Western Springs Stadium
Auckland, New Zealand,
Remastered Audience Recording, (A Group/Personal Project)
This is a group/personal project by "The 5th Most Popular Folk Group In New Zealand", The 7th Son, Joel, Porgie, King Mike, Mark, Mike, and Acapulco Gold.
Notes about the performance, and sound quality:
After playing a few shows in Australia (Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne), the band made it's way over to New Zealand to play this one and only show in the country.
This show was an outdoor arena performance, and there were close to 25,000 people in attendence.
A lot of them were brought in by train, a "Zeppelin Express" ( hence the title for Genuine Masters "Kiwi Express") but the sound is so tight and warm you wouldn't think this was recorded in such a large venue.
According to press reviews, the sound was apparently so loud that the band could be heard 5 miles away.
Everyone in the group is in fine form, especially Plant, he seems to be on the mend from his bout with the "Australian Bug".
Jimmy is doing some excellent soloing at this concert, and sneaks in an instrumental tease of "The Song Remains The Same" during "Dazed And Confused.
There are quite a few surprises at these Australian/New Zealand concerts.
Here are some examples:
- Jimmy plays an instrumental portion of "Train Kept-A-Rollin'" during "Heartbreaker" at the Adelaide concert.
- Jimmy plays a portion of "The Rover" during the "Whole Lotta Love" medley at the Sydney concert.
The audience seems very receptive to the band, and the group seem to be playing off their energy.
This is so far the only recording known to exist, and is in circulation of the group's performance in Auckland.
The raw recording we were working from was quite nice on it's own, there was a nice distribution of the instruments had hardly any tape hiss in the channels, but it did have a few issues that could use a little tweaking:
- There was a bit of bass distortion in the channels.
- The volume of the recording was amplified a touch too much, drowning out a few things in the recording, like crowd comments.
- There were some instruments that were a little more up front then others (bass, and vocals are more present then guitar and drum fills)
- The whole recording was running at the incorrect tape speed, the raw source was running about 3% fast.At first, I thought this recording was running at the correct tape speed, but my mate Mike brought it to my attention that it needed to be slowed down.
So the goal of this project was to correct those issues I've listed, and try to also breathe some new life into the recording.
- We've tried to balance the instruments.
- We've corrected the tape speed issues.
- We've tried to bring out things that were buried in the recording.
- We've tried to give the listener a sense of ambiance.