I’ve never been pleased with the sound on this CD. It was recorded, as you can see, in 1971. Zappa always had the best stage equipment and best studio equipment, but the state of the art at that time was more like Rhode Island than Alaska. If you’re old enough, you might remember what live recordings sounded like at that time: distant, blurry, with way too much ambient noise – more like a bootleg from a smuggled tape recorder than a polished studio product. At the time, that was considered a plus, the musical equivalent of raw oysters.
The problem with this CD, in my estimation, is not quite that. Like the hastily scrawled cover (inset), I don’t think Zappa cared that much for this “set.” I did. It was pretty much the same set list from the first (November 1970) and second (April 1971) Zappa concert I attended. I want it to sound better.
I pretty much stuck with my recently successful strategy to accomplish this. Break down each track into separate frequency bands, kinda like a cheap equalizer. But first, I ripped all the files to a desktop folder named “Fillmore.” ImDB correctly identified and numbered the tracks, so the scut work was already done. I made subfolders within the main folder for each track session. Here is what happened for each:
Band 1: 0-120Hz. Not much to do here except a boost. Quite a large boost actually, since the bass range was way down in the `20% range of the 16-bit 44.1K sampled range. I normalized that to 80% and did no more with it.
Band 2:120-3200Hz. Did absolutely nothing with this – that’s basically most of the original recording.
Band 3:3200-7900. This is where God lives and I made his home more comfortable. It is also the home for crispiness of cymbals, pedal-depressed panchromatic resonance,
and other highly ambient domains. I normalized this to 80% of full range and laid a “midtones following” echo on the 1.4K range. That may sound stupid, but it means the overtones of 1.4K (below the filtered range) at 4.2K, 5.6K, and all the other integer-multiples of 1.4K in this range will be echoed lightly will the fundamental and its first overtone (2.8K) remain unmolested. A little aural spice, but not too much.
Band 4:7900-22050. I know for a fact that I don’t hear most of this range, but my speakers can produce it and I truly believe there is visceral pleasure in this range even if only the little hairs on your forearms know it’s happening. This range was also practically non-existent in the recording. I hard limited it (forced to 100%, with a greater boost of low amplitude information) and normalized back to 80%. Realizing this might be a mistake; I put some reverb on it. That’s what audio guys do when they think they fucked something up, put reverb on it. The reverb I put on it had the name “last row seats,” which is as close to the exit doors as you can get
I punched the master volume down 6 dB and created a mixdown of these 4 tracks (all equal in volume – set to 0 dB) and produced a track that had nothing in the red zone. These were all normalized to 90% and saved in their tiny little folders.
Yes, it was a mistake to dick around with that high band. There were screechy artifacts produced in the 9750-10050 range that really kicked up the forearm hairs. So I applied a notch filter with a center frequency of 9890 and it felt a whole lot better.
The track “Happy Together” had a special problem. When Zappa gives his closing comments at the end of the set, there is squawky feedback. I brought up a spectral view, pinpointed the noise, and pretty much cut it out.
I used Nero to proof the project and didn’t love what I heard. So I used the tools provided with Nero Burning ROM to boost the midrange (the “Band 2” area I left untouched in the original processing) and spread the stereo out a little more – too much had appeared to come from the center.
Ah, yes, that’s it. That’s the concert I remember. It might sound horrible to anyone else with normal hearing or a different type of hearing loss, but it sounds just fine to me and that’s who I did it for.
9:55:17 PM 
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