Hello again listeners,

Several weeks ago I had the good fortune to view videos of two of the songs performed in concert by Neil & Crazy Horse on their European leg of the 2013 Alchemy tour. Editing was going down in Santa Monica, California.

RAMADA INN (from the album Psychedelic Pill) as performed in Dublin was totally insane with guitar work by Neil, vocal adlibs by Poncho and the relentless rhythm section of Billy and Ralph churning away. All of which served up one hell of an incredible conjuring. This, along with the camera work and visuals captured a unique rendition of this song.

Also, I got to view Neil playing Dylan’s BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND performed in Rome. He gets in the zone and then some. One amazing interpretation of this classic folk and protest song unlike any I have heard before, by anyone.

On other fronts, I have just finished reviewing the CD reference from Grundman Mastering of the new Colorado album. As I’ve talked about before in this column or letters to the editors replies, we always do a capture of the original mix masters, be they analog tape or digital hi-res sources of Neil’s new records and do the mastering at Grundman’s in Hollywood in the analog domain. This is done by Chris Bellman doing one mastering pass for the vinyl cutting, one for the hi-res 192/24 and another for the CD master. Never do we employ SRC – sample rate conversion to get to the CD. Because this is basically three manual passes of mastering as it is not automated there can be ever so slight if not imperceptible nuances unique to each pass. One such occurrence on the CD master had to be fixed today. I always listen to an exact replicate reference CD prior to sending to the plants so when I get manufactured test pressing CDs I can compare to the one that Grundman’s made for me. If there is a subsequent problem I can easily identify the source so it can be effectively addressed as to whether I missed something or the plant had an issue. I want you to hear the exact same quality that I hear.

Work is also ongoing for the unreleased album Homegrown. I have assembled analog master tapes to try and cut vinyl directly from the tapes, thus staying A to A (analog to analog). However there is much tape damage and it remains to be seen whether or not I utilize these newly assembled master tape reels or their previously transferred and digitized songs that were painstakingly archived by John Nowland at Redwood Digital many years ago. We master at 192/24 for both formats and then decide upon listening as to which sounds better. There are no rules except good sound no matter how we get there.

This and the rest of Volume 2 of Neil’s archives is being mastered and finalized now by Tim Mulligan with some select albums mastered by Chris Bellman.

And we are currently reviewing the songs that are to be on the next archives Volume number 3 which will complete one hell of a prolific and creative period in Neil’s musical journey right into the middle of the ‘80s.

See you back here soon.

John Hanlon