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My personal source mix/compilation of Tokyo 9/23/71


ZepHead315

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FLAC download: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ivmk5EXNO7M5FfLKT4ZyRPwRVUO1esJL

One of my favorite shows by Led Zeppelin has been their first show in Tokyo, Japan on September 23rd, 1971. Yet, strangely, I’ve never been satisfied with any release of this show. There are a whopping 13 sources circulating for this show. The three best ones are widely considered to be Source 7, found on Watchtower’s “Rock Carnival”, Source 5, found on Empress Valley’s “First Attack Of The Rising Of The Sun”, and Source 3, found on TDOLZ’s “Reflection From A Dream”. Each of these sources have several glaring flaws that prevent any of them from being definitive. For one, they’re all incomplete, but there are other issues as well: 


Source 7 has a great portion (between song banter, Celebration Day, That’s the Way, and everything from What Is and What Should Never Be onwards) that has undergone extensive noise reduction and EQ. The midrange is too bright and the music doesn’t “breathe”. Source 5 has pitch problems during the acoustic set, with some minor tape warbling here and there. And Source 3 has the bass and drums sounding a bit thin, plus it’s just overall slightly inferior to the other two sources.


With this in mind, I decided to combine the best of all three sources in order to give the best-sounding and most complete version of this show possible. I really must credit blackmikito over on Royal Orleans for giving me this idea. He posted in this show’s entry on the “What Place To Rest The Search” forum on what his ideal version of this show would be.


In essence, I followed his guide: I used Source 7 for the first third or so of the show, Source 3 for the majority of the acoustic set, and Source 5 for the remainder of the show. Below is a more detailed examination of how I mixed the sources.


Key: 
* – Rock Carnival
** – First Attack Of The Rising Of The Sun
*** - Reflection From A Dream


1.    Introduction **/*
2.    Immigrant Song *
3.    Heartbreaker */** (minor patch to Source 5 when Source 7 becomes muffled for a few brief seconds)
4.    Since I’ve Been Loving You *
5.    Black Dog *
6.    Dazed and Confused *
7.    Stairway to Heaven *
8.    Celebration Day **
9.    Bron-Y-Aur Stomp/That’s the Way ***
10.    Going to California ***/*
11.    What Is and What Should Never Be **
12.    Moby Dick **
13.    Whole Lotta Love **
14.    Communication Breakdown **


NOTE 1 – Much of the between song banter for tracks 2-7 were patched by Source 5, owing to Source 7 having undergone extensive noise reduction and EQ for those portions, as mentioned above.


NOTE 2 – I did NOT EQ these sources in any way. All I did was adjust the sound in order to make for a smoother and more balanced listening experience.

Feel free to listen to and share this wherever you want. If you don’t like it, there’s plenty of other versions of this show that should suit you.


Enjoy! :)
 

YouTube link (minus Stairway):

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

ZepHead315,

First, man, I love this show! What other '71 show has Bonham and Page so ON FIRE (plus a very-strong Percy)? Perhaps May 3rd in Copenhagen, but this is a better-recorded show. Maybe the best "Whole Lotta Love" ever. 39 minutes?! How many other songs does this rendition include? I lost count. 🙂

My take:

Source 7 is better-balanced in terms of EQ than Source 5, but also has significantly more distortion. Source 5 has the vocals and guitar a bit buried, and the very high end (cymbals) a little too high. So what I did today was create a custom EQ in iTunes for source 5 - basically a mid boost and a trailing off of the very high end. This brings out Page and Plant nicely. It does result in somewhat of a "bright" mix, which could be grating, but I don't see any other way to do it. And this show is best listened to cranked anyway.

On the mini acoustic set, I didn't notice much of a difference between source 5 and source 3. Therefore, I can just listen to First Attack of the Rising of the Sun as released. And I found that the mini acoustic set sounds better without my custom EQ, and "Moby Dick" sounds good with a Rock EQ. Use any EQ you want on "Goro Itoi Introduction". 😜

Going to listen to this show again RIGHT NOW!

ALB

 

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ZepHead315,

Upon further, further listening, I think you were correct about all the choices you made; source 7 is overall superior to source 5 for the songs you choose. It's less distant and more balanced. The distortion turned me off to it initially, but once I got used to it I realized you were right.

So thank you so much for your work on this! It sounds great.

Happy listening,

ALB

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1 hour ago, AchillesLastBand said:

ZepHead315,

Upon further, further listening, I think you were correct about all the choices you made; source 7 is overall superior to source 5 for the songs you choose. It's less distant and more balanced. The distortion turned me off to it initially, but once I got used to it I realized you were right.

So thank you so much for your work on this! It sounds great.

Happy listening,

ALB

My pleasure ALB! Glad you enjoyed it! I was surprised that, to my knowledge, no one's done a mix like this, cause it offers the best and most consistent sound imho.

On 6/11/2018 at 3:03 PM, Moby_Dick_Ale said:

According to http://www.bootledz.com/comparisons/6871.htm there are "only" 10 known sources 😉 for this show...

According to this thread there are 13, though I don't know if some of them are duplicates or whatever. It's crazy to think that there were THAT many tapers in the audience. Makes me wonder/hope that there's more circulating sources for the other Japan shows out there somewhere. Perhaps some really good quality ones too!

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On 6/12/2018 at 11:40 PM, ZepHead315 said:

My pleasure ALB! Glad you enjoyed it! I was surprised that, to my knowledge, no one's done a mix like this, cause it offers the best and most consistent sound imho.

According to this thread there are 13, though I don't know if some of them are duplicates or whatever. It's crazy to think that there were THAT many tapers in the audience. Makes me wonder/hope that there's more circulating sources for the other Japan shows out there somewhere. Perhaps some really good quality ones too!

I asked BootLedz.com whether is was 10 or 13 known recordings for this Japan show. This is his reaction...

"...Hey, there are 10 on silver disc at this time.  any more than that, they are not on silver discs yet..."

Makes me wonder though how on earth all these tapers got inside. There were at least 10 people inside the venue with recording equipment and with the reputation of Peter Grant smashing the equipment and beating up bootleggers it was quite a risk for them...

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On 6/15/2018 at 2:11 AM, Moby_Dick_Ale said:

I asked BootLedz.com whether is was 10 or 13 known recordings for this Japan show. This is his reaction...

"...Hey, there are 10 on silver disc at this time.  any more than that, they are not on silver discs yet..."

Makes me wonder though how on earth all these tapers got inside. There were at least 10 people inside the venue with recording equipment and with the reputation of Peter Grant smashing the equipment and beating up bootleggers it was quite a risk for them...

Yeah it might just be that some of them aren't on silver disc. Or it could be they're duplicates. That thread is kind of out of date so who knows?

Japan's always been more lax when it comes to bootlegging from what I understand. Like I said, I'm wondering if there's more out there from the other shows. We already had the "Super Stars" release of the 24th show which contained a new never before heard source. I wonder if there's an excellent audience recording out there for one of the other shows. I mean, what we have now isn't bad for the most part, but I'd LOVE for there to be an audience source out there for, say, the 29th, that is on par with Source 5 or Source 7 from this show.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Don't know how I missed this but ...thank you!! This is a great source mix, and I've had several. I helped work on Kong Of Monsters which was done a while back by acapulcogold on dime. I think this is a better merge overall. That later release of source 7, which is from Cel Day - What Is sounded terrible IMO. It was processed to hell, made me wonder if it was truly the same source as Watchtower's Rock Carnival. Maybe it deteriorated over the years so they noise reduced it to death. Source 5 is a much better choice for those songs. Great work!

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