Allison Crowe Trio
The Seagull Sessions
September 25, 2002
Crowe Family House Concert
Nanaimo, B.C., Canada


3 source "multitrack" matrix remix remaster 2024 version

So, what is this? It's three stereo recordings blended together - a six channel matrix mix. Two minidisc recorders with two stereo pairs of ambient room mics plus a vocal / piano soundboard feed with bleed straight into a desktop computer line input... Captured on three different devices, on two different formats, they were manually re-assembled and synchronized almost 22 years later to make this remix.
A house concert performed as a dress rehearsal for a tour that followed. Additional rehearsal bonus material from the afternoon band practice.


Technical Lineage:
Capture: source 1: line out from mini P.A. amp > line in SoundBlaster16 on Win98 Desktop @16 bit 44.1 khz with either 100.0136637343933 or 99.98633813232805 of slowing digital drift
source 2: Marantz SuperScope EC-9P Cardioid Condenser Microphones in X-Y pattern on stands at front of room > Sony MZ-R70 minidisc masters
source 3: Sony ECM-ZS90 Switchable Stereo/Zoom Condenser Microphone (in stereo mode) on wall at rear of room > Sony MZ-R37 minidisc masters
Transfer and processing: Sony MZ-RH1 and SonicStage software digital transfer via USB > master oma to wav conversion > master wav files of both room sources plus DVD-A archive wav files of board source > iZotope RX Advanced (declip, phase alignment, slight cleanup, and re-balance of all sources plus time shift of soundboard source) > Audacity (multitrack manual alignment of individual sources, mixdown, and tracking) > Trader's Little Helper (FLAC8 conversion) > Foobar2000 (tagging and testing) > torrent > you!

First set:
1-01 intro set 1 why recording
1-02 Midnight - solo
1-03 intro dress lady story pt1
1-04 Fade Away
1-05 Disease
1-06 intro air sound effects secrets
1-07 Fire
1-08 intro new song dress lady pt2
1-09 Montreal
1-10 outtro intro funny announcing
1-11 Fallen
1-12 intro Alley's biggest fan and another debut
1-13 Ready
1-14 outtro got the bridge intro come as
1-15 On The Air
1-16 intro do you like pie
1-17 Bobby McGee
1-18 intermission break pt1

Second set:
2-01 intermission pt2 end jokes
2-02 intro set 2 thanks Condor and John
2-03 Who Will Save Your Soul
2-04 Crayon And ink - solo
2-05 intro couch drums waterboy sleep
2-06 Dark Blue
2-07 intro Dave's kind of weird
2-08 Snakes Patterns
2-09 outtro brand new intro Dave's not here
2-10 Lisa's Song
2-11 intro not sick I'm fine
2-12 Scared
2-13 intro send your letters new song
2-14 Open Letter
2-15 Unstable
2-16 intro the wind says go showboating
2-17 Delay
2-18 intro last song for the evening
2-19 Philosophy
2-20 encore break can't go far
2-21 A Murder Of One
2-22 intro disc flippin more bad jokes
2-23 Crayon And Ink - band
2-24 intro one more song solo
2-25 Angel
2-26 outtro wrap up and walk out
2-27 outtro group photo

Bonus afternoon rehearsal:
3-01 Ready - rehearsal 1
3-02 chatter something somewhere
3-03 Ready - rehearsal 2
3-04 chatter phone call drum tuning baffles
3-05 Open Letter - false start
3-06 Open Letter - rehearsal breakdown
3-07 chatter see how it ends
3-08 Open Letter - rehearsal last verse
3-09 chatter boom out breathe in
3-10 Snakes _ Patterns - rehearsal
3-11 chatter sickness inspired Dave's cormorant
3-12 Montreal - rehearsal
3-13 chatter Mtl arrangement
3-14 Lisa's Song - rehearsal
3-15 chatter breaktime




