PM sent.

PM sent.

Nice to get a recent confirmation that the documentary is still in the works,

The Immigrant Song, sung in Old Norse:

You'll have better luck getting replies in the Musician's Corner section of this site: https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/forum/17-musician39s-corner/

That sounds really good. Nice job.

Most of the rock music I listen to these days is live, including Zep's. And as much as their studio albums are burned into my soul, I prefer to hear their live shows. When I do revisit the studio albums, I'm always surprised at how different those arrangements are to the live versions. And as a bonus, I get to hear a bunch of songs they never played live, so it's kind of like discovering new Zep songs, which is ironic because I first got into live bootlegs because it was like discovering new Zep songs.

According to Wikipedia, which references a book about Zep's songs by Dave Lewis, "the hiss is feedback from an echo unit." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrant_Song Regarding the sound quality of the song, the latest version I have is from the Deluxe edition of the third album. To me, it sounds as good as the rest of the songs on that album. There's an intentional echo/watery quality to the guitar in places that's unusual, but otherwise it sounds similar to the rest of the disc.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out for it.

In general, they are what quora described, a standard against which other tracks can be compared to make sure they sound similar. There are programs that let you load the reference track into your mixing or mastering session and compare it on the fly to what you're working on. It lets you hear the differences between the two at the press of a button. There are also programs that let you copy the EQ of the reference track and apply it to the one you're working on, and others that let you copy the dynamics of the reference track to the new one. This kind of thing is helpful if you have an early mix of a song you like and want to make sure later versions of it sound similar. However, the reference track can also be a different song from the one you're working on and you use it to make sure the other songs on the album sound similar to it. In regard to the companion audio tracks specifically, the songs I listened to recently that are labelled reference mixes sound more like final mixes with slight, if any, variations from the versions that were originally released on LP back in the day. I suppose they could have been used as references, basically to say "hey, we're almost there. Make sure when we add the last few touch ups that the final version sounds like this."

I'm not sure when it was cut. I assume it was done right before an album was sent to be pressed to vinyl, so the original multi-tracks probably still have the low end intact. My assumption is that because the formative years of Jimmy's musical career were during the LP era, he still takes the truncated low end as being the way recorded music should sound. And because of that, he didn't take advantage of one of the big benefits of digital technology, namely deep bass, when he remastered the Zep catalog. Of course all of that is just a guess on my part, but it seems to fit the work he's done recently on the Zep remasters.

Thanks. I'm glad you like it. I sent you a message with the link.

I was a computer programmer for much of my career so I may have too much faith in technology, but I really think there will be a solution for shows like Bath. I'm not sure how long it will take, but things move quicker than you might expect. Although it's obviously a different situation, here's an image showing how fast computers evolved in their ability to create human faces from scratch. The group of black and white pictures on the left were generated in 2014 and the two color ones on the right were done in 2018. Here's the full article on how the faces were created for anyone who's interested: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144356/ai-image-generation-fake-faces-people-nvidia-generative-adversarial-networks-gans

For the studio recordings, I assume his bass sounds however Jimmy wanted it to sound. If it was supposed to be up front like on Ramble On, it was. If it was supposed to be farther down in the mix, it was. Also, the low end of his bass was absent from the original records because it was difficult to encode deep bass on LPs. The grooves had to be so large that the needles would jump out, so the low end was cut as a matter of course to prevent that. In concert, his bass would have had a tremendous impact, but the cassette decks on which most audience recordings and soundboards were made don't accurately capture it. The reason bands in the '70s initially started to play so loudly was because the PAs were inefficient and needed tons of power to produce bass that hit you in the chest. Doing that made the low end loud, so everything else had to be turned up to match it. (Eventually sheer volume became a bragging right, but it started out with an actual purpose.) And even if professional multi-tracks from live shows back then captured the power in Jonsey's bass, Jimmy isn't going to remaster them with killer low end like someone today would mix a rap album. He's just of a different era where that couldn't be done for so long that it's not part of his repertoire, even if it's easy to do today with digital technology.

Tried that one, too. It sounds different, but not really better than the original. I also tried 9/4/70 and some other famous audience recordings as well. Same thing happened. The problem is that each of them has a basic sound that is "baked" into them. I can make them sound different, but making them sound significantly better is difficult. And it's not just audience recordings either. I have the same issue with the 1980 soundboards. I can make them sound a little better, but not enough to make it worth the work I put into each release. I will definitely keep trying with the 7/7/80 show for sentimental reasons though, but the past few times I worked on it did not yield anything promising. I pick up new tools occasionally, so maybe one of them will help. Or I'll learn some new technique that can make a noticeable improvement.