Dec 1, 2000 6:08 PM, By Rick Clark

Recent history shows that however saleable a new entertainment delivery format may appear to manufacturers and industry pundits, the factor that usually determines success or failure is a rush of consumer enthusiasm. The average consumer generally buys into a new format not for the technology itself, but rather because there is some "must have" blockbuster title on hand to spur the upgrade. Just as in the early '80s, such sonically seductive music titles as Brothers in Arms, Graceland and Avalon boosted sales of CD players, the current growth of DVD player sales is accelerated by the DVD releases of such recent films as The Matrix and Fight Club.

Eager to find and market the first DVD-Audio blockbuster, the record companies have scoured their vaults for proven titles that can be re-issued in surround sound. Coincidentally, as music industry giant Universal began to look for a title to spearhead its DVD-A marketing efforts, Peter Frampton began pressuring the label to remaster his entire catalog. Not surprisingly, discussion soon centered on a surround sound re-release of Frampton's landmark concert album, Frampton Comes Alive.

As it happened, Frampton was already a fan of the new format and recently completed work on a surround sound DVD, Live in Detroit, with Chuck Ainlay, one of the new format's foremost remixing engineers. Universal quickly agreed that a 5.1 DVD-A re-release of Frampton Comes Alive would not only celebrate the 25th anniversary of the biggest selling live album in music history, but might also fuel consumer acceptance of the new medium.

"Peter and I have been talking about doing this for some time," says Chuck Ainlay. "A year ago we did the Live In Detroit DVD. We began talking then about how it would be great to get the old multitracks out and remix the Frampton Comes Alive. We kind of just pursued it, and it happened. Since we got into it, the Emerging Technologies Department of Universal got wind that we were actually doing a 5.1 remix and that I was doing it, and they've become really excited to make this a DVD-A release."

FINDING THE TAPES
As with any re-release project, the first task was to assemble the tapes. Bill Levenson, senior VP of A&R, Catalog Development for Universal Music Enterprises, located the original multitracks and had them sent to Ainlay. "Four shows were recorded and used on the original album, but there had to be another five or six shows recorded," says Levenson. "I sent them everything, which was over 40 reels of tape. It was a mammoth job just getting them all in one place."

Locating the scattered multitracks was only the beginning. Not only were the 25-year-old tapes spread out geographically, but many had been stored in a less-than-perfect environment; a number of the tapes needed work just to get them in playable condition. The original recordings had been made on Ampex 406 and 407 and Scotch 206, all recorded at 15 ips with Dolby A, and, while the Scotch tape was no problem, the Ampex reels required some serious work. "I think there was only one reel that we didn't have to bake, but all the other 40-some-odd reels of 2-inch tape had to be baked two or three times before we could get them to play," recalls Ainlay. "These are treasured items to us, so we were very conservative on our baking temperature and times. We didn't want to over-bake it so that the oxide would just fall off."

IN THE STUDIO
Working at Backstage Studios, Ainlay's private studio within Nashville's Sound Stage facility, Ainlay routed the original tracks from a Studer multitrack to the SSL Axiom-MT's A-to-D converters and then into the 24-bit RADAR system. This setup allowed Ainlay the flexibility to add new material if necessary and eased the job of repairing analog dropouts and matching material from different shows. (Though most of Frampton Comes Alive was recorded 24-track at San Francisco's Winterland, some tracks were recorded on 16-track at other venues.)

For example, on one of the Winterland multitracks, the edge track on which an audience mic had been recorded was full of dropouts. Fortunately, a total of four audience tracks had been recorded, so Ainlay was able to use the remaining three tracks to create a surround environment. "The problem track was one of two stage mics pointing out to the audience," says Ainlay. "What I had to do was use the one good stage microphone and create a phantom center and sort of spread that out with effects across the front so that it sort of had the same sort of surround effect that the two [distant audience] mics were giving me."

For songs that had been recorded on 16-track, Ainlay had to re-create a surround audience from only two audience tracks. "That was one of the reasons why we used `canned' audience to fill in gaps from song to song and make it sound like you didn't leave one venue and go to another," explains Ainlay. Similarly, Ainlay found that on the 16-track tapes drums had been grouped onto a stereo pair plus a separate kick drum track. "Toms are more out front in recordings today, and on these recordings, they were basically nonexistent on those stereo tracks of drums," he recalls. "In fact, I don't even know if they used separate tom mics—it may have just been overheads. So in order to get the tom fill levels up, I had to do major rides on those stereo tracks, just to make those toms sound like they were up at a proper level. You can imagine trying to make the drums fill out a surround mix with a pair of tracks. It is pretty difficult."

