YES Live at QPR 10th May 1975 Box Set

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ssully

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despite the title, this is actually a box set collecting all three of the known FM/soundboard quality Relayer tour shows (1974-5)

https://www.musicglue.com/takeaway-records/products/yes-live-at-qpr-10th-may-1975-box-set

DVD 1 – Video: Full DVD of QPR ( 10th May 1975 ) concert.
DVD 2 – Audio: Quad up mix of the QPR concert + Original Quad version of 'King Biscuit Flower Hour" from Dec 11 1974, Boston Gardens.

CD 1 – Double live CD of 'King Biscuit Flower Hour' Broadcast from Dec 11 1974, Boston Gardens (the first 'Relayer' tour).
CD 2 - Double Live CD of New Haven Broadcast 10th December 1975.

Paper parts: Reproduction;

QPR ticket I QPR Program I 8x10s Press Photo I Postcards I Numbered Certificate I Poster.


Before anyone gets too excited....

The 1975 QPR video has been 'officially' released for years and the soundtrack has always been mono. And unfortunately , it has always been badly unbalanced for about the first three songs, with massive instrumental dropout (both characteristics purportedly related to it being a monitor mix feed). As for the quad upmix of mono .....well, that's new but hard to imagine it 'working' very well. (The most recent BluRay release of 'War of the Worlds', the 1954 movie, has some astonishing surround effects gleaned from its mono soundtrack..but those are rayguns and tank fire, not music.).

The quad version of 1974 KBFH broadcast has been around in several decoded versions for awhile...some are better than others.

MOD NOTE; Please do not share copyright material.

Contrary to what description up there says, the New Haven show was recorded but never broadcast. It remained in the KBFH archive, which now resides with Wolfgang's Vault and can be heard there. There's a reason Boston was chosen over New Haven for broadcast....it's the better performance.

I'm am doubting that 'Takeaway Records' (which incorporated in Dec 2020 and is half owned by somewhat dodgy former Yes manager Brian Lane) looked for, much less found, better-sounding sources for these shows. Though clearly some money has been spent, to reproduce tourbooks, photos, do a 'quad upmix'. Reportedly the release has a green light from current Yes management.
 
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They are really scraping the bottom now aren’t they? I would rather see a multi-channel DVD of the Drama tour. If such a thing even existed. I wish these legacy rock bands that I grew up loving would just call it a day and hang up their guitars while they still had a bit of dignity. I am speaking of Kansas, Yes, etc,.
 
They are really scraping the bottom now aren’t they? I would rather see a multi-channel DVD of the Drama tour. If such a thing even existed.

I would rather see more high quality audio/video from the 70s tours.

I wish these legacy rock bands that I grew up loving would just call it a day and hang up their guitars while they still had a bit of dignity. I am speaking of Kansas, Yes, etc,.


Surely this box is exactly the sort of thing that would be released after a band has called it a day and retired?
 

The link leads to a page that says "not found." Searching the site shows a button for Yes live QPR but clicking it brings up a page with "no products currently for sale."

They do have a bunch of over-priced merchandise though. Art prints of and merchandise with the original Yes logo; couldn't get approval to use the classic logo I guess- or any others for that matter. Seems like a dodgy site...
 
So... another "grey area bootleg"?
(When something gets licensed to some label - and that's all legal - but they just don't have any quality standards and end up stepping on it. It's always something older where no one from the band is currently interested enough to keep their eye on it throughout production.)

Wolfgang's Vault is notorious for this crap. Their audio treatment effectively makes all their KBFH archives unavailable. Comes across just like the bootleggers that only share reduced quality (or missing some tracks) so they still have the only good copy. See, one day the band is going to pay them a million dollars for that recording and and...

Wakeman's Six Wives DVD release with a poor copy of a decoded vinyl copy for the quad program. Maybe the master was lost but there are better consumer copies in private collections.
The Yes Progeny releases with quick scratch mixes. (There was even a big promotion with talk about really knocking the audio out of the park... that never came to be.) This could all be mixed if someone wanted to. If fact there are probably engineers that would jump at the opportunity!

