What's up with the vocal mic's?
The Dead always pushed the edge in audio. But what were they thinking with those mics? They sound terrible. Some kind of stereo experiment gone bad.
shareThe explain it in the director's commentary if I remember correctly. But its something like this:
It had to do with the "Wall of Sound" sound system and avoiding a feedback of the vocals (I don't believe they had monitors in front of them either). Anyway, the mikes are called "self cancelling mikes" and what they do is the lower mike picks up the vocals out of the speakers and cancel out any potential feedbacks of the vocals. Each band member has to get up very close to the upper mike in order for their vocals to be picked up.
The limitations as you say is that the vocals sounded really tinny and also the musicians were forced to be less spontaneous with how they interracted with the mikes.
I am in no ways a sound engineer, I am just speaking from my memory of what they say in the director's commentary. I also believe it is discussed in the "Making of the DVD" feature in the bonus features on the DVD. If I remember correctly, they remixed the sound for the DVD and tried to compensate for the poor audio quality in the vocals.
Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.
The mics are reversed in phase, therefore the sound they pickup from the speakers is cancelled out and only the difference is amplified. If you sing into only one mic then the sound will come through and none of the feedback from the wall of sound is heard.
"A man must test his mettle in the crooked old world" - TW
The mics are reversed in phase, therefore the sound they pickup from the speakers is cancelled out and only the difference is amplified. If you sing into only one mic then the sound will come through and none of the feedback from the wall of sound is heard.
If ”you sing into only one mic”, how can there be a ”difference” (takes at least two to make difference)? Why should only the lower mic pick up the sound from the massive and huge “wall of sound” (=multiples of speakers)? And if the lower mic is phase shifted 180 degrees, shouldn’t this severely lower the input from the upper mic (they’re at most, say, 4 inches apart)? I’m not a professional sound engineer, but as far as I can see, both of the vertically arranged mics must pick up *both* the sound from the singer *and* the rear placed wall of speakers, albeit the upper mic would most probably get a higher lever of input from the singer. Are you absolutely sure of your explanation?
Apart from this: this is a *totally* wonderful musical experience and a great doc of rock music when it was at its height!! Regardless of more or less intricate mic arrangements!!
All the best from
cine from the north
"Why is it that men are so much more interested in women than women in men?"
Virginia Woolf
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Let me explain this more clearly for you...
If you watch the movie you will notice that NO ONE IS SINGING INTO THE BOTTOM MICS and if you pay even closer attention you will notice that Jer and the guys are singing really closely to the top mics to aid the system that was designed specifically for the Dead (by Owsley Stanley) to make the wall of sound possible.
The music coming from the massive wall of speakers is going into both of the mics. Because the mics are 180 out of phase the signal is cancelled out. The voice is going into only one mic, therefore that signal passes through minus what ever small amount of voice leaked into the other mic. It's fairly simple electronic theory.
"A man must test his mettle in the crooked old world" - TW
English is not my mother tongue, as you can clearly see (?), so maybe my question came through as rude. I apologize for this; it was certainly not my intention to be rude.
Which probably explains why your reply is both arrogant (“Let me explain this more clearly for you...”) but also pretty useless.
If you watch the movie you will notice that NO ONE IS SINGING INTO THE BOTTOM MICS and if you pay even closer attention you will notice that Jer and the guys are singing really closely to the top mics to aid the system
Yes, I have watched the movie more than once, and I know (after four decades of training) how to pay attention. I don’t have to look “really closely” too see what any idiot can see: that they *are* singing really closely to the top mic and steering away from the lower one.
It is definitely not “fairly simple electronic theory” (oh yes, I can tell anyone Ohm’s law correctly, even if they wake me up at four a clock in the morning). There is *nothing* “simple” regarding acoustical engineering. Just ask Harry F. Olson. I don’t know of O. Stanley, but I’ll definitely get some info on him now (thanks for the ref.).
If it was so simple, why is not *every* pop/rock band using this “fairly simple” technology? Most of them use pretty powerful “walls of sound” PA systems, but admittedly seldom as immensely massive as the Great Deads did.
Obviously Stanley’s (if your ref is correct) solution to the, just as well known as annoying, acoustical feedback problem did work out fine. Your explanation did not.
But just let it be. I’ll find the proper explanation elsewhere. I usually do.
"Why is it that men are so much more interested in women than women in men?"
Virginia Woolf
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I also apologize for being rude. I didn't realize that English wasn't your first language and I thought you were being a jerk on purpose. I wouldn't have wrote my answer in that tone had I known.
So, in a normal tone, the reason why no one uses this technology is because most bands use monitors to hear themselves. Therefore the PA speakers are in front of the vocal mics. The Wall Of Sound had no monitors because the band wanted to hear what the people were hearing, so the weird microphone thing was thought up as a way to get around the feedback problems that come with blast all of that wattage directly into the mics.
