Phish
Madison Square Garden
New York, NY
12/31/2023

AT4031s (OTS/row6s9/37cm@65°]/~9') > XLRs > MP10ii Ch3/4 (24/48)
AKG483s (OTS/row6s9/26cm@70°]/~9') > XLRs > MP10ii Ch5/6 (24/48)
--> mk41Vs (OTS/row6s9/20cm@65°]/~9') > Nbob KCY > Naiant PFA > MP10ii Ch7/8 (24/48)
DPA4061s (OTS/row6s9/AB100]/~9') > mma6000 > 1/8" TRS > MP10ii Ch9/10 (24/48)

SDHC > processed in Reaper (see notes below) > tracked in CDWav > encoded in dBpoweramp > tagged in Mp3tag

recorded, processed, tagged, and posted by djphrayz

Set 1
1.  Everything's Right
2.  Tube
3.  Ether Edge
4.  Reba
5.  Taste
6.  Ruby Waves
7.  A Life Beyond The Dream
8.  Character Zero

Set 2
1.  Down with Disease
2.  Harpua
3.  The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday >
4.  The Lizards
5.  Punch You in the Eye >
6.  AC/DC Bag
7.  Tela >
8.  Llama
9.  Wilson
10. The Sloth >
11. Divided Sky

Set 3
1.  McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters >
2.  Colonel Forbin's Ascent >
3.  Fly Famous Mockingbird
4.  Auld Lang Syne >
5.  Split Open and Melt
6.  You Enjoy Myself >
7.  Loving Cup >
8.  Possum
9.  encore break
10. Cavern >
11. First Tube >
12. Tweezer Reprise

Notes: Shout out to my friends that let me borrow their Schoeps caps and the gear to run them: jadedphan from team no drama (41Vs and mount), and Noah Bickart (KCY, KCY extension, and PFA). I am now quite tempted by the power of the dark side, so thank you for that. :)

Processing: Since a lot of people misunderstand my post-processing methods, I decided to spell them out.

Typical processing:
After splitting the polywav into stereo files with Sound Device's Wave Agent and dragging them into Reaper to create separate stereo tracks, I like to peak normalize the files to -0.2 dB.  After doing so, I typically adjust the panning and and level match each mic pair with the help of visualization tools like iZotope Insight, which helps get all the sources pretty close in overall loudness.  This faciliates rendering each source through the same limiter on the master track with identical settings for each source.  I like being able to hit -16 LUFS, if I can do so without pushing the limiter too hard.  Subsequently, each mic pair has roughly the same loudness, which enables curious listeners to hear the differences between each of my microphone pairs from a given night with minimum bias towards the loudest.  That's usually all there is to it in the DAW, and that's all I did on N1-N3.  But on those nights I also had the extra fun of mixing omnis with coincident hypers, which can get me feeling fiddly with micro delay to find the sweet spot of minimum phase correlation/cancellation between the mixed pairs.

Atypical processing (i.e. loud occurances that would force the overall loudness of the recording to be lower than I desire):
I typically stay away from straight EQs/filters. They cause me analysis paralysis, leaving me unconvinced that I did more good than harm; however, after normalizing the N4/NYE stereo files, I noticed that some local claps and balloon pops were depressing the levels, so I used the De-click module in iZotope Rx to scrub them out.  You can still hear them, but they're no longer louder than the music, which allows a much more reasonable normalized level for subsequent processing.  Then I noticed sets 2 and 3 had some explosion special effects that were not only too loud but added a little too much energy in the low end of the cards (AT4031s) and omnis (DPA4061s) on a few occasions.  I chose to use iZotope's Dynamic EQ on those two sources along with a FabFilter Pro-C compressor on all the sources (individually tailored) to limit the dynamic range on those special effects as transparently as I could manage and as briefly as possible.  Applied in parallel and mixed out quickly, I compressed two cannon shots in PYITE, a few bazooka launches in Llama, a few SOAM volcano rumbles, and the loud cap at the end of the NYE countdown.  Compression was not applied to whole sets but just those problem areas where the sound effect was several dBs louder than the music and would hit the limiter too hard.  After all of these problem areas were addressed, I matched the levels and rendered through the limiter as described above.  I hope you enjoy.

Thank you Phish for always keeping us guessing, and for letting us tapers do our thing.  Much love! -djphrayz

p.s. I don't have any tickets yet, but if I can get into the Sphere for a reasonable cost, I will pull the best recordings I possibly can.  I will likley think outside my usual box, since we won't have a pair of line arrays to give us bearings on the direct/reverberant sound ratio in the room.

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