06/20/2007

Source A:
Solid State Recorder --- Danish Pro Audio 4061 mics > MMA6000 preamp > Edirol R-09 24/48
Transfer: Edirol R-09 > USB > wav @ 24bit/48kHz > Hard drive > Mastering (see below) > CD Wave 1.95 (tracking) > Flac Frontend 1.7.1 (Level 6 Flac Compression) > Flac
Location: Floor (general admission), front of right stack ~50ft from stage
Taper: Ryan A (http://db.etree.org/potsy_monkey)
Gen: 0 from Master
MP3 Sample: Right click & save

Notes - Taper: Honestly, this show sucked and so does the recording. Well, it's not terrible but I'm definitely disappointed with it. One of the top 3 worst Tool shows I've been to, possibly the worst. Everything about it was bad. A loud woohooing and generally obnoxious crowd. Overzealous gate security. And Tool's sound was complete crap. I've never heard it that bad. Justin's bass was a muddy, rumbling mess. Danny's bass drum distorted when kicked hard, and Maynard's vocals were so low they were inaudible at times. Lots of compression per usual on the sound too. Some of that is the venue, but a lot of that is on Knobby. No excuse for distortion and extreme level discrepencies (unless the low end on thePA was actually blown). My recording brickwalls on the bass drum quite a few times, the most disappointing thing about it. I think the reason for this is a combonation of two things. 1) The loud, rumbly bass and distortion on the kick drum coming from the PA. And 2) I ran my levels too close to 0db. I actually never ran over 0, the loudest peak was -0.3db. But lesson learned - you can still distort and brickwall without running your levels over 0db. I put a filter on the bass all the way up to 95Hz in post-editing. It helped a little. Maynard was in a pissy, prima donna mood. Back to the crowd almost the entire night. An ass in the crowd threw something on stage during stinkfist - a shirt or cellphone maybe. It didn't hit him, just landed in front of him. He stopped singing the entire 2nd verse, picked up the object and said: "that's what you wanted right. You want me to pay attention to this instead of sing. I can sing if you want. It's up to you." Later as Wings was starting, MJK announced "please no flash cameras on this song. No flash cameras please." Repeating it 3 or 4 times. Then stopped singing in the middle, and repeated again "no flash cameras." It may be annoying, but seriously if you make millions of dollars playing music for a living and can't handle people taking some pictures of you on an arena stage - you have problems.
Notes - Galen: Yes, the vocals are almost inaudible more often than not. The distortion the taper hears is not that bad; tapers can be the worst critics. Honestly, I agree with everything listed above by Ryan. This is once of those shows though that seems to just reek with animosity from the band to the crowd. Or maybe it really was MJK's "artistic focus". Who knows. Poor performance, this is clear. However even a poor performance of Tool is better than pretty much any other band - think we can agree on that.

Maynardism / Quote

Time:
110:17

<bass drone>
Jambi
Stinkfist
46 & 2
Schism
Lost Keys/Blame Hoffman
Rosetta Stoned
Right In Two
Wings For Marie
10,000 Days
Lateralus
Vicarious