Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Live in Vancouver, B.C., Canada
August 11, 1986
Expo Theatre


unknown recorder > master casettes > Nakamichi BX2 > ZoomH2 @24/96 > mastered with Wavelab


Setlist:
01 intro walk on tune up
02 Scuttle Buttin'
03 Say What!
04 Stevie's monitor problems
05 Superstition (Stevie Wonder cover)
06 Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (The Jimi Hendrix Experience cover)
07 Come On (Part 3) (Earl King cover)
08 my buttons is broken
09 Ain't Gone 'n' Give Up on Love
10 camptown races doo dah
11 Pride and Joy
12 Couldn't Stand the Weather
13 Life Without You (fireworks)
14 encore break : murphy's law untuned
15 Riviera Paradise
16 Rude Mood
17 serious trouble offstage



This is a Steve C. mono master recording. It's an unknown recorder but I'm sure it's a single point mono built-in mic auto record levels kind of device. General Electric? Radio Shack? The automatic record level gain control that the recorder had sometimes kicks in during the fireworks display and causes the record levels to drop sharply and then slowly re-rise back to the proper level. It makes some small dropouts in the sound for these pops and bangs, but they only last a second.

I adjusted the tape playback azimuth when I transferred the tapes. I processed the files with Audition's automatic phase restoration tool to fine tune that azimuth / phase relationship, so these mono master tapes transfers ARE mono. But, I hate mono stuff! LOL To master these raw phase corrected files, I declipped, EQ'd, stereoized, and maximized these files!

I lightly applied iZotope RX Advanced 2's DeClipper as a Wavelab plug-in to try and undo some of the limiting on the master. I think it helped a little bit...

The Sheppi stereo plug-in might be a little bit controversioal! I find that it's use in widening out a mono bootleg such as this makes for a much more pleasant headphone listen and sounds fairly natural to what I believe a "stereo" bootleg audience recording of similar vintage would sound. I've used the effect sparingly. I think it sounds fairly natural...

There's not that much EQ done with Waves Q10 Paragraphic EQ: a little more highs, a little more lows, hammered down a spike in the lower mids - upper lows, filled a valley in the upper mids. Just small changes -just a few db's up or down nothing too drastic...

The final sound processing step that I did was pull the final mixdown 24/96 split files into ClickRepair 3.4.1 which is a program usually used by audiophile vinyl rippers to remove ticks and pops. It works here to knock down the closest sharpest sounding clappers nearest to the taper, amd also cuts back the volume of the fireworks explosions a little bit.

I downsampled these files to 24/44.1 with SoX resampler via Foobar2000 (best quality 95.2% passband no aliasing 25% phase response)



"This is precious..." Stevie says while he's standing on the stage looking over the crowd's heads in Expo Theatre to watch through the gaps in the open hanging roof and see the nightly fireworks display that Expo 86 would put on. They start during the middle of "Life Without You", and I've heard stories of folks who were there saying how Stevie really liked seeing the fireworks display from stage, so he just kept soloing and playing and vamping the song while he enjoyed the interruption... BaBOOM! Pow! PaPOW!

I originally wrote on my old 2nd generation cassettes title J-cards to track out the show, and I called my tapes "A Staggering Performance" - a bad play on his drinking problems, I guess. Listening now to the masters much more clearly, I can hear that there are several technical malfunction moments that happen to throw off a performance. My old tape copy wasn't as clear as this, so I couldn't tell the difference. Broken pedals, dead monitors, untuned guitars, a fireworks display mid-show, and a strict deadline to shut down a show. It feels like there could have or should have been another song or two on the setlist but that laundry list of bad things makes it seem like a short show. There were lots of interruptions to slow down the pace and make a couple too many dead air moments waiting for things to get fixed. What IS played is great, and kinda unique, I think! I tracked out all the technical error problem pause moments that Stevie had as their own tracks. I even tracked out how the plug got pulled for the end of the show by management.


I had a tape copy of this show for years, dubbed from a "buddy" 's tapes that he copied from the taper. I say "buddy" because this dude I've known for years and years recently kinda basically ripped me off of my vinyl collection of minty original pressings and MoFi's and imports and bootlegs worth I dunno but thousands for sure... And, I think now that he might have ripped this tape off in a similar fashion from the taper, so I'm glad that I'm liberating it!

My former "buddy" had his 1st gen tapes that I had made my second gen tapes with, and that was fine. Then one day about maybe 10 years ago, he told me that his taper buddy and him had had a falling out over something, but he had gotten 2 big boxes of this guy's tape collection "because he was throwing them out" was the story. My now ex-buddy claimed that he'd dumpster dived the "discarded" cassettes when the taper supposedly threw them out... My "buddy" then locked these master cassettes away for several years and hoarded them like they were stolen Nazi gold or something!

One day not that long ago, he went on a trip and asked me to cat-sit for him. While I was taking great care of his cat that I love (that he's talked about stuffing down the garburator when he's mad at it! - psycho...) I found the tapes hidden under a bed while playing with the cat and could not help myself but to catalog and transfer the best ones. In a marathon tape transfer session over the next few days, I digitized approximately 30 concerts worth of audio. Many rare shows from several artists that nobody but maybe 2 or 3 people have heard since they were recorded live at the shows!

I meant just to do this clandestine operation as a catalogging and preservation operation. I knew this stuff should get out to the fans that would actually appreciate it, but I wanted to do it right. I had planned on convincing my old buddy the tape hoarder con artist to let me digitize some of the tapes "legit" at which point I'd tell him I'd already done a lot of them. But, things got really weird. I never got to do this. He did to me what I now think he did to the taper, and made a way to get and hold 1000 records of total collectible material. Autographs. Rarities. I got shafted big time by him and didn't deserve to be.....

So, I'm gonna start getting some of these recordings that nobody else knows exists out there where they belong. If the dude I thought I knew for more than half my life had his way, these recordings would NEVER see the light of day. It's because of the apparent loss of thousands of dollars and man-hours worth of my rare vinyl collection being taken and kept by this dude that this (and other) recordings are coming to light... I don't know where the actual taper of these shows is but Steve C. if you're out there get a hold of me! I think we have something in common now and maybe we need to talk!


audioarchivist@hotmail.com