01 December 2011

The Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound", 1974

Found at imgur via a Reddit thread which included these interesting comments:
My favorite part is how every single person in this picture has essentially the same haircut, guy and girl alike....

It should be noted that each of Phil Lesh's strings was sent to a different stack
...Wait, what? Really?
... This is how Phil was able to play lots of dyads and chords on the bass, with overdrive, without them sounding all weird and intermodulation-y as on a normal bass.
...That's not... possible? Guitar pickups do not work that way!
...it absolutely is possible. Phil Lesh used special pickups that sent the output from each pole piece out on a separate channel each channel was routed to its own set of speakers

Due to the lengthy installation time required for each venue, the Grateful Dead had three stages for the Wall of Sound. One would be in the process of being torn down from the previous concert, one would be in use, and the last would be in the next city being built as the present shows were being played... Four semi-trailer trucks and twenty-one crew members were required to haul and set up the 75-ton Wall

9 comments:

  1. Not to be confused with Micky n' Bill's "Wall of Drums", which I once had the pleasure to see them give an amazing workout, joined by Billy Cobham.

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  2. A Grateful Dead TYWKIWDBI post?!??!?!? I can die a happy man. They sang into two mics so they could hear themselves over all the distortion. It was actually quite revolutionary at the time.

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  3. They sang into one mic and the other picked up the ambient noise on the stage. The "subtracted" the ambient noise from the one picking up the vocals, leaving a pure vocal track. Apparently, the mechanism used to process this took some time to operate, so they actually had to sing slightly ahead of the music!

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  4. Not to be confused with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.

    That is amazing.
    Two Mics, I wonder if his Bass had 4 jacks?

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  5. Looks more like 1971 or so. No Mickey Hart in the photo. Awesome sound during that period, and tremendous energy in their playing.

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  6. Must've been when Mickey had left the band due to his old man burning them for 100s of 1000s of dollars. He rejoined in (I believe it was) '75.

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  7. Phil could make notes from each string sound like they were coming from different corners of the arena. In 82 he realized he could make it feel like the arena was shaking with a specific tone (google "Phil's earthquake space").

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  8. Everybody in the photo, except Jerry, has the same color hair.

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  9. Amazingly, this set up was created to project High Fidelity, distortion-free sound a quarter mile, and actually sounded decent as far as a half mile.

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