Even on the 24-track Winterland recordings, some drum tracks were compromised, because in the excitement of performance, Frampton inadvertently knocked the kick drum mic out of position. "We had the old big dance band bass drum with mufflers on the head and the back," recalls Frampton. "I think I tripped over the bass drum mic, and it ended up facing offstage."

"I could've gone in and replaced all of the drums with samples and everything, but then it wouldn't have sounded like the original album at all," says Ainlay. "I used what was there and just tried to EQ it and compress it and rely on all of the tricks that I used to have to do 20 years ago."

STRUCTURING THE MIX
The original tapes may have been something of a mess, but mixing the project was relatively straightforward. Thanks to the SSL console's facility for making stereo and 5.1 mixes simultaneously, Frampton and Ainlay were able to create both stereo and 5.1 remixes of Frampton Comes Alive at the same time, an economy that pleased Universal's Levenson and eased the workload for Ainlay and Frampton. To monitor in both formats, Ainlay used Backstage's self-powered KRK E-8s with an M&K subwoofer and bass management crossover.

"My intention for this project was to provide the listener with a good seat in the house and not surround the listener with all the instruments. Rather, it was my intention not to redesign the idea of the original live record, but to try and enhance it and bring it up to today's technology and then offer a 5.1 mix of it," Ainlay explains.

One area where Ainlay diverged from the original mix was in the level of the audience tracks. "That audience must've been huge—you turn up the audience mics and it is like white noise. It must've been deafening there at the time," Ainlay laughs. Though the audience interaction with the music helps create much of the magic on Frampton Comes Alive, Ainlay, Frampton and Levenson decided to lower the audience tracks slightly for the 5.1 mix. "The original album was a little over the top with the audience," says Ainlay. "If you listen to the [original album], there is so much coloration from the audience mics being so cranked up that to make the remix sound good, we backed off a little bit. I wanted to keep that energy and vibe, but I wanted to also make it sound warmer and richer, with a little more contact with the source. We tried to not redefine what the record is, but we tried to bring it more up-to-date and have more power, and so there was slightly less use of the audience."

On the original Frampton Comes Alive, audience reaction and sounds were added to the smaller venue recordings to match the feel of the Winterland recordings. Because "Show Me the Way" had not yet been released in any form, the audience response was less than more familiar numbers. On the original album, Frampton added more audience response to make it appear that it was as recognizable to the audience as more familiar material.

"The remix makes you feel like you are really sitting at the mixing console, and that is the best seat in the house," enthuses Frampton. "I've engineered a lot of my own stuff, and I mixed `Show Me the Way' and `Shine On' from the live record, because Chris Kimsey had to go off to another project. So it was quite interesting to hear someone else mix `Show Me the Way,' and—what a bastard—he made it sound better."

Frampton is particularly pleased with the way Ainlay used the 5.1 surround sound field to enhance an already historical musical document. "I think it helped to have a different perspective, someone who wasn't involved in the original project," says Frampton. "Chuck's got such a great pair of ears, and he knows exactly what he is doing. It was great to hear the extra warmth that he gave to the instruments, warmth that wasn't originally there on the tapes. When you really sit down in front of the speakers and you concentrate and do an A/B, you go `Wow!'" Frampton continues. "It feels like you are there at the show."

In addition to the surround mix, the new DVD-A version features other value-added elements: There are four new tracks, three of which were from other concert recordings made that same year, and one live-for-radio session. The new tracks are "Just the Time of Year," "Nowhere's Too Far for My Baby," "White Sugar" and "Day's Dawing."

And, encouraged by this first foray into mining its vaults, Universal is already looking at other candidates for future DVD-A releases, including The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East, Layla by Derek & The Dominoes and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

5.1 FORENSICS
Surround Audio Might Require Some Detective Work—And Having a Good Lawyer's Not a Bad Idea, Either
By Dan Daley

As the major labels gear up to feed the consumer pipeline with DVD-A product, most will discover that there are often major hidden pitfalls when it comes to reformatting archival material. After sitting in a vault for two decades, many so-called master tapes are in poor physical condition, and if the tapes have been improperly stored or cataloged, then anything from a guitar solo to an entire reel of tape can go missing.

