I was surfing over on thew Allman Brothers Hittin' the Note website and I noticed that they are selling something now called "Instant Live" CDS. These basically are soundboard recordings of the just played sets which apparently can be pre-ordered or bought on site.
What I'm wondering is how they sound? They should be good because they're off the soundboard, but obviously, they really can't have much production/engineering/tweaking as they're up for sale like right after the show.

The Instant Live website lists a bunch of artists, so this may be a new type of distribution system. It sure would be great to have a CD of the show you just saw, especially if it was on of those red hot, everybody's on fire nights :thmbsp:

Here's the Instant Live link, FYI:

Instant Live (http://www.instantlive.com/)

I have bought the Instant Live discs at an Allmans show and once at a Ratdog show, both times they were ready to go less than 30 minutes after the end of the shows and they sound very good. Kind of sterile, as many soundboard recordings tend to be, but still nice to be able to play it in the car on the way home!

I have bought 3 for Dead performances I saw and 1 for an Allman Bros gig I saw. While I have heard the occassional criticism, these 4 all sound really good to me. I did grab them weeks after the show as opposed to as soon as it was over. Maybe that helped with the quality. There is no manipulation or improvements that standard live albums feature, but that is the way I wanted it. The price is also reasonable. No complaints have I.

Bottom line: If you were at the gig and thought it something special, go for it. If you are a big fan of the band and collect live performances, well, its gonna be better than one done by a taper in the audience, although I have my share of those.

I have very mixed feelings on this, especially with Live Nation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation) . I sure wouldn't pay their rip off prices for the US shows but then now that they own things
like Pink Pop festival, etc. I would be tempted to get the music I liked from
artists "kept from" the US public. But not yet...


Carl

Since DC area AKers are chiming in, I will add my $0.02 (while mixing metaphors). The instant live stuff is a great idea. I'm always looking for the bootleg of a show that I have enjoyed and am generally stuck with another muffled, audience-taped show that I listen to once. Soundboards are almost always better than an audience-taped bootleg (with exceptions, of course).

Ken

I think I am in the minority in that I do prefer a well-recorded audience tape to a soundboard recording. But that could be largely due to my spending several years taping every show I went to. Also, some audience tapes are substantially better than others, an experienced taper running a nice pair of AKG mics and a DAT deck will pull a substantially better-sounding tape than the guy with a minidisc deck and a single-point stereo mic taped to his shoulder.

I find that while I really do like the instant live recordings, if you want to hear what the show actually sounded like to the people who were in attendence you have to get an audience recording.

I dig where you are coming from. A taper who knows his craft can produce a really good recording. The Beacon Theater has some kind of union thing whereby there is no instant live so I have to go AUD for shows from there. I have a RatDog and some Allmans that are really cool as you hear the group of fans around the taper reacting. Of course that is predicated on them being cool. If the taper is around an obnoxious drunk or some airhead, then the result is different.

Solution: Get both!

Some audience shows are indeed fantastic and have more "life" than a soundboard. The recent David Gilmour tour produced some super sounding shows. Some of the Dead and Zep shows that have been "matrixed" with a soundboard layered with an audience recording are truly the best of both worlds.

I dig where you are coming from. A taper who knows his craft can produce a really good recording. The Beacon Theater has some kind of union thing whereby there is no instant live so I have to go AUD for shows from there. I have a RatDog and some Allmans that are really cool as you hear the group of fans around the taper reacting. Of course that is predicated on them being cool. If the taper is around an obnoxious drunk or some airhead, then the result is different.

Solution: Get both!


The last time I saw the Allmans at the Beacon (98?) some people had 'recording studios' set up. Seems the AB didn't mind getting recorded but they sure hated being photographed which to me makes no sense and I did have a backstage pass and photographers pass.

Compared to their early days when I saw them in 69 (and a few times after that in the 70s) they were a pale imitation of what I remembered. Greg Allman looked bored as hell.