A Hard Shea’s Night – In Stereo

You all know the Hype Blurb:  “Over 55,000 people came to watch this ground-breaking gig, the sound of which was completely dominated by the screaming audience. The huge number of security guards were kept occupied by fainting girls and audience members attempting to reach the stage.”

The Reality (true confession, I wasn’t there!) is that from a production standpoint… the show was (and largely still is) a mess. The audio throughout was terrible… the Beatles had secret recording sessions in January of ’66 to augment or completely replace sections of audio that were plagued with dropouts, technical failures on instruments and microphones… balancing issues within the original mono mix that was controlled by two old fat-asses situated in a corner at the bottom of the stage who had no clue what the hell they were doing. They kinda looked like they could just be middle-aged men slurping down a chili-cheese dog for all anyone knew.

What I did done do to da stuff I did done do it to… 

The audio source I chose was from “First Play At Shea”.  Some secondary audio was sourced from the actual video documentary in cases where there were dropouts. Be aware that there were several releases of “First Play”…  the recording used by Figa Records’ SECOND wave CD’s ( the one with AER Records written on the disc cover) was more pure, as far as audio dynamics were concerned.  So after working on the mono “master” source, I used iZotope 10 for de-noising and DEMUCS v.3 and v.4 for separating instruments, vocals, audience and such. After equalizing the individual tracks (as much as possible, I then produced/engineered the mix that you are listening to here. Yes, there are at least 2 others who have done this before on this particular concert, and you can find those on YouTube with just a quick search.  I think mine (after 10 remixes and tweaking) stands out at least slightly above those.

FLAC/MP3 Download