I don't understand why you don't think I explained it clearly, though. Imagine it like numerically for example. If the wall of sound emits 100 units of sound to the two separate mics and one is out of phase of the other than the first mic will "see" 100 units and the second one will see -100 units. They will cancel out. If the human voice emits 2 units of sound and it only goes into one of the microphones then it will not be canceled out because there isn't -2 units in the other mic.
I hope that helps but it seems more confusing to me in those terms.
"A man must test his mettle in the crooked old world" - TW
Hi!
Imagine it like numerically for example. If the wall of sound emits 100 units of sound to the two separate mics and one is out of phase of the other than the first mic will "see" 100 units and the second one will see -100 units. They will cancel out. If the human voice emits 2 units of sound and it only goes into one of the microphones then it will not be canceled out because there isn't -2 units in the other mic.
Thanks! That explanation worked out fine! And yes, I missed the fact that bands of today are using monitors.
All in all: this is a great film documenting a great era in the history of rock music!
All the best
cine
"Why is it that men are so much more interested in women than women in men?"
Virginia Woolf
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Thanks for the explanation, Pirate, on the mics. Electrical and sound theory and practice has always been difficult for me to get my mental arms around. Usually thinking of electrical capacity as water running through pipes or hoses helps me understand, but your mathematical allegory for the mics and the cancelling of duplicate sound really helps. Certainly an aquatic metaphor would not have worked in terms of *understanding* the theory behind the design.
And yes, Cine, Pirate is absolutely right about Owsley being the designer of the Wall of Sound. In fact he was always sort of tinkering with the sound system in the pursuit of perfection. There is an excellent article on Mr. Stanley in the second of the three "40th Anniversary Issue" of Rolling Stone magazine that says that the practice of the band taping concerts which evolved into "The Vault" grew out of Owsley's desire to document the changes in the sound systems' performance as a result of whatever tinkering he had been doing. He was simply collecting data to measure whatever changes, if any, came from changing the variables.
If it wasn't for Mr. Stanley, the wonderful archive that is "The Vault" may never have come to fruition.
I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. I'd shine my light through the cool Colorado rain.
No problem Jamo, working with electronics is my job and a lot of time I imagine the electrons as water moving. It works in a lot of applications.
I didn't that info about the birth of the vault. That's really cool.
Thanks
and sorry again to Cine for things getting hairy a few posts ago.
"Goin home, goin home, by the riverside I will rest my bones"
"A man must test his mettle in the crooked old world" - TW
Hi Pirate!
… and sorry again to Cine for things getting hairy a few posts ago.
No worries Pirate, all’s just fine! We just happened to lose each other in translation for a second there! I really appreciate your latest explanation; it solved a “mystery”. I like mysteries, but most of all, I love to see them solved!
I just refereed to you in my reply to Jamo on the “Great Grateful”-thread.
cine
"Why is it that men are so much more interested in women than women in men?"
Virginia Woolf
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The solution came about because all of the music was being produced by the Wall of Sound behind the band. They had to have some way of filtering out all the music that was leaking into the mikes.
These days, the amplifiers behind the bands are miked (wired) to the PA systems that are in general above, to each side of, and, most importantly, forward of the band. So the PA sound is not being projected into the mikes as the it was with the Wall of Sound. Also, the result was pretty crappy, as you can tell. It didn't last long, maiunly because it took an enormous amount of work to haul around and construct the Alembic syustem for each sets of concerts. When the Dead went to the convential PA system the need for those mikes disappeared and so did the crappy vocal quality.
The reason the vocals sound so poor is that for the system to work, the mics had to be placed fairly close to each other. So close that, even though the vocalist is only meant to be singing into one mic, their voice is being picked up just a bit by the other. It's the same thing that happens with a drumkit: the bass drum mic picks up the snare drum and vice versa, etc.
As a result, part of the vocal signal was getting cancelled out, which is what created that sort of tinny vocal sound. In theory, you could restore at least some of the vocal sound in mixing, using EQ, but that would only be possible in a multi-track recording, and with the vocals being isolated on their own tracks. I wonder if they tried to do something with that when remixing the music for the DVD. If you watch the documentary on the second disc, the guy who did the remix talks about doing stuff like running Jerry's guitar tracks through a guitar amp and mic'ing it, in an attempt to improve the tone.
I think Owsley said they had a lot of technical problems with recording those shows. He said that Weir's rhythm guitar was inaudible on most of the recordings (I think he said something "the mic on Weir's amp got knocked over the first night, and stayed knocked over for the entire run"), etc, so maybe there was only so much they could do with the vocals.