Originally Posted by David
There's a lot of confusion about the term soundboard & what it means in relation to Fleetwood Mac concert recording. In the venue there is a PA system & a mixer. A guy stands at the mixer & controls the levels of every feed on the stage, whether it's vocal or instrument.
A true soundboard recording (of which the complete St. Louis is one) is the multitrack feed from that mixer, where everything is more or less mic'd directly, with audio cables. When you listen back to a tape of that soundboard mix, you will hear things a little differently from what you would have heard had you been in the audience at the concert. First of all, you'd hear the audience noise distantly, in the background, because the audience isn't mic'd into the mixer. Secondly, you'd hear varying levels because what the band needs to hear in its monitors (or what the sound tech needs to hear at the mixer) isn't always identical to what the audience needs to hear in the hall. This is true even in small venues.
Thirdly, you'd hear activity onstage that you wouldn't be able to hear in the audience. For example, if you listen to the few moments before Gold Dust Woman starts on the Baton Rouge 1978 soundboard tape, you'll hear a crackle followed by some buzzing. That's Lindsey's guitar tech (Ray, I guess) plugging in or unplugging an electric guitar from an amplifier. Ray has to hand Lindsey a different guitar for that song from what he was using on the song right before, Over My Head. The soundboard picks up the sound of the switcheroo because it is monitoring the activity onstage with audio cables.
A live album or a radio broadcast is generally made (at least in the old days) by microphone recording of the entire hall -- what you would hear, more or less, if you were in the audience. That's why when you listen to a concert broadcast on King Biscuit or Superstars Rock Concert Series, you can hear the crowd as if you were there. It is incorrect to refer to a radio broadcast of a live concert as a soundboard (even though nowadays live recordings mix microphone & soundboard technologies, which is called a matrix tape).
You can't hear the crowd roar on the soundboard recording of St. Louis but you can hear it roar on the concert video because that's a recording of the concert with microphones, placed strategically throughout the hall. The King Biscuit organization used to send around a van -- a mobile unit -- that would set up microphones & record the concerts, which would then be broadcast on the radio at a later date.
If you're in a band, you can tip your soundman & ask him to record the soundboard mix for you. He'll give you a tape (or CDs) of the soundboard mix, made from most of the instruments & vocals mic'd directly (which means the sound waves aren't traveling through the air, they're traveling as electrical signals through the medium of cables).
Whew! I know somebody is going to find some factual errors here. My knowledge of recording technology is minimal, but I think the general idea here is accurate. Don't refer to old radio broadcasts of concerts as soundboards!!
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