Georgia, both in my dorm
room and the radio production studios of the Grady School of Journalism. Studio
C was the largest, with room for a small orchestra or 25 students. It had an
RCA two-track stereo recorder and an Ampex full-track mono recorder, mounted in
a rack, another Ampex full-track in a stand with wheels, and an RCA board of
older vintage, even for 1975. I patched the Panasonic recorder into the board
and copied the cassettes onto the two reel-to-reel machines. I split up the
tapes by track and cut out unwanted talking, added a few effects, and ran the
output through the Blonder-Tongue equalizer Barry had liberated from a radio
station junk pile. It was an old tube model with about 8 bands and a tube for
each one, in a rack-ready configuration – in other words, a face plate and
chassis, but no cabinet. The equalizer output ran into my Tandberg 3000X
quarter-track stereo tape deck. I lugged the equalizer, the Tandberg, the
Panasonic, a bundle of cables, and a copy of YesSongs in and out of my dorm
room, down three flights of stairs, and into my VW Beetle. I drove to the
“J-school” studios, lugged the equipment out of the car, up more stairs, and
down a long hall to the basement studio. At the end of my allotted time in the
studio, I retraced all my steps, equipment in tow. I repeated this process
numerous times during the spring quarter of 1975.
In my dorm room, I used the Panasonic cassette
recorder to process the signal from one track of the tape coming from the
Tandberg, which was playing the product of my day at the studio. I would EQ the
signal to favor the high end, and the Panasonic’s automatic level control would
pull up the low-volume passages that the excessive bass had produced. This
output was bounced back to the other track of the tape. I would then reverse
the EQ and play it back again through this same signal path, hoping to fix the
problems the previous loop had created. Even though I did this numerous times,
I didn’t pick up much tape hiss – this speaks to the quality of the Tandberg, I
guess. I believe I did pick up distortion from the equalizer, though, and the
multiple passes probably compounded it.
I cross-faded the introductory sound
effects from the YesSongs version of Close to the Edge with the ones from my
recording to replace a lot of talking picked up by the tape. Sometime in the
history of the tape, I hit the record button during Total Mass Retain and wiped
out less than a second of the signal; I used an echo and some reverb to fill
the hole. I went overboard with echo on this track. The monitors in studio C
were at the other end of the room and did not reveal how much I put into the
mix. The result is muddier than I would have liked in hindsight. Echo was also
used in Ritual to cover some tape defects, most obviously in the passage before
the bass solo, starting around 9:45.
The tape flanging effect from 2:30 to 2:48 in
Sound Chaser is a product of the two recorders in studio C. The RCA deck ran
just enough slower than the Ampex that it was easy to make a successful phasing
sound on Moraz’ soaring Mellotron passage.
There is a cartoon sound effect buried in
the mix during the Ritual drums. A tape cartridge with the sound was in studio
C, and I added it on a whim. Other bizarre sounds were coming from the stage,
but this was the only one I added myself. Listen carefully for it.
Ambient audio was mixed over the middle
guitar bridge of And You And I, where Barry carried on about the lighting and
photo opportunities. I cross-faded in and out of a couple of remarks made by
Barry and me in Gates and Ritual, and made a splice at the end of the bass solo
in Ritual to handle an abrupt change in EQ. With the reverb in The Omni, it was
hard to hear much of anything going on in the bass solo even as it was
happening. The drum part of Ritual is probably the least effected part of the
entire recording – it seemed quite fine in its original form. Roundabout is
also quite unprocessed, as the noise levels were so high that the poor
Panasonic had all it could do to keep the audio below total distortion. The
entire audience was standing and clapping during Roundabout, and I don’t recall
whether I was holding the microphone or if it was stowed under my chair at this
point.
At some point in the summer of 1975, I
decided to shelve the project. Being in an “endless loop” of reprocessing the
audio, and not being able to make further improvements, I ran some of the
less-processed tapes through the equalizer one last time, recorded the output
on track one of a BASF reel at 7-1/2 ips, and put everything away. To make the
show fit on the reel, I moved To Be Over to the beginning of side two, followed
by And You And I. During this dubbing session, as happened all too often in my
efforts, one of the tubes in the old EQ unit emitted a high-pitched squeal. The
decrepit device had ruined many takes with its unwelcome audio additions,
forcing me to restart the process from the beginning and waste hours of time. At
one point I whacked the EQ unit with my hand – you can hear this as a small
burst of static during the ending minutes of Ritual. This apparently was
exactly what was needed, as it did not squeal again during the rest of the
final copying session.
I thought that some day I would be able to
process the recording with the equipment I needed (which may not have existed
at the time) to fix the audio distortion and abrupt level changes caused by the
automatic level control. I had no idea it would be over 25 years until that
came about.
In 2001, after acquiring a Dell PC, Sound
Forge 5, and a used Sony TC-366 reel-to-reel tape recorder, I started work on
the remaster.
The tape was in good condition, having been
stored in its original plastic case and the air-tight inner plastic shell in an
air conditioned environment for over 25 years. The first playback revealed a
bad 60 Hz hum throughout the recording, another artifact of the old tube
equalizer. Volume levels were consistent, but some spots remained where the
loud bass had overpowered the rest of the audio signal. There were no drop-outs
or other signs of deterioration in the playback of the reel.
I used Sonic Foundry’s Paragraphic
Equalizer to kill the 60 Hz hum, and its Multi-band Dynamics plug-in to divide
the audible spectrum into four bands and apply compression to each. This
allowed me to bring up the part of the music that had been smothered by the
loud bass and midrange. After this processing, I went through the entire
recording in Sound Forge, revamping the audio levels frame by frame to get rid
of the remaining abrupt volume changes. Pitch was corrected in spots where the
RCA deck of Studio C played back more slowly than the Ampex. The final output
was divided into tracks, compressed with SHN, and distributed through YesSwap.
In 2004, I started with the 2001 remaster
and reprocessed the frequency bands with Sony Sound Forge 7, adding additional
compression and hand-tuning the levels. Sony Acoustic Mirror and Multi-tap
Delay processing was added to give stereo depth to the audio. It now more
closely recreates the audio experience in the Omni on that Sunday after
Thanksgiving, 1974.
Final Thoughts
I still enjoy listening to this tape, and
the images it invokes are still vivid. I toyed with a Dolby 5.1 mix of the
program, but decided it would take too long with my obsolete PC. The lack of a
surround monitor would make it a blind effort. Maybe that will be possible for
the 35th or 40th anniversary edition.
Had I anything to do over, I would have
kept the original recording on the cassettes, or dubbed them in their raw form
onto a full-track reel before erasing them. But having the raw tapes made me
nervous – I was afraid I would get “busted” by the RIAA or the Yes Police, and
in order to destroy the evidence, I bulk erased the cassettes. I still have the
tapes themselves, but their mechanisms broke and the tape wore out years ago;
if I had kept the original Yes recordings, they would not play today. At least
I was able to reason through my paranoia sufficiently to keep a final copy of
the recording.
But what the hell... thirty years later, at
least I still have the recording and someone to share it with!
ENLACE
https://mega.nz/file/fAB2XK4J#AAAAAAAAAABTh4MbEyCQngAAAAAAAAAAU4eDGxMgkJ4
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