tarkusnj
400 Club - QQ All-Star
<some nonsense about offering downloads of copyright material deleted by moderators>
Last edited by a moderator:
I do see the date here from 2008
I remember a pretty stepped on copy making the rounds. It appeared to be a very challenged Q4 release to begin with and the mix might have been a little quick and awkward around the edges as well. The Q4 duplication quality was apparently as poor an example as can be found. And of course the studio 4.0 mix master (for good or bad) is lost. The copy I found making the rounds seemed to line up with all that. (All the defects.)
Is that about right?
Brain glitch on the "Q4". I meant Q8.Not too much.
WBMF was released only on Q8, not Q4, and had serious duplication issues on all Tape 2 due to bad duplication - some bad, some worse. Add to that the rear channels are silent for at least 90% of the time and it's not worth any effort. Believe me, i have three full sets and i tried and gave up, and i'm not one that give up easily....
And i do like WBMF, back in the days i shelled out quite bucks for the first cd release of that, warts and all, and had it in all formats.
If you really want to spend some time on it, the best suggestion i can give to you is to use the funky quad release as a reference point about instrument placements on the rear channel (there isn't too much, but there are keys swirling around in some places) and with the current level of extraction software (specweb, spleeter and so on) or surround imagers (Involve etc...) generate stems and remix them following the blueprint of the quad. That's IMHO the only way to get something sounds decent and multichannel.
Definitely.....I've recently ordered the 2016 remaster of this....reviews are quite good.Anybody interested in hearing Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, Ladies and Gentlemen, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in 6 channel DVD-Audio with Dolby Digital layer and an automated slide show on the DVD-A layer, send me a personal message for more details.
I know it's probably not much help at this point in time , but Silverline had this very album (possibly the Q4 master) on their soon to be released DVDA website around mid 2000 (2005 ?).
It wasn't on the official listings but in some information about what they were up to regarding their future products at the time.
At worst it could have been a stereo extrapolation for 5.1 , but I guess we'll never know . It is worth noting this was in the last years of their DVDA support program .
Perhaps someone who was employed by Silverline/Immergent , or had insider information from them can clarify if indeed they had the Atlantic/Manticore Q4(Q4's) for this quad recording.
Anyway , regardless of that post regarding Silverline/Immergent ; two people who MIGHT KNOW more about "Welcome Back My Friends..." album's quad master, could be the two who worked on their first 4 album's multitrack masters for DVDA surround
namely :
Steven Wilson(ELP, Tarkus , Trilogy)...and Jakko Jakszyk(BSS).
I didn't know all the KBFW stuff was mixed in Quad, only some and within a certain period of time. I even recorded a few live in stereo in the mid 70's (Eric Clapton, EL&P & ZZ Top) on my Teac A-2340, and none seemed to be Quad encoded at least. I ran them through my SMv2, and didn't impress me as such.The same recordings that produced the Welcome Back album were also used to produce the ELP episode of the King Biscuit FM broadcast - ironically the KBFH mixes are actually better (less bathed in reverb) than what appeared on the LP.
Given that Silverline released loads of old KBFH recordings as part of their Live... From the Front Row series, I'd suspect that that's probably what that release would've been, but it probably (just guessing here) got blocked by ELP's legal team - you'd imagine that whatever the original contract was, it probably said something like "we get physical media rights, you get broadcast rights" so trying to release the 'radio mix' on CD or DVD was probably an infringement on their rights.
Obviously all the KBFH stuff was mixed in quad originally, and those tapes would've been ideal sources for Silverline's DVD-As, but it's my understanding that the warehouse that stored all the mixed masters had a fire in the early 80s and all those tapes were destroyed. Apparently some years later, the rights owners discovered that the multitrack tapes were stored elsewhere, and they had them all newly remixed in the late 80s or early 90s - that's why you see a flood of CD reissues of this material from this point onward that doesn't have the old SQ encoding, it's all new mixes.
