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
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.
ReplyDeleteA 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.
ReplyDeleteThey 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!
ReplyDeleteNot to be confused with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.
ReplyDeleteThat is amazing.
Two Mics, I wonder if his Bass had 4 jacks?
Looks more like 1971 or so. No Mickey Hart in the photo. Awesome sound during that period, and tremendous energy in their playing.
ReplyDeleteMust'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.
ReplyDeletePhil 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").
ReplyDeleteEverybody in the photo, except Jerry, has the same color hair.
ReplyDeleteAmazingly, 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.
ReplyDeleteWatching the Wall go up was almost as exhilarating as hearing the band play through it. A true labor of love, it cost them millions and was only used on the 1974 tour.
ReplyDelete