Allison Crowe Trio performing in Alley's parent's house on Seagull Lane in Nanaimo on September 25, 2002. A livingroom concert premiering several of her songs at the time. A warm-up for a set of shows that followed on a small tour, this house concert was mainly for me and my recorders, and a small gathering of friends and family. The recordings were used for research and development purposes and perhaps given to a few folks but not widely shared. My original analog minidisc transfer mix of this show was burned to CDR and in 22 years those discs have become unreadable due to a bad batch or poor quality burning. I no longer have access to the original mix but for some badly ripped eMPty3 files with 2 second track gaps, and in any case my original mix was heavily dynamically crushed which sort of ruined the sound quality in many ways. This mix has been made with full dynamics intact - in fact, the source minidisc digital transfers were declipped for further dynamic range extension! A good test of how loud versus how quiet a recording can be! A whisper to a scream. Crank the volume!

The original "lost" mixdown that I made way back a couple of decades ago was funny. I was kind of new to music production, and new to computer mixing, but eager to try stuff! The master minidiscs had to be transferred to the computer via analog playback output and re-digitized, creating a small drop in sound quality. It was the beginning of the loudness wars age, when louder was better, so I ramped up compressors on the vocal / piano channel, multiband compression on room feeds, mastering compression and limiting - hammered in multiple stages by a ham-fisted noob. Yuck! Burned to Maxell 24x CDR's as audio discs, the old mix was distributed to the band, me, and a couple of friends and associates. The whole batch of discs were bad, and after a while the last few tracks on each 80 minute disc started to sound funny. Scratchy. Crispy. Unreadable. Un-rippable. There was a copy made before the disc rot of a too fast disc burn but they were eMPty3 files with 2 second gaps after each track for some reason. Bad disc rip, but all there was! And LOUD. As. Fuccccccccccccc... I am sort of glad that it needed to be replaced, as my 2024 reworking of the masters has improved the clarity quite a bit, I think!


A mono soundboard feed (rehearsal PA rec out) of Alley's vocal mic mixed with a bit of a poorly placed piano mic was fed into the line input of my old desktop computer with clock speed issues running windows 98. This wav file needed to be time shifted / pitch corrected slightly to synchronize with the minidisc recordings. It took a lot of trial and error and error and error to find the right 100.0136637343933% (or is it 99.98633813232805% ?) difference to time align it to the other sources that I trust... During the second set the mix of piano increases more than I would like, but it is what it is.

A Sony MZ-R70 minidisc recorder mic input was wired up to a nice pair of Marantz SuperScope EC-9P Cardioid Condenser Microphones in a X-Y pattern that were set up on two stands at the "stage lip" a few feet in front of the mash of drums and grand piano and bass amp that made up one side of the living room. Borrowed from my ol' taper buddy Fred W. who used them to record many concert tapes in Vancouver through the 70's and 80's and into the 90's, they are nice old warm sounding mics with some good history. His 1975 Vancouver Pink Floyd recording is a bit legendary... These captured the drums and bass and piano fairly well, but miss most of the P.A. where the vocals might be, and also don't get much of the audience that filled the room with life...

A Sony MZ-R37 was set up at the back of the room farthest from the band with a Sony ECM-ZS90 Switchable Stereo/Zoom Condenser Microphone (in stereo mode) stuck to the back wall somehow. Did I take a picture down and use an existing hanger? My used minidisc recorder didn't come with a user manual, and this was still the dawn of my internet usage to find an online manual to learn how to change the recording level to a manual setting. D'oh! The hyper-compressed dynamic range fo the auto record level pumping and breathing on this master disc is not nice! It does, however, contain most of the air and life and breath of all three recording sources, as well as all of the applause and crowd banter. I was able to re-process the master disc digital transfer with iZotope RX declipper module, which expanded the flatline overdriven original waveform of cringe inducing hammered loudness into something with depth and dimension that added the sparkle on the piano and even the cymbals that the mix needed.

