RE-UP Pink Floyd - Birmingham 1970

PINK FLOYD
Project Birmingham
HRV CDR 024
11-February-1970
Town Hall
Birmingham, UK

Release date: 18-Dec-2001 by Harvested Records
Originally released in SHN format

DISC ONE
1. The Embryo
2. Main Theme from More
3. Careful With That Axe, Eugene
4. Sysyphus

DISC TWO
1. Project Birmingham, feat. variations of:
    Heart Beat, Pig Meat
    Quicksilver
    Moonhead
    The Violent Sequence (aka Us And Them)
2. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
3. The Amazing Pudding (aka Atom Heart Mother)

*Original Notes
--------------------------------------
>>From Harvested's RonToon:

For those who are interested, here's some of the details of Project
Birmingham (which will be our NEXT release...Ed promises to be
wedding in time for X-Mas). I initially started working on this
almost 2 years ago. I had three sources to choose from; the vinyl
bootleg LP "Violence In Birmingham" (the longest of the 3), "The
Violent Pudding" released by JS&TBD, and a low gen analogue tape.

I mainly used the old analogue tape as my source and spliced in the
additional material from the vinyl release, which gives you a few
more minutes of AHM. I then tweaked the Hell outta this one,
balancing and boosting channels, patching lost moments and applying a
custom EQ to the whole thing. There was still an unacceptable amount
of hiss left, and for the 1st time I was willing to go with some
major noise reduction and give it a try.

I sent the files I had been working on to Chris Burns in NYC. Chis
had some professional audio equipment and volunteered to lend his
skills to the project. The NR greatly reduced the hiss, but created
an artifact that gave the impression of listening through a long
drain pipe. Still, I felt that this was an improvement over all that
hiss.

The data CDs were next sent to Marc-Oliver who has a built in radar
detector for speed correction. He worked on each track, making sure
that the pitch and speed were accurate. The next step was more
difficult. Marc had trouble mailing it back to me as customs busted
the package (pretty trivial with what's going on in the world today)!
Eventually, the CDs got back to Ed via France, no less.

I was glad to be finally done with this one.... until a better source
came along!!! As soon as I heard the quality of this new recording, I
knew I would have to scrap all the work that was done and start all
over again. Which I did........

There was still hiss on this new source, but not as bad. AND, I was
able to hear some subtleties that I hadn't heard before. I also took
a new approach to remastering this show as well. I didn't want to use
any NR this time as I felt that some EQing would do the trick.

There seemed to be some strange anomolies with the source that I also
would like to mention. During some songs, the hiss seems to oscilate
in and out like a whirlwind effect. It's really not too terrible and
only rears it's ugly head in a few places for a short period of time.
In other places it just cuts in and out...almost as if someone was
playing with the Dolby button while making the dub (although I was
assured that this was not the case). These sudden "bursts" were also
very difficult to smooth out and I only had limited success at times.

After re-assembling the entire show, I cross-dissolved different EQ
applications over the entire piece. During the quieter parts I
brought the high end down, for the louder parts I boosted the bass
and midrange a bit. Next, it was back to balancing and boosting
levels again and all the general work I had done before. Lastly, I
speed corrected the entire thing, using M-O's previous effort as a
reference. I'm sure that the speed will be pretty close, although it
does vary from time to time.

This performance has an incredible setlist, one of my favorites, and
it's mostly instrumental! If you can make it through the opening
minute of Embryo (which is totally distorted and over-saturated),
you'll be in for a real treat for what follows. You will also find
that Sysyphus and AHM (aka The Violent Pudding) are now complete, and
the missing bits were NOT sourced from an alternate show. However, Dr
FrankenToon did "cheat" to make them complete ; )

Cheers!

Ron

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