9 ms·
The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)
- S_A_P 3y agoDisappointed that the components were not included in the article. I want to say they used McIntosh hifi amps that were 300 watts per channel. I’m not completely sure however.
- stevehiehn 3y agoI remember chatting with a sound technician at a concert once and he told me that putting amplification in front of the performers only started happening in the late 60's (ish). Before that musicians were actually subjected to insane DB's by standing only a few meters in front of the amplification. (Don't take this is as fact, but this diagram suggests that he was correct)
- llamaimperative 3y agoMust’ve felt pretty amazing, at least for a little while til the injuries started.
- buildsjets 3y agoSome techniques require this. Ted Nugent wouldn't have gotten the crazy howling feedback out of his semi-hollowbody Gibson Byrdland had he not been standing directly in front a pair of Fender Super Twins pushing 4 15" drivers. If it doesn't make your pants flap in the breeze, turn it up!
- dekhn 3y agoI believe most musicians these days achieve this using a nearby monitor speaker, for example Trey Anastasio from Phish, although I believe he may have adopted newer technology (see https://treysguitarrig.com/2023/08/31/2023-summer/ https://treysguitarrig.com/2023/08/31/2023-summer/ for more details). He could sustain notes for a long time with his custom hollowbody (like, minutes at a time).
- standardly 3y agoThat dude is a wizard. A lot of guitar players look down on fancy pedal setups, but watching his rig rundown video on youtube was mind blowing. I've heard Anastasio get tones and effects you just won't hear anywhere else.
- dekhn 3y agoI hadn't seen that before (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZKjKaQdW9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZKjKaQdW9w) but it's lots of fun. It's nice to be able to see what devices he's fiddling with to get his effects (most of the concert videos don't show the effects pedals and stomp boxes in detail). He's making heavy use of a looper- he can play some notes, capture them, and loop them continuously in the background (he uses to create a whole group of backing music that runs even when he's not playing actively). I mean if you look at this effects it's not surprising he can get all those tones. He's got multiple signal paths that get split and recombined with various effects applied to one or the other (being played thru speakers that are miked), a Leslie (rotating speaker in a cabinet that adds some interesting warbles), a bunch of different gains with distortion, along with a bunch of "digitech" that does real-time complicated distortion. All of those run in chains so effects compound. Some day I really want to have the time to build my own guitar similar to his as well as my own pedals. I've spent various bits of time in the background working on related things, but haven't allowed myself to really focus on it, because I tend to get a bit obsessive until I've fully explored my interests. Here's a nice example of looping to make one instrument sound like many: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsBINddmVcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsBINddmVcY and here's a person who runs her harp through various effects pedals (she has a library of them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Uv7JcnhhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Uv7JcnhhI
- standardly 3y agoTotally. He constantly messes with his pedals and pickups while playing, and never even looks down, it's impressive. Very important as musician to be that familiar with your gear. I heard you can get a Langeudoc like Trey's for about 60k+ now days. Good luck with that haha. Emily Hopkins! I've followed her for a while. She just did a collab with Anthony Fantano and I think she blew up with it. Neat stuff. Makes me want a unique instrument to play. I saw Bela Fleck perform with a tribal African band and they had an African ukelele run through a wah pedal. Was super funky and not like anything I'd heard
- Synaesthesia 3y agoThe Beatles had to quit playing live shows because the amps and speakers were too small to compete with the crowd.
- 082349872349872 3y agoTh' Dead not only allowed taping, they encouraged it: at the shows I attended, there was invariably a small grove of microphones set up near the soundboard, in the middle of the audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taper_(concert) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taper_(concert) (a disadvantage to too much ethology reading: I can't remember "Bill Graham Presents" without thinking of baboon behaviour)
- jMyles 3y agoI'd love to hear more about your experience and observations of taping at the shows. Not only did GD (and particularly Jerry Garcia and John Perry Barlow) eschew the 'intellectual property' model of music, their thought-leadership has lived on to become much of what we today consider fundamental internet technology and methodology. Early decentralized crypto-economics, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation were all developed by some combination of deadheads and musicians and tapers, particularly on an internet service called The WELL. The Green Pill Podcast had an entire episode exploring the bluegrass roots of blockchain technology; I was humbled / psyched to be a guest and play several of my songs, as well as some traditionals that GD also played. It's here if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3s9Fu4yu7o&t=2898s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3s9Fu4yu7o&t=2898s
- zer00eyz 3y agoIt's almost impossible to talk about The Dead and not talk about LSD. Owsley (wall of sound engineer) was one of the original major LSD manufactures... and a dead show was always where you went to score ACID if you lived on the east coast. This remained true well into the 90's. I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD. The Dead, Bill graham, hells angles, peoples temple, Patty Hearst.... There is a continuum of culture that spills out of San Francisco to this very day.
