The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-wall-of-sound

by tintinnabula • 11 years ago

119 27 11 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

dualogy• 11 years ago

Ah, Owsley "The Bear" Stanley. He also lived on a fatty-meat-only zero-carb diet for some 50 years in decent health until he died in a car accident aged 75 in 2011. Quite the character: http://www.thebear.org

snissn• 11 years ago

nice! I really enjoyed reading this the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley

dekhn2• 11 years ago

He was a genius in more ways than one.

mturmon• 11 years ago

"Kid Charlemagne" by Steely Dan is a nice memorial for the man and the early LSD era:

  Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl,
  You turned it on the world,
  That's when you turned the world around.

bjelkeman-again• 11 years ago

"That’s because the Wall was a PA of PAs—six independent PAs, one for each instrument. Lead guitar, rhythm guitar, vocals, bass, drums, and piano each had a dedicated PA, according to the official Deadheads Newsletter No. 19, published in December 1974. This did away with having to mix everything through a single set of speakers. The “single biggest thing besides the true line array aspect” of the Wall, as Wiz told me, was how there was no need for panning, or adjusting various sound levels on a mixing console."

Much of live sound today sounds pretty poor and a great sound tech and producer, Lennart Östlund from the ABBA Polar Studio, told us (small workshop on mixing) that the cure was exactly what the Dead did. A PA per instrument. If you can't do that at least split the vocals to a separate system. Which he had actually tried with great success several times.

huuu• 11 years ago

In my experience it's not the PA that makes it sound poor but the 'sound guy'.

I also have a hard time believing that a separate system will make it sound better. You still need to adjust the level of each PA to create a good mix.

brusch643• 11 years ago

Sure. But sometimes the equipment just sucks. Was at a outdoor festival last weekend. One of the bands had a sound guy and I wondered that the sound was so shitty. Couldn't hear anything of the bass player. Normally the sound should be pretty good when a band is having their own guy on the mixing desk.

Said this to a friend (who was standing some metres off) and he said everything sounded fine for him. Went 3 metres to the right and suddenly I've heard the bass player. Talked with the sound guy afterwards and he said that the PA simply sucked. Never heard this so extreme.

I would say it is a thing of many factors: the PA, the band (their equipment) and of course the sound engineer.

deckiedan4• 11 years ago

The separate PA thing means that you lose all phase related issues (providing the vocal PA is a mono single effective source, rather than a pair of speakers...).

You hardly ever pan main vocals anyway, so you're normally using your stereo pair to produce a mono sound. In other words, both speakers are producing the same sound at the same time. Since hardly anyone in the audience is an equal distance from both speakers, they'll hear a messy comb-filtered version of the main vocals, rather than them cleanly.

You can make a very good argument for not bothering with stereo at all for live sound (except for effect stuff, but then we're back into separate-pa-for-each-instrument grounds...). The trouble with that is how much harder that is to rig. If you're stacking stuff on the ground at all, then you can't really stack center stage, you need to stack to the sides. (Or behind the stage, with all the feedback issues that involves). If you do fly your PA, then you still need legs, usually. And a big PA is stinking heavy, and flying it near the legs is a lot easier than near the middle, due to lengths of truss, loading points, etc.

I've never tried it personally, but people who's ears I trust all say that besides all of that, just using a secondary sound system for vocals still makes them come through a lot clearer and everything sound better.

One possible reason for that is that a speaker is essentially just a paper cone with an electromagnet on it. There are physical limits on what that one bit of paper can do in terms of vibrations. We like to pretend the world is a lot more digital and measurable than it really is. By separating out the vocals from the other instruments, you allow the speakers to only move when the vocalist is singing. I can see why it could be cleaner. I believe the Chilli Peppers may be doing 2 PAs at the moment splitting off the vocals to their own mix...

You'll still always need a good sound guy, and you'll still need somehow to control the (vocals:instruments) ratio in the audience.

Ideally, bands would think of the sound guy as a member of the band. Kind of like the conductor of an orchestra is a vital member of the orchestra. A good sound guy is very similar. A bad sound guy has all of the same control, but none of the feeling.

kazinator2• 11 years ago

Modern PA? Or 1970 PA?

dzhiurgis• 11 years ago

Few years ago I've experienced dub sound system (Jah Shaka) for the first time. I've fallen in love with the concept immediately. It was entirely different from your regular rave, the culture and the musical vibrations that just move your body. Did not like the tinnitus for next few days, but that's why you need ear plugs.

If you never been in one, I highly recommend. Very different experience. They are usually somewhat underground so takes some research into what dub and reggae is.

dekhn2• 11 years ago

In sort: sound is a complex vectorial field, and line arrays make that sound the field smooth, so that each frequency is properly represented within the audience volume.

kazinator2• 11 years ago

They re-coned speakers that had blown or torn. They replaced tweeter diaphragms as needed.

Explains why Garcia had no time to learn fingerings outside of the pentatonic box. :)

mashmac2• 11 years ago

If you liked this, check out Dave Rat's blog - http://daverat.blogspot.com/

He's the sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, and it currently testing out a double line array system - with separate systems for vocals and instruments.

blhack• 11 years ago

One of the coolest conversations I got into recently was with the person who designed the audio system on something called Kalliope (a GIANT, 75,000 watt sound system/art car).

Audio is cool, and the rabbit hole on it goes really, really deep.

For instance, I learned that Kalliope uses something called a cardioid array for its subwoofers, meaning that some of the speakers are pointed forwards (towards the crowd), and some are pointed backwards (away from the crowd).

The result is that the pressure created by the subs pointed backwards is collapsed by the pressure wave created by the subs pointed forward.

(Alex, the audio engineer calls this a warp drive).

The amount of thought that goes into designing some of these things is astounding to me. Building PA systems is NOT a matter of plugging speakers into amps and pointing them where you want them, and making loud sound systems is NOT a matter of getting more speakers.

scrumper• 11 years ago

This article is not entirely unlike a Dead show: it's quite rambling and unfocused, but there's stuff to get your teeth into if you invest the time in the right frame of mind.

marssaxman• 11 years ago

A group of my friends throw a 150-person mini dance festival every 4th of July weekend. In the past they've used Mackie SRM450s with a couple of subs, but this year we brought a pair of SR1530s, plus the same subs. Both are active systems with 100-watt HF drivers and 300-watt LF, but the SR1530 has an additional 100-watt midrange element.

The difference is astonishing - much more significant than you'd expect if you're used to thinking of volume as a function of power. It was an awesome wall of clear, clear sound, and we had to keep it turned down a fair bit in order to keep from driving people out of the dance area. 100 more watts doesn't seem like much, but separating sound-reproduction responsibilities among three different amps clearly makes a really big difference.

I did notice some of the problems the article describes with stereo, though. There were definitely parts of the field where you could hear one side but not the other, and it was distracting. We clearly have more to learn about this whole business.

The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound

Related Stories