MANAGING THE MUSIC
"The problem in the music business is that 25 years ago, no one had any concept about the future uses of the recordings," observes Blaine Graboyes, founder and creative director of Zuma Digital. The multimedia authoring and audio facility in New York City has been doing 5.1 remixes for a range of media, including film, television, advertising and music videos. "Now you pull a tape out—if you can find it—and you find five takes of the same song. They all sound the same to you; only one is the approved version, and the engineer's been dead for 20 years," Graboyes explains.

Graboyes applies terms picked up from Zuma's corporate clients to describe the problems that the music industry faces as DVD-Audio attempts the transition from a novelty to a mass-market product. "The biggest issue in doing any kind of repurposing of previously used creative elements is `knowledge management'—the ability to know where all the assets of a project are and how to retrieve them," he says. "And the absolute biggest problem that surround music faces on a day-to-day basis is missing assets, from pieces of recordings to the media itself. The second biggest problem is missing records of the asset. That is, the documentation that tells you things like how to use the asset, which pieces the artists intended to be used and which were not, and where to find the right pieces on the media. Without either of those things, you're not going to be completely successful in repurposing them for new media."

The stories of tapes moldering away forgotten in broom closets, dumped in the trash or auctioned off for a few dollars when studios and record labels close down are legion in the entertainment business. Proper archiving and record-keeping of the music media has been almost nonexistent. And that's compounded, Graboyes adds, by the fact that the entertainment industry, in general, is a transient one. "The turnover rate in the music and film businesses is incredibly high," he says. "One of our clients has had four different assistants, all of whom get up to speed on where things are and then leave, and the next person has to start all over again."

It's not just the golden oldies that are missing the most in music. Even relatively recent recordings show up with missing pieces, slowing down or completely halting the remixing process. Jake Nicely, co-owner of Seventeen Grand Recording in Nashville and one of the leading multichannel remixers in the music industry, was contracted this year to do a DVD-Video multichannel remix of a live album by the country group Alabama. Though the record was originally released in stereo in 1998 on RCA Records, pieces of the master recording quickly went missing, and Nicely had to turn to gumshoe detective techniques to get the project moving.

"When they recorded the concert, they didn't have enough tracks on the 48-track tape for the audience tracks and the MC's announcements, so they slaved those off onto a DA-88 tape," Nicely recounts. "But when it came time to do the [multichannel] remix, no one could find the DA-88 tape. This is a live record, so the audience tracks are incredibly important to making it work, especially in surround. We started calling around, trying to track the tape down, and everyone kept saying, `Yeah we had it, but we turned it over to so-and-so,' and so-and-so told us they turned it over to someone else, and so on and so on down the line.

"Finally, I found out the tape had been over at TNN [country cable channel The Nashville Network] from when Gaylord [Entertainment] used it in post-production for a broadcast," continues Nicely. "So I drove over there and asked their tape log person for it, and she had no record of it. It had never been logged into their vault, so she said it couldn't be there. But I asked her if I could look around in the vault anyway, and in there I happened to glance at a pile of tapes in a little bin marked `To Be Erased,' and there it was. The tape girl said she was supposed to erase the tapes for reuse but just hadn't gotten around to it. Had I gotten there a day later..."

Chuck Ainlay has also run into the kinds of problems that result when documentation is missing. Ainlay has recently been working on a 25th anniversary 5.1 re-release of Peter Frampton's huge '70s hit Frampton Comes Alive and describes the kind of problems that crop up even after all the media assets are collected. "It was a live recording, but there were parts that were fixed with overdubbing in the studio afterward," Ainlay explains. "We had very little documentation on the tapes, and we had to rely on Peter's fantastic memory when it came to which parts were the ones used on the final version. In doing surround remixes, you want to stay true to the original vision of the recording, so every little piece counts."

Most of the Frampton record's tracks were taken from shows at San Francisco's Winterland venue, but audience effects from other concerts were also added to the original album. "If you listen closely [to the original], you can hear where you go from one crowd sound to another in different songs," notes Ainlay. "There's three different crowds on the record; they didn't have the digital editing and the ability to do crossfades like we have now. So to get the same crowd noises in the same places, you listen for cues, like a guitar note or a firecracker, and then you sample it and put it in."