- Liquix 3y ago> I'm going to guess that all of those early internet pioneers that you mentioned also have fond stories of LSD. What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff is exactly that. A dive into how psychedelic counterculture made its mark on folks at Stanford, folks at XEROX PARC, Doug Engelbart, Jim Fadiman, Steve Jobs, etc. Not the most cohesive narrative but fascinating stories https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...
- scrumper 3y agoArticle doesn't mention one of the more interesting (to me) aspects which was how feedback was avoided. The solution is elegant: each vocal microphone is doubled, meaning there are two at each position. The phase is inverted on one of them, the singer sings into only one, and both are sent to the speakers via their channel's amp. The effect of that setup is that only the difference between the two microphones is amplified; common signal in both (i.e. the sound coming out of the speakers) is nulled out, but the difference signal (the voice) makes it through. It apparently wasn't quite perfect but was absolutely a lot better than wailing feedback. The thing that made it sound so good was that any given speaker only reproduces a single source, but the article touches on that. The mic arrangement I described is simply what makes it possible.
- itishappy 3y ago> common signal in both (i.e. the sound coming out of the speakers) is nulled out, but the difference signal (the voice) makes it through. What drives this? Singers and speakers are both localized sources, so I'd expect the mics to pick up similar phases for each. I bet it's distance! Falloff depends on distance to source, so there should be a larger difference in volume for closer sources.
- llamaimperative 3y agoYeah one microphone was behind the other, though I was under the impression it was half a wavelength behind and thus created something quite akin to modern active noise-cancellation? Edit: Apparently this is not the case!
- JohnBooty 3y agoYou can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explained https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine... For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers. 3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from comb filtering for listeners who are not located dead center at the middle of the array. (This of course assumes your audience is dispersed horizontally as opposed to floating randomly in space) Modern home loudspeakers hew to this philosophy as well to an extent. As opposed to big "monkey coffin" 70s speakers with a random array of drivers sprayed across the front of the speaker[1], modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line[2]. ____ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/attic_find_thoughts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/at... [2] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/revel-f328be-speaker-review.17443/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
- dekhn 3y agoMany of the ideas here were explored and commercialized by Meyer Sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories (the founder also helped out with the Wall of Sound)
- bongodongobob 3y agoAnother cool thing you can do with line arrays is beam steering, you can direct the sound to a certain extent. There are tradeoffs, but I always thought that was pretty damn magical.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jtriangle 3y agoDave Rat, of Rat Sound/RHCP/Bassnectar/etc fame, has some very interesting takes on the wall of sound idea using modern equipment. The core of it is that speakers are bad at polyphony, so if you can avoid it, you can produce something that sounds more natural to human ears, and do so in a larger area. The way to avoid it is more speakers, more stacks/arrays/etc. You don't necessarily need an array per instrument, because modern loudspeaker arrays are indeed much better than they used to be, and modern loudspeaker processing fixes a multitude of problems.
- mrob 3y agoAnother advantage of individual speakers for each instrument is that it allows positioning them without the phase cancellation artifacts you get with a stereo setup. It's obvious with some sounds, e.g. try playing some mono pink noise on stereo speakers and move your head. Then try again after hard panning the audio to only one of the speakers. This is why adding a real physical center channel makes dialogue clearer in movies.
- hunter2_ 3y agoThe center channel also helps by allowing the listener to localize the dialogue differently than the music/FX. When the dialogue comes from a different point in space, it doesn't need to be louder than the music/FX for sufficient intelligibility. When downmixed to stereo or mono or any other non-center-having configuration, the dialog must be mixed well above the music/FX to avoid being masked by it. Sometimes a downmix occurs without this step being given enough consideration, resulting in complaints about the mix, when the original 5.1 (or whatever) mix was perfect but an engineer wasn't involved for downmixing. This is also what Dave Rat is on about, in addition to IM and combing concerns, when explaining why a speaker per instrument sounds better than a mix: not just that it's a single point source, not just that it's doing one single job, but that all the sounds come from discrete points nowhere near each other. Just like an acoustic band using no reinforcement.
- amlib 3y agoI wonder how do they deal with the phasing over so many speakers? Wouldn't an array of speakers require you to do something about that? Specially so if you are stuck with 70s tech.
- pastureofplenty 3y agoWeb designers really, really need to stop putting light grey text on a white background. Good article though.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI just go into Reader Mode any time it’s supported. A lot of design work is already solved. Gosh now I’m imagining if people did this with books. At least chapter books are mostly the same.
- gjmacd 3y agoThe most incredible sound system to hear a band play out of tune and out of key for 90 minutes.
- owenmarshall 3y ago90 minutes? At a _Dead_ concert?! That’s enough to cover a typical Playing>Uncle John’s>Drums>Space, and probably not get all the way through the reprises. You’ve easily got another two hours of jam.
- STRiDEX 3y agoi found this Wired youtube video pretty similar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c-gD4mwI8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c-gD4mwI8A sound engineer that worked on coachella and they talk about the switch to vertical stacks of speakers
- stevehiehn 3y agoVery interesting video, thx
- anonymousiam 3y agoNot be be confused with this other "Wall of Sound": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound Despite being an insane murderer, Phil Spector was a musical genius.
