Renaissance
My Father’s Place, Roslyn, NY
3rd April, 1974


This show comes from an off-air recording of a WLIR-FM radio broadcast of the complete show including encore. The original radio broadcast was likely stereo, but this recording is mono.

The band played 5 nights at MFP, Wed through to Sunday. They were on their second US tour, and pushing to develop an audience there. Hence there are several radio broadcast recordings from this period, such as the Ebbets Field, Denver show in August (that I also restored recently, and still available here):
http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=727054

Both broadcasts show the band having onstage and mixing problems due to the complexity of their arrangements and prominent use of acoustic piano. On this evening, the piano can be heard cutting in and out, possibly due to a dodgy microphone connection which can be heard adding crackle on the original tape (I’ve repaired this here). It wasn’t only the piano; vocals, bass and guitar all get lost or jump out of the mix at various points in the show. The only stable element is the drums, and even they are occasionally a little dominant. But hey, it’s a live show and the band were on fire and in good spirits.


Sources:

My source for all things Renaissance, prologueau, has supplied me with two versions of this show, with the comment that he has not found any others in circulation over the years:

• Traded cassette, of unknown lineage. This cassette was transferred to CDR at some point in the past, very possibly by myself (although I’ve no recollection of having done so). If I did, I’d have used my trusty old Teac 570D deck with manual azimuth adjust, and no dolby, into ProTools.
• The ‘Turn of the Seasons’ double CD bootleg. Disc 2 has the tracks from this show. This is likely the most widely known source for this show.

Both sources derive from the same master tape, and judging by clarity, seem of similar tape generation. The ‘TotS’ boot has been noise processed using a gating parameter and while acceptable it is not great. It also has a prominent eq peak around 1-2kHz, giving it a brash quality, without the treble extension of the cassette. Finally, ’TotS’ has a 2 minute patch of severe tape damage in ‘Ashes’, whereas the cassette does not.

So prologueau’s traded cassette source was the one to work with, however it does have a brief cut in ‘Ashes’ which is not present on the boot CD, making the boot is at least useful for the patch.


Restoration notes:

• All processing done in iZotope RX8 advanced at 32 bit
• As this is a mono source with the right channel containing slightly more top end, I copied it to the left to create a true mono working file.
• Remove 60Hz hum plus harmonics.
• Correct pitch by -0.7 semitones, stable across whole program. (Boot CD is -0.2 semitones).
• Lift eq of top end in an even curve from 1kHz, rising to near +20dB @ 10kHz. Boost to bass below 100Hz, and attenuate lower mids. High pass filter to roll of sub-bass noise below 20Hz.
• Eq-ing accentuated the hiss, which was fortunately not excessive (sign of a low gen tape). Applied a noise shaping curve to moderate top end hiss, adjusting parameters as necessary. I’ve left some residual hiss remaining.
• Even out volumes, particularly in the first minute.
• Remove clicks throughout. There were numerous crackles in ‘Let it Grow’ and ‘Kiev’ (likely from the piano mic onstage) which were tricky to repair.
• Meticulous repair of micro-dropouts and odd issues throughout the recording.
• A one second cut in Ashes patched from the bootleg source.
• Also patched a little more audience applause at the conclusion of ‘Ashes’.
• Additional fine tuning of pitch correction, plus wow & flutter repair (Goody)
• Final mastering in Ozone: stereoize mono file and master to -0.6dB.
• Fades, track and export to flac at 16/44 & 24/44.



1. Can You Understand? 11.46
2. Let It Grow 5.04
3. Kiev 9.21
4. Things I Don’t Understand 9.40
5. Ashes Are Burning 15.29
6. Encore: Prologue 7.14


A Hogweeds audio restoration, June 2022. My thanks to Prof Goody for editorial input, and applying final pitch adjustment corrections as well as wow & flutter repair which we believe took this to a place much closer to the original performance. Also to ethiessen1 for the artwork, plus prologueau for the sources and prompting this restoration of one of his favourite Renaissance shows.

Enjoy.


Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.

Images for this show: