Casual live concerts recordings: my experience

Here is a brief account of my experience with amateur concert recordings. Blues isn't my favorite genre—though who hasn't been captivated by powerful pentatonic progressions or finger-picking techniques when first learning the guitar? In any case, my brother and I were lucky enough to attend this historic B.B. King concert on July 19, 1985—his only Italian date that year—which also featured various Italian bands and artists. Not only that, but we were able to bring our boombox inside (which was allowed back then) and, thanks to the courtesy of the Pistoia Blues Festival organizers, we even positioned the recorder directly on the stage. We certainly didn't intend to create a bootleg; for us, it was simply a way to preserve a memory. Nor could we have known that the stage was actually the worst possible spot for a field recording. Regardless, we ended up with a couple of terrible-quality cassettes—things we’d listen to occasionally before they faded into obscurity, only to be unearthed recently while I was sorting through my collection looking for tapes to reuse.



Years later, after doing some research, I realized I held a unique record of that event and immediately thought about digitizing it. However, upon listening—especially to the B.B. King tape—I noticed the abysmal quality: heavy distortion caused by tape saturation; a recording made with ALC (Automatic Level Control) that offered no manual adjustment; and VU meters pinned constantly between -2 and +3 dB. The result was an extremely limited dynamic range and a sound that was compressed beyond all reason and barely intelligible. I attempted a sort of restoration, trying to tame that chaotic wall of rhythm and bring B.B. King’s vocals and guitar to the forefront. I achieved some modest results, which I’ve now decided to share by posting a series of videos dedicated to the 1985 Pistoia Blues festival on YouTube—since the footage appears to have been unreleased until now. I wanted to share this find, and anyone who is a fan of B.B. King, the blues, or live music in general is welcome to check out the results of my recent efforts online.
Here the First of the series (WARNING: audience recording very band sounding):



Has anything like this ever happened to you?

 

On a related subject the last official Beatles release was based on a poor quality home demo John Lennon recorded onto cassette in 1977.
It took until the 2020s for technology to reach the point where the audio could be recovered to an acceptable quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Then_(Beatles_song)