Silverline, being the cheapskates they were, missed a real opportunity with their Live... series - instead of doing new 5.1 remixes from the same multis that were used for the new stereo mixes, they just took those new stereo mixes and upmixed them to fake 5.1. So I think if that ELP release did come out, it would be this flavour of lame "mix."
My memory is a little fuzzy, but I have some recollection that when one of those ELP box sets came out (Brain Salad Surgery maybe?) there was something in the liner notes from Jakko about how there were dozens (or hundreds) of different multitrack tapes for the project, and that at one point they were delivered quadraphonic live mixes of one of the tracks (I'm thinking it was Karn Evil 9, but again, memory fuzzy) which would suggest that they do have the quad masters for Welcome Back My Friends in their possession - maybe they aren't even aware of it, or don't care.
For me the whole thing is kind of moot, because it's such a damp squib of a quad mix, with the rears silent for huge portions of the recording. Given it was probably a 16 or 24 track recording, and Emerson's huge arsenal of keyboards, and Palmer's enormous drum kit, there was plenty of opportunity for them to make an exciting immersive mix, but they really hamstrung themselves by replicating the experience of the live quad PA.
I didn't know all the KBFW stuff was mixed in Quad, only some and within a certain period of time. I even recorded a few live in stereo in the mid 70's (Eric Clapton, EL&P & ZZ Top) on my Teac A-2340, and none seemed to be Quad encoded at least. I ran them through my SMv2, and didn't impress me as such.
Fizzy, I was told by someone acquainted with Jakko that he didn't come across any 73 live recordings during his work, although there was a post at one point that implied that.Anyway , regardless of that post regarding Silverline/Immergent ; two people who MIGHT KNOW more about "Welcome Back My Friends..." album's quad master, could be the two who worked on their first 4 album's multitrack masters for DVDA surround
namely :
Steven Wilson(ELP, Tarkus , Trilogy)...and Jakko Jakszyk(BSS).
Fizzy, I think your observation about the King Biscuit mix is on point. The radio mix makes more use of the natural ambience throughout, so the back channels never sound like they're off. The album mix is a lot more "tweaked" That is very interesting that there was a 4 track recording from the montreal show.Well Steely I've heard a copy of that Biscuit live recording and what I've heard was actually pretty decent in quad.
Was it sweetened by the individual to sound better than the Q8 ? Well possibly .
But I guess part of what I was trying to get across on the Silverline/Immergent version that never occurred , was that it was at a time when they were putting out some of their last DVDA 5.1 discs........the good ones........such as Richard Thompson Old Kit Bag , Pere Ubu - Modern Dance , Dar Williams etc.,............ so IF (and it's a big if) they could have and would have it would have been better than those Live From The Front Row terrible upmixes .
But yes your right it is kinda all moot now , but mostly because it never happened .
Also my fuzzy memory kinda tells me I read somewheres in a 70's magazine that that live quad recording was taken from the concert at Montreal's Olympic Stadium show.
I kinda remember that as it was the Montreal show , which at the time I found to be a bit of a surprise .
Now for all we know it could have been pieced together from different tour stops , but we'll never know unless it sees the light of day in a present surround format.
Thanks for the info though , it's fun to share .
Jakko then realized he was missing a track. It was "Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression Part 1 & 2" which contains 'Welcome Back My Friends' the most famous tune on the whole album. He checked to see if it might be held in the Atlantic Records archive in Burbank, California.
"Then I realized that although the majority of the album was recorded at Advision in London, it seems as though they had started out at Olympic Studios in barnes. I got in touch with the guy in charge of their archive and he sent me a spread sheet that revealed there were three of four multi-track reels with an Olympic stiver on them. They also found some one inch tapes of Quad mixes I thought I could utilize for the 5.1 mix if we had lost the missing track."
Jakko was sent a hard drive of this new material. He played the Quad mixes first and found they were 'live' versions of "Karn Evil 9".
"Then I went through the stuff recorded at Olympic and it seemed to be studio version of "Karn Evil 9". The last reel I opened in digital format was indeed the mater of the missing track."
Enter your email address to join: