This remaster was inspired by Fred Vail who introduced The Beach Boys here on their first Concert album! This is a complete concert remaster with some tweaks, fixes and alterations. At first all I was attempting to do was to improve Fred Vail’s vocal introduction by adding some lower end, upping the volume on his speech vs. the crowd and a general remaster of the final mix. But it turned into more!
I hadn’t listened to the concert in a while and I noticed that the lead vocals were in the left channel with reverberation in the right. While this 2001 remaster is nice and clear, I wanted to balance the vocals and remaster the first track to go with the Fred Vail introduction. Because that turned out so well, I decided to do the entire album.
I separated the album into layers of vocals and instruments and put it back together. The lead now can be heard out of both speakers with a studio like stereo sound. I then started to remaster the new final mixdown, but noticed it really made prominent some flaws in the tracks.
First I could really hear low frequency hum in quieter sections, and even in some areas with the crowd cheering. I had to listen to the entire show about 4 times to get all of them out. Once that was done I started noticing little clicks and noises that didn’t necessarily sound like stage sounds, but if they were, it didn’t sound natural so I removed them. Then with the new master revealing bass volume surges in the original track, I had to manually adjust levels back down to normal. And finally, I noticed obvious rough transitions in the original mixdown between songs that I fixed.
If you have the original album or CD from 2001, compare it with the following sections that have been fixed in this video. At 0:01 Fred Vail’s introduction is a lot easier to hear and powerful and the crowd fades into Fun Fun Fun naturally. At 5:25 there was a rough fade into Mike’s speech. There’s a more natural crowd noise decay now. At 5:41 you can now hear Al’s rhythm guitar which was almost mute on the original, at 12:36 you can hear Denny’s live drum roll closing the song now, at 27:28 I Get Around used to have a very obvious abrupt edit from screaming to Mike’s introduction. Now the crowd decays more normally and the levels of Mike’s speech and at 27:38 the decay and levels of the instruments on the stage are all corrected to sound live and unedited as they flow into the vocal opening.
You may not have paid attention to these moments when listening to the originals, but compare these moments with the original mix. The mix on this album doesn’t include the I Get Around lead guitar solo and I thought about adding it to the mix, but when coupled with the video footage, it didn’t look like it was played in the video either, so I left it out, which makes it sound a bit different from the album.
On the final track Johnny B. Goode, it felt like it was sped up. They boys may have played it that way live (even though this live album was