- block_dagger 3y agoFor those wanting to listen to free legal taped audio of Dead shows, head over to https://relisten.net/grateful-dead https://relisten.net/grateful-dead or install Relisten app for iOS. All fan supported and open source.
- switz 3y agoHey! I created this website and have been maintaining it along with my friend Alec for the last decade. Fun seeing it pop up here on HN. Thanks for sharing!
- gverrilla 3y agoBeen enjoying the music on your website for the last hour, very grateful for your work! :) Why those bands, and not others? What do they have in common?
- switz 3y agoAll of these bands have agreed to allow people to tape and distribute their concerts for free. This is most popular in the jam band community, but you’ll find a plethora of other bands that allow it as well.
- gverrilla 3y agoI see! May I suggest adding this awesome japanese band from the 60's? Les Rallizes Dénudés - not sure about the legal status, but there's a lot of live material and afaik the band incentivized bootlegs, perhaps inspired by the Dead! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Rallizes_D%C3%A9nud%C3%A9s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Rallizes_D%C3%A9nud%C3%A9s
- block_dagger 3y agoThanks for your work! I maintain the phish.in API and caught a show with Alec over ten years ago. Good times!
- 3y ago
- syngrog66 3y ago[flagged]
- 89vision 3y agoThe wall of sound sounds way more fascinating imho.
- causality0 3y agoNot like it ever did anything anyway. I'd report spam then get the exact same damn e-mail the next day.
- tom_ 3y agoDon't care about the grateful dead? Me neither. What you might like instead (as I certainly did) is this one-sided collection of endless forum posts from Stanley about his all meat diet: https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/ https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/
- robodan 3y agoBose sells line array speakers that will happily work if placed behind a standard mic. They are using anti-feedback DSPs to cancel the audio loop this creates. They can be used in a speaker per performer setup. What is weird is that they don't talk about this. There is a graphic on products that can do this that show the speaker behind the mic. That's it, no text at all. I think the moral of this story is that marketing is weirder than engineering...
- DoodahMan 3y agolove how i checked HN with 5/28/77's Sugaree playing and come upon this post! love how today you can still see Bear's influence on venues across the world w.r.t the sound setup. here's to Dead&Co's Sphere run, it ain't the same of course but the music never stops (~);)
- derwiki 3y ago5/28/77 had a banging Sugaree, and is overall a top 5 GD concert recording IMO!
- tkgally 3y agoAm I the only one here to have actually heard the Wall of Sound? I attended two of the 1974 concerts where it was used, at UCSB in the spring and at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer. I was seventeen. I had also attended two shows at Winterland in February, where apparently some the components of the Wall of Sound were used before the full system was rolled out the following month. One should not, of course, trust fifty-year-old memories, especially about something so subjective as sound quality. But, for what it’s worth, my recollection of the Hollywood Bowl in particular is very positive—clear, solid sound with distinct separation of the instruments, while not so loud that my ears rang afterwards (as they did after other rock concerts I attended in those days, until I started wearing earplugs to protect my hearing).
- soulofmischief 3y agoInformative article and a good read, although the author clearly has no idea how commas are supposed to work. I had to re-read the very first sentence multiple times to make sense of it, and there were plenty more comma errors throughout the article.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoWhile the article is interesting, my god is it long and repetitive and winding. Why does every blog try to write a novel. Please just mainline me information. But wait, then there wouldnt be room for 700 ads
- fastaguy88 3y agoFor a somewhat different (more technical) perspective, look up Robert Heil, who died recently.[0] I found this story [1] fascinating, and really enjoyed this interview [2] where he talks about working with Joe Walsh, a fellow amateur radio operator, and many others. He had a very midwestern modesty. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573756 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111005221916/http://www.performing-musician.com/pm/dec08/articles/bobheil.htm?print=yes#top https://web.archive.org/web/20111005221916/http://www.perfor... [2] http://www.famousinterview.ca/interviews/bob_heil.htm http://www.famousinterview.ca/interviews/bob_heil.htm
- Triphibian 3y agoThe diagram in the story reminded me of the band Sunn O))) and their stage set up. Certainly a far-flung relation in the same lineage. https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/pjeq4/sunno_stage_plot_and_input_list_2012_volume_look/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/pjeq4/...
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoAlembic Inc. still exists . Google Maps indicates it moved from Santa Rosa to Rohnert Park. Rolling Stone article from a decade ago: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dead-wood-is-this-the-end-for-classic-rocks-greatest-guitar-makers-103511/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dead-wood-is-t...
- sandworm101 3y agoMandatory comic: http://www.stirlingaudioservices.com/realitycheck.gif http://www.stirlingaudioservices.com/realitycheck.gif This image, addressing concert PA arrangements, has been floating around for decades, highly influenced by the GD setups.
- Great615 3y ago[flagged]
- GGHAW 3y ago[flagged]