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Dick's Picks volumes 3 & 4 now available on vinyl from Brookvale Records!


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Brookvale Records will be releasing ALL of the Grateful Deads "Dick's Picks" series on BEAUTIFUL Heavyweight, 180 gram vinyl!  Volumes 3 and 4 are now available for pre-order @ WWW.BROOKVALERECORDS.COM !!! 

 

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Volumes 3 and 4 are the first in the Brookvale Records Dick's Picks series to be mastered by the legendary Jeffrey Norman, from the original master tapes!  

 

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Mr Norman talks about mastering vol 3 and 4.

 

“I was excited to get the chance to remaster the early Dick’s Picks’ releases for vinyl…they were originally mastered for CD in 1995-96, and I was looking forward to hearing the 1/4″ source tapes once again, 17 years later. What I didn’t expect was the dramatic improvement the new mastering gives to these classic releases. The original CD resolution is 44.1KHz/16bit (as is any released CD), while the mastering I am now doing for the vinyl releases is 96KHz/24bit. I’m now using a state-of-the-art analog to digital converter (Pacific Microsonics Model 2)….and I’ve probably gotten better at doing this over the years! I used the original CDs as a guide for the new mastering, but when listening to the CDs I feel like I’m listening in black and white, while the new mastering feels like I’m listening in color. It’s very exciting!

 

A few observations: the mixes for Dick’s Picks Vol. 3 and Vol. 4 couldn’t be more different. The Pembroke Pine show (Vol.3) is quite bass strong and powerful. The Fillmore East show (2/13-14/12) on the other hand is very bright and a little bass shy. Both represent the ears and interpretations of the mixers at the time (Betty Cantor Jackson at Pembroke Pines, and Bear at the Fillmore East), and both capture the quality and excitement of these shows. I did some equalization on both shows to enhance the presentation but kept true to what the original mixers intended. As typical of all Grateful Dead shows, both these two shows are very dynamic….there’s a wide range of volume from quiet to very loud. I tried to keep the dynamics intact, with very little limiting, using limiting mainly as protection against digital overs.

 

In choosing the songs for each side of vinyl, the goal was to be true to the flow of the show and keep the fidelity as high as possible. There is a physical limitation to the length of a vinyl side….if it gets too long there is a loss of bass and level. Ideally the sides would be no longer than 20 minutes, and for the most part that was accomplished. However there are a few sides that are longer than ideal, but because of the way the music lays out there was no way around a few longer lengths. Also because of those side length constraints, there are some songs that had to be split in two (i.e. Vol.4 Dark Star, The Other One, and Lovelight)…sorry, you’re going to have to flip the record to get the entire “good stuff”.

 

Considering that these tapes are 40 years old (in the case of Vol. 4, Fillmore East), they sound phenomenal! There are some issues on the original recording that can’t be fixed (i.e.. L/R movement side to side in Vol. 3 Eyes of the World), but that in no way takes away from this great music.”
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