Here's something special to commemorate the August anniversaries of Jerry's birthday (8/1/42) and passing (8/9/95)...

The Grateful Dead
Mtx'ing through the 80s - live "concert" all-matrix mix from 1980s highlights

The inspiration for this live mix came from the excellent Garcia Discs/Jerry Compilation seeded by icculus18 on etree. Specifically, one track - Morning Dew from 9.18.87 - opened my eyes to an entire decade that had been previously under-represented in my collection. It also reinforced my belief that there is nothing better than a good matrix, which captures both the music and spirit of a performance. So I naturally went overboard and downloaded every matrix from the 1980s (about 35 shows) and started listening. And I also naturally (because it is what I do when I get inspired by music) began to make notes for a live mix containing songs that I thought would sound exceptional alongside one another in a "concert" format (first set, second set, encore).

While I normally don't comment on live mixes that I create, I'm going to make an exception because my role as window dresser (selection, mixing/smoothing transitions, volume normalization) pales in comparison to the effort of those who took the time to properly matrix the best available soundboard and audience recordings. I just listened to this live mix from start to finish for the first time since completing it a couple of weeks ago and was completely blown away. You can't lose: worst case scenario this live mix is a sampler of matrices from 20 different concerts; best case scenario the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and it gets heavy rotation for a while. SPECIAL THANKS to all those (especially HS) that created these matrices (see info file for full reference info and shn id #).

On a side note, I created a matrix mix for one song (D3T1) and it took me nearly 2 hours for the one song! Some time was spent to patch a gap in the sbd with an aud recording, but it should give you some sense of how long it takes to create a matrix. Of course if there's a magic button or great program out there please do tell. Until then I suppose it will be necessary to adjust the pitch of one source and then merge the two 30-60 seconds at a time in order to remain in synch.

All tracks were normalized and transitions mixed to flow like a concert. Transitions between songs are generally no more than 20 seconds in length.

I suggest not looking at the track listing before listening. Allow yourself to be surprised, as there are so few pleasant surprises in life: LET THIS BE ONE. You can email me later to thank me for the suggestion :-)

I created and included some basic artwork, which is intended as a placeholder until someone creates some proper artwork.
The etree entry is here: http://db.etree.org/lookup_show.php?shows_key=494449

Note to the moderators: To my knowledge, none of the tracks in this mix have been commercially released. As a resource, I used the "Grateful Dead releases by recording date," which looks to be the most complete and accurate account of commercially released GD and can be found here: http://www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Dead_By_Date.htm

Finally, the the resources "Dead to the Core" and The Deadhead's Taping Compendium were a great help in narrowing some very tough selections.

Source: Various > EAC > Sound Forge 8.0 (normalized, mixed) > CDWave > 2flac/3cdr
ALS, August 2010