Elevation Phoenix (Birdman Mix)

America West Arena

Phoenix (Arizona), USA.

28 - April - 2001.

Attendance: 17.575 (sellout) - Support: PJ Harvey

Disc 1 (61:51)

01. Elevation Influx Intro (PA) / Elevation

02. Beautiful Day

03. Until the End of the World

04. New Year's Day

05. Kite

06. New York

07. I Will Follow

08. Sunday Bloody Sunday

09. Stuck in a Moment / Band Intros

10. In a Little While

11. Stay (Faraway, so Close!)

Disc 2 (63:16)

01. Bad / "40"

02. Where the Streets Have No Name

03. Mysterious Ways

04. The Fly

05. Bullet the Blue Sky Intro

06. Bullet the Blue Sky

07. With or Without You

08. Pride (In the Name of Love)

09. One

10. I Remember You

11. Walk On

Recording Equipment - History

Birdman's ALD/AUD Mix - Created from two excellent SHN sources:

1) Taper: Brad Gardner <millsu2@yahoo.com>
Source: ALD > MD

2) Taper: Unknown
Source: Schoeps mk4 (in hat) > brbox > sbm-1 > M1 > CD-R > EAC (Secure Mode) > WAV > mkwACT > SHN
Quality: Excellent Audience

Notes / comments from Birdman (they were distributed with the SHN files):

So why would I spend weeks getting this mix just right? Who cares? Well, if there's one thing I've learned in the last few years of trading Springsteen and U2, you can never have too many good shows in your collection. :-)

Another thing I have learned, is that ALDs, by in large, are crap. Nothing sounds worse, IMHO, than a pure ALD recording - and so it should - remember the purpose is to help hearing impaired individuals hear mid to high end sound. As bad as they sound though, ALDs are great for one thing though - enhancing already good audience 
recordings!

When I started collecting U2, and I asked people what the best recordings were from the Elevation tour, and many pointed me to the 05-03 Cleveland show - the ALD/AUD mix known as the "Cleveland Tea Party". For the most part, I agree. CTP is a great mix, but not without issues. I disliked the fact that in some places, there are significantly loud crowd reactions, bad singers, yellers, screamers... I thought of recreating the mix from scratch to see if I could improve upon it, then figured I'd try a different show and see what happened... This is the result.

2001-04-28 is a great show to experiment with. The audience recording is almost perfect, with almost no fallouts or imperfections. This makes mixing infinatly easier. The ALD however is full of dropouts and digital noise, and that makes it infinitetly harder. In all, I think it worked out evenly.

The ALD for this show is incomplete as well - the last 3 songs are missing. At first I thought it was kind of stupid to go to all this trouble and fall 3 songs short of a complete show, but after listening to the last 3 songs, and doing a bit of remastering on them, it's almost hard to tell they aren't mixed with ALD.

The ALD issues were mostly solved by experiment, but here's some of the things I used to get this as clean as possible:

First off, all tracks are converted to 32 bit. All editing is done in 32, then the tracks are mixed down to 16 bit. All this does is minimize the digital noise created by some of the editing procedures. Remember this if you ever try it yourself.. ALD tracks are also all run through a hiss reduction process, as almost all tracks had some form of background hiss.

Digital artifacts were removed by a noise reduction filter that looks only for digital noise. There were 2 songs on this recording that were pure shite. The worst, was UTEOTW. My god what a mess. After removing digital noise, there was still parts of the song where the music was destroyed, and had to be recreated from scratch. I did this using various techniques, including:

- use an advance digital noise filter, and increase the volume on the filtered segment
- isolate the noise and remove it from the frequency spectrum (like the old EQ method)
- use another part of the song that is sonically the same (i.e a repeating word or verse)
- take the same segment from the AUD recording, convert it to mono and remove the low end, remix it back to stereo, then mix paste it back into the ALD. This isn't that bad actually, and recreates the ALD fairly well.
- remove it. Last resort. This ends up sounding like a half-dropout, and not too bad. Always 
remember to fade your dropouts though, or they sound much worse...

In all, if you listen to UTEOTW, there are probably 2 or 3 places you can hear significant issues that couldn't be resolved to 100% Not bad, considering the source.

In a few places, I removed heavy claps or screams from the audience recording as well. Easiest way to do this is splice in a quieter part from elsewhere in the show.

In all, I'm pretty happy with it. WOWY, my favourite song, had issues as well, and I was quite happy with what I was able to do with it. That's what convinced me to do the whole show...

cheers
Birdman (aka Brian)

Comments

Incredible recording, from a so-called "Matrix" source (mix of ALD + audience). Phenomenal clarity and crispness. The final source is pretty clean, with minimal audience noise. Birdman really did an outstanding work with it. Bono added a snippet (few lines) of In God's Country to the end of Elevation.