I don't have the QPR in front of my ears at the moment but I remember it sounding like someone had a couple channels confused on the mixing board initially. It sounded for all the world like someone was struggling to pull the gtr out of a vocal mic or something (that wasn't being sung into at the moment). Then you hear bursts of red-lined distorted parts that blast through...
Maybe a connection just got fixed? "Oh shit, THAT'S the guitar channel!" I can only speculate but that's what it sounded like was going on. No one was sitting there thinking "I guess this is OK". There was a seat of the pants struggle in the recording truck. Some mayhem and confusion was going on with stage inputs and it's one of those unfortunate things where that happened live in broadcast.

This is one of those live broadcast mixes where multitrack was never recorded, right? At least no one has ever made a new mix if it does. But then, multitracks exist for those 1972 shows and we still only got rough scratch mixes there.
 
The Yes Progeny releases with quick scratch mixes. (There was even a big promotion with talk about really knocking the audio out of the park... that never came to be.) This could all be mixed if someone wanted to. If fact there are probably engineers that would jump at the opportunity!


I'm glad someone else says this. I was deeply disappointed by the Progeny mixes, after all the talk about the work that went into making them. And Brian Kehew is certainly no slouch, so I don't know what went wrong. It's not that they aren't surround, it's that compared to Yessongs (warts and all) they're so small, arid, and unimaginative. Decisions like anchoring Wakeman on the right side, with no panning allowed *even when he's performing his solo piece* complete with soaring Moog lines and Mellotron chorus, are just absurd to me. 'Scratch mix' is good.

At least we can hope that the multitracks are now safely archived to digital, and could be revisited some day.....


I don't have the QPR in front of my ears at the moment but I remember it sounding like someone had a couple channels confused on the mixing board initially. It sounded for all the world like someone was struggling to pull the gtr out of a vocal mic or something (that wasn't being sung into at the moment). Then you hear bursts of red-lined distorted parts that blast through...
Maybe a connection just got fixed? "Oh shit, THAT'S the guitar channel!" I can only speculate but that's what it sounded like was going on. No one was sitting there thinking "I guess this is OK". There was a seat of the pants struggle in the recording truck. Some mayhem and confusion was going on with stage inputs and it's one of those unfortunate things where that happened live in broadcast.

This is one of those live broadcast mixes where multitrack was never recorded, right? At least no one has ever made a new mix if it does. But then, multitracks exist for those 1972 shows and we still only got rough scratch mixes there.

There likely never was a multitrack tape, it was mixed direct for broadcast...in mono (Steve Howe in 1993 when Brian Lane first released QPR on VHS: "And QPR was a wonderful show we did with the other act [which] should have been filmed because it was Seals and Crofts, on that show. And so QPR gets released, it's never been remixed from the original monaural mixes, I don't expect that I or whoever it was didn't know and we said it was a good job at the time, but it wouldn't please any of us now, so it doesn't please me. " )

IIRC from reading later , QPR released audio was really sourced from stage monitor feeds gone horribly wrong. No one who attended the concert has so far reported hearing a problem from the audience.
 
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The SOP for live broadcast mixes was to make a completely separate mix in a recording truck. Like you said, this is often all that was recorded. No multitrack because it was hideously expensive! The FOH mix wasn't used because the audience mix is a blend of live stage sound reinforced by the FOH mix and thus the FOH mix by itself is missing content and unbalanced.

Having said that, a large venue live show like this would have a pretty complete mix in the FOH feed. Hindsight is 20/20 and all.

One of the monitor mixes? They had crossed wires (mispatched or mislabeled) or missing channels in one way or another. They're probably in a truck with no visual connection to the stage. I picture the poor engineer sitting there going "f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f*** f***" !
 
I canot seem tp find the musicglue pre-ordering?
Can someone send me the link?
Takeaway says not available?
Thanks!
 
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