Many of the issues raised in surround music have been seen before in surround for film and are now showing up in the production process while creating surround audio for DVD-Video. Cynthia Banach, VP of operations and a mixer at Zuma Digital, notes that she increasingly encounters poorly stored tape elements and M&E tracks with missing sound effects. In the latter case, she has more than once had to go out and redo a film's Foley effects, using the original video release as a guide track. This slows down the work considerably, with additional levels of approvals required when new sound elements are added to a project.

THE LEGAL ANGLE
Banach has had her work slowed down at times, and sometimes stopped altogether, when music tracks for films arrive with songs completely different from those on the original release. It often happens that the company that now has the rights to the film may not have been able to get approvals renewed for the DVD soundtrack. "People acquire the rights to distribute films, sometimes from estates or from other means, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all the elements are automatically also licensed," says Banach.

And the need to fill up to four more channels of information is already leading to the addition of elements that were not part of the original artistic entity. In one instance, Jake Nicely was working on a DVD music video of a George Strait concert. "The acoustic/electric guitar player had been having technical problems onstage, so the instrument wasn't recorded on a couple of songs," Nicely explains. "It was something that was important to the song and the mix, so I picked up a guitar and played the part myself and recorded it and put it into the mix. We could have called the original guitar player, but he was out on the road and that would have slowed the whole project down, plus added an additional cost to the mix. So I just figured to do it myself."

That seemed like an obvious solution, and in this instance carried little liability, either artistic or legal, because the part being replaced was not done by any component of the artistic entity that would be compelling to consumers. In other words, people buy the DVD because they are interested in George Strait, not his hired band.

But the surround post-production process offers the potential for much more wide-ranging enhancements to music projects. What happens if musical parts played by a band member are irretrievable for a surround remix or can't be resampled? Does the project stop? Is the band member contacted to play the part again? Suppose that person refuses or asks for too much money? Can the rights holder of the sound recording—which is very often not the artist—pay for a less-expensive replacement part to be played and recorded? If that is the case, must the rights holder advertise that the re-released surround version of the recording does not contain solely original elements? A similar scenario has played out hundreds of times in recent years as oldies and classic rock bands headed out on tours years after their last hits, often with few or in some cases, none, of the band's original members onstage. Often, none of the original band members have any legal rights to the names of their own bands. Court cases have been filed in the past seeking to put the musical equivalent of truth-in-labeling into such shows.

What are the legal implications when elements are irretrievably lost? Ken Kraus, a music business attorney at Loeb & Loeb in Nashville and who was involved in the negotiations to bring Steely Dan records into the DVD domain, says the answers are unclear at this point, but that DVD-Audio appears to be a new minefield in the music business. "A sideman added to a record or deleted from one is fairly simple—the employer owns his services," Kraus says. "But in the case of a band member, it's more difficult. What's the artist's claim to the artistic entity, and what documentation does the artist have? Also, it becomes important as to how a record is represented to the buying public, as either containing all the original elements from the first version or with new elements that might change the recording. All of that has to be clear before a label should authorize a remix.

"Then there's the issues regarding the record labels' responsibilities for the safekeeping of the masters," Kraus continues. "What if the label loses the tape? That happened for a period with Steely Dan. There's an awful lot of tape out there, and no one knows where it is. What losses can the artist allege if they're not able to re-release a recording and make more money from it, because the label can't find the tapes?"

Could studios be held liable for being party to artistic liberties in the pursuit of surround mixes? There is nothing specific in the legal literature yet on the matter, but precedent seems to indicate that they could. Over the last three years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued several large CD replicators on the grounds that they were manufacturing discs containing material that was not properly licensed. And the suits have been successful—RIAA has won over $25 million in judgments against some replicators, including a record $10 million from Americ Disc alone.

It's unlikely that anyone will try to fill in missing guitar parts of a Jimi Hendrix record with a ringer. But what happens when someone hires Jimmy Vivino to re-create the rhythm guitar part of a Foghat record from 1976 because the tape was damaged? "It's a matter of how significant the part is, and how it's represented," says Kraus.

As Zuma Digital's Graboyes points out, regardless of who owns the rights to musical material, there needs to be some acknowledgment of the implicit right of the original artist to maintain the integrity of the original artistic vision. "On the other hand, though, we also have to realize that musicians are at the extreme end of the artistic temperament," he says, "and we have to find ways to balance those needs with the need to get work done. All the while, we have to keep in mind that the financial records are part of the documentation of the assets, too. There's a lot to watch out for."