All three sources were prepared with iZotope RX Advanced 6. Declipper was used to try and expand dynamic range lost from overdriven inputs on the minidisc mic preamps. The original waveforms looked like plateaus in the Badlands at times! Through some modern magic, this program re-works the sound to re-draw the peaks of these cut-off waves to try and restore what was damaged, to sometimes very good results! Spectral editing was done to remove a few unwanted sounds like photoshop would retouch a flaw in a photo. There was the sound of a camera pouch's velcro ripping in one of the songs, so that was removed without touching the music around it on both of the audience room sources. Finally before moving to multitrack mixing, each stereo source was automatically phase aligned and balance corrected to focus the soundstage to the middle.

Audacity was used to pull the three re-processed master sources together and manually time-align to several loud sharp sudden sounds that match in all three waveforms. Zoom in on the spikes and drag until it all lined up. Boom! It took a while to find the levels for each source to balance them all for what each one represented in the final mix, and not clip. There is one instance during the entire night that the mix does actually clip, but it just touches the limits of digital recording! haha! But, I decided dead against any compression and to let it be a better representation of how it sounded in the room. Wide. Dynamic. Range! It gets loud! It gets quiet. It goes up, and down - sometimes several times in the same song! In that dead original mix, it was kind of always louder than everything else! So, hopefully this more "raw" mix, of the declipped versions, sounds better... I think it does! Turn it up!

The cover photo is my seagull buddy that I've known for a few years now paying me a visit. He nested across the street from me on the roof of a car dealership, and had raised several years worth of young there until this year when the building was torn down to make way for another condo tower downtown. He came back this spring with his wife and was devastated that their home was gone. They've stayed in the neighbourhood, and I've been feeding them more often this year from my balcony, where they come to the railing to call me out when they are hungry. I've been awakened a few times this summer by their calls for service! Fall seems to have arrived now, however, and they have left town. I hope I see them again next year. Cute couple! Maybe their new deluxe apartment tower will be built by then on the same spot!

The mix isn't perfect - somewhat beyond my control now. The first part seems okay but by the second half the piano sound becomes a little overbearing in the recording. I believe that the person running the P.A. sound decided to adjust the live mix which also changed the ratio of voice to piano in the board recording. I did attempt to do some EQ to minimize the what I would call poor piano mic placement that caused the piano mic to be quite spikey with some frequencies jumping out too far. I actually attempted to use an A.I. de-mixing program to separate the vocals from the piano and band bleed feed to try and fix things more, but I lost patience with the program and rejected it when it added a nasty layer of noise to the split layers of voice, so I didn't use it. Perhaps in another 5 years the bugs will be worked out in this new A.I. demuxing software to improve things further, but it's not that bad as it is, is it? It's certainly better to my ears than the version I tried to rip from my failing CDR's with crackling data error noises scratching their way through! Better than dead air blank discs! Better than a phone call on an answering machine. In other words, it's fine... Everything's fine!

Time passes...

In the 22 years that have come and gone since this was recorded, many things have happened. Allison has toured the world. More than once. She has had her music used in movie soundtracks. More than once. She has appeared IN a movie. Once. So far. "Tidings" Christmas concerts. Several. One this year upcoming, even! She released many many albums and singles. She is currently acting on stage and teaching and heavily involved in theatre production in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland. She got married to a great guy. Just google her and there's tons of links and data and info about here career. So much is different now and this time in her life isn't always looked back at in the fondest of terms. For me as well! Maybe you, too. I know I wasn't the only one going through a pretty rough go of it back then, but sometimes it is nice to enjoy the music for what it is from then. I am glad I have been able to rescue this recording from the depths of oblivion where they were on the brink of disappearing forever! I do remember that I did work hard on the original lost mix, but I am glad that this new version can replace the early one and improve upon it so dramatically at the same time!

There are several more shows that I recorded around this time that I hope to share soon. I have several CDR's of mixes like this one of other shows but that did burn correctly that I can rip properly that are basically all ready to go. I can hardly believe that I haven't gotten to posting so many of them before. They've had some very limited releases but should always have been out here, so I'm hoping to change that! haha! Official bootlegger gotta bootleg more! So, more to come, as they say...


http://audioarchivist@hotmail.com

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