Roger Waters
The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
The Woodlands
Houston, TX
May 4, 2008
Taper Notes:
-------------
While looking through the extensive closet for
something to listen to on the way to the Waters
concert I came across my old cassette recorder that I
used for some college lectures and had previously
attempted to tape a couple of shows without much
success. I figured what the heck, might as well give
it a whirl. It was a stereo recorder with 2 built in
condenser mics in fact; and it did say "Extended Bass
System" right on the side of it! Found a couple of
unnecessary cassettes to tape over. Stopped off at the
drug store for batteries and low and behold they had
blank cassettes!!! The old stand-by back in the day
Maxell-XL-II. (My personal favorite.) 2 for 3 dollars
was a bargain!
Anyway, got to the venue and proceeded to situate my
secret recorder. Yes boys and girls... IN MY PANTS!
All is going well, the security at the gate was pretty
relaxed and I am waved through after lifting my shirt
and turning a 360 for the guy. The ticket person tears
off my ticket stub and then it happens. The
unthinkable ! My life flashes before me and I start
getting dizzy. My recorder has slipped out of its
secret hiding place near the family jewels and has
proceeded to slip down my pants leg at a rapid rate of
speed for all the world to see. I grab my leg to keep
it from hitting the pavement at any second. I
basically fake a massive leg cramp, while holding the
recorder in place inside my right pant leg. I took a
few steps forward to get out of the way of more people
coming through the gate. Then, as the two policemen
20ft away to my left were staring at me with a
concerned look on their face, I bend down letting the
recorder slowly slide down my leg to my ankle and then
try like a motherfucker to get it tucked into my sock;
all the while kinda cringing from the "leg cramp"
pain. Hastily, with all my remaining strength, I
miraculously get it tucked into the damn sock! (Thank
the gods I was wearing crew socks instead of ankle
socks!) I get back on my feet and glance over at the
cops still looking VERY concerned at what the hell I
was doing, I start to cringe again from the pain. They
look like they are coming towards me, but I start to
limp profusely and make my way to the bathrooms to do
some re-arranging. They do not follow... Yikes!
Tragedy averted.
THE RECORDING: To call me an "amateur" at recording
would be an understatement. I really didn't expect
this recording to come out listenable anyway. I just
held the recorder behind my new $20 concert program
like you would hold your books at school. The idea
being to possibly shield the mics from the direct
brunt of the immense volume from my 6th row seats. It
seemed to help I guess. Those portable recorders can
only handle so much volume before they kinda crap out
on the heavy bass end of things. This sounds like one
of those better than mediocre recordings from Floyd's
1988 tour... Heywood can probably give you a better
run-down on the quality, but it is very listenable
even with its sonic faults and tape flips missing mere
precious seconds twice! Sorry I tried my best, but I
did it for the Y! This will probably not be the
"definitive" version for this concert but we wanted to
get it out there as soon as possible to everyone.
Thanks again to Heywood for his expertise in sonic
turd polishing!! Rock on!!!
Quentin1840
After listening to the version posted here a few days back I must say that this is a far superior recording. The one posted by altdive was tonally thin and quite a bit distorted. For a cassette recording this is pretty damn good. There's a bit of distortion when the bass is loudI find that all those tape recorders put a bunch of noise down on the tape with low budget erase heads, so what I do is take a sample of the pure noise from the end of a tape side (that 1 second of tape between the erase and record heads) and remove it, as I did with this one. I then EQ'd it to what I thought sounded best (very little needed on this one, actually. I upped the extreme high end a few dB and dropped most of the midrange out across the spectrum a slight bit. Left the bass alone; it was great.) and turned the volume up as far as was practical. The tape flips have been patched with portions of altdive's tape, with his kind permission. Thanks, altdive, and kudos on getting your tape posted so fast. I had to wait for the mail to come from Texas before I could get Quentin's up.
lineage is: cass(M)[recorded with Optimus SCR-100 with built-in condensers] ---> Adobe Audition (NR and EQ tweak; also speed correction as the master runs about 90% of a tone flat) ---> TLH (flac 8) ---> you
This is the last American performance of DSotM probably forever.
I believe my ISP is spying on all my P2P activity. When I post torrents they seem to not start seeding right away even though uTorrent says they are. Usually they begin within 24 hours. If you jump on this one it may not start right away, but be patient and all will be fine
As with nearly everything I post/share, do not sell, but feel welcome to convert anything I post/share to any format you like, lossy or otherwise, and feel free to share/trade it that way. Spread the music as much as possible, in any format possible. Music should be free and for everyone to enjoy as they see fit. If a person is completely satisfied with an Mp3, then they should be allowed to get it that way. All music should exist in all available formats, be it lossless, lossy, phone files (well maybe not phone files), or whatever. The more formats the more people will be exposed to the variety of music out there, and that's a good thing no matter how you slice it. Just make sure everyone knows what they're getting.