AC/DC November 21, 2015 Adelaide Oval Adelaide, Australia Rock or Bust World Tour
01. Intro (missing) 02. Rock or Bust 03. Shoot to Thrill 04. Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be 05. Back in Black 06. Play Ball 07. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap 08. Thunderstruck 09. High Voltage 10. Rock 'n' Roll Train 11. Hells Bells 12. Baptism by Fire 13. You Shook Me All Night Long 14. Sin City 15. Shot Down in Flames 16. Have a Drink on Me 17. T.N.T. 18. Whole Lotta Rosie 19. Let There Be Rock (with Angus Young guitar solo) 20. Highway to Hell 21. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)
Taped from in front of barrier in area B front of left stack
Ok, this was a well played show, but amazingly, it wasn’t sold out. Also it wasn’t terribly enjoyable as the wind was blowing the sound around. Gully winds from the hills kept on blowing in intermittently, added to the southerly that was also coming from the other direction, so the sound was not a great feature for the night, many were very disappointed by the overall ambience, unless you were down front, it probably didn’t sound too good. The recording had hundreds of noticeable volume fluctuations and I have spent about 3 weeks sorting these out, sweating blood over it, remixed it about 4 times, went back to the beginning started from scratch and got a better result by painstakingly fixing each flaw by hand using spectral tools and very careful listening on a variety of systems to remove nasties in the high frequencies and maximise quiet patches where the wind blew the sound away.
The show now sounds pretty good for a stadium concert, at its best it’s probably an A-, there are some sections where the sound is muddy but they are not too many overall.
I moved around during the support acts searching for the best spot I could find, the sound was dire in the centre of the arena as the wind had nothing to stop it, so I moved over and found a decent spot sound wise just behind the barrier in front of the left stack, this was protected from the southerly, but there was nothing i could do about the gully winds apart from shield the mics with my hand, this stopped a lot of wind noise on the cards but didn’t help with the fluctuations, which I knew would have to be cleaned up in post production :-(
There were acres of spare space in area A in front of me (see pics) which was a total pisser, I know of people in area B that were upgraded to A section (the tickets cost the same whether you were in A or B), many tickets were not sold in the front section, no doubt held back so there would be good positions to flog on the night.
This meant that there wasn’t much of an audience feel apart from directly in front of stage as there was huge gap between various sections of the audience, with no crowd energy to feed off and the knowledge that we could all have been about 50 metres closer to the stage, the area I was in was really quiet and hardly anyone was clapping or making noise (good for taping but not for atmosphere). The only time there is audience nose is when some drunks moved in and began whooping during one song, fortunately they were behind me, thanks to the hyper cards, which doesn’t pick up much noise behind you, the noise wasn’t excessive (although the loudest noise of the night was when one of these goons whooped right next to my ear). They then moved away - so no ongoing problem.
In track three a drunk was tackled by the security and police, this meant people were moving around in front of me so there’s some muddiness in the sound. The guy was ejected, took about 6 security folks to subdue him.
2 CDs Godz golfball Audience Godz golfball SP-CMC-25 cards > SP 12 volt battery box > Sony PCM M10 > wav (16/44) > Adobe Audition (remove excess applause, levels and minor EQ) > XACT > flac (L8) FLAC 111:54 min. A-
