Pink Floyd
Ludwigshafen, Friedrich-Ebert-Halle 25.11.1970
Some background information first:
Last Autumn I visited my old friend HB in Mannheim who had recorded close to 200 concerts in the Mannheim/Frankfurt area from 1970 until about 1975. He used a portable RtR mono tape recorder with a single external mono microphone but copied his masters onto 18cm reels when back at home after the shows, as tapes were expensive at the time and archiving this way was cheaper than keeping the master tape of every show. Speaking to several tapers of the time, this must have been fairly common practise. Compact Cassettes weren't available at this time. In later years he copied some of his back-up masters onto cassette tapes as the quality of these had improved dramatically by the mid seventies and they were easier to handle. Later on copies of the reels were also made with a DAT recorder, but I'm not sure on the whereabouts of these. Fortunately HB was wise enough to keep his RtR back-up tapes.
The shows he recorded back then covered nearly all genres from Rock to Jazz, including Led Zeppelin, ELP, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and even Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Blood, Sweat and Tears and many many more.
So when I arrived at his appartment in Mannheim on a Saturday lunchtime he had a huge cardboard box of reels on the floor of his living room and he gave me the whole lot for a fresh digital transfer.
So here you have a fresh digital transfer of HB's first ever concert recording, done by myself with my revised Revox and my MixPre3 for very best results. This tape has been around for many years and has been digitised on at least two other occassions. I'm not claiming that this is the ultimate version, just a fresh transfers.
HBs back-up master tape reel to reel, Tape #22, Side 1, Track 3
Original Recording Equipment: mobile RtR recorder, most probably a Telefunken 300TS halftrack mono , maybe with the single external microphone TD33 with balance input control.
Source Master Tape: Unknown, probably 13cm BASF or Shamrock RtR (wiped when re-used later)
Original back-up Tape: 18cm BASF, AGFA or Shamrock RtR 1/4 Track mono
Playback Tape Deck: Revox A77 on 1/4 track mono, 9.5cm per minute
Digital Recorder: Sound Devices MixPre3
Manual azimuth alignment (with mono headphone output setting on the MixPre 3 - which in most cases enables pinpoint accuracy)
Audacity: edited, heavliy pitched, normalised and de-noised
iZotope RX9: Kirchhoff EQ plus Brainworx bx Stereomaker plug in
Heribert's first reel that has eight shows on it plays back way too slowly and here I had to add 14% pitch to get it at the correct speed. Surprisingly he doesn't remember this, and therefore couldn't tell me how this happended.
A few minutes before the end of Saucerful HB ran out of tape, and here I did something that I don't usually do; I added the missing bit from another source, namely the Album Pictures LP which was recorded three days later, as they say. I left a two-second gap here to enable the listener to identify where the Ludwigshafen source ends and the infill begins. In all two and a half minutes were added from the other source.
Tracks:
01 Astronomy Dominé
02 Fat Old Sun
03 Cymbaline
04 Atom Heart Mother
05 The Embryo
06 Green is the Colour-
07 Careful with that Axe, Eugene
08 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
09 A Saucerful of Secrets (cut)
10 A Saucerful of Secrets (rest, from the Album Pictures LP)
Pink Floyd in 1970 were:
David Gilmour guitar and vocals
Roger Waters bass and vocals
Richard Wright keyboards and vocals
Nick Mason drums
https://mega.nz/file/z3olFSYC#RTATAYtKJb21xWnHd60X2j5anwh_KPUfHP1qMagmMaQ
