Frampton Comes Alive In 5.1

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In the Studio

Peter Frampton (front) and Chuck Ainlay at Backstage Studios, Ainlay’s private studio within Nashville’s Sound Stage facility

Working at Backstage Studios, Ainlay’s private studio within Nashville’s Sound Stage facility, Ainlay routed the original tracks from a Studer multitrack to the SSL Axiom-MT’s A-to-D converters and then into the 24-bit RADAR system. This setup allowed Ainlay the flexibility to add new material if necessary and eased the job of repairing analog dropouts and matching material from different shows. (Though most of Frampton Comes Alive was recorded 24-track at San Francisco’s Winterland, some tracks were recorded on 16-track at other venues.)

For example, on one of the Winterland multitracks, the edge track on which an audience mic had been recorded was full of dropouts. Fortunately, a total of four audience tracks had been recorded, so Ainlay was able to use the remaining three tracks to create a surround environment. “The problem track was one of two stage mics pointing out to the audience,” says Ainlay. “What I had to do was use the one good stage microphone and create a phantom center and sort of spread that out with effects across the front so that it sort of had the same sort of surround effect that the two [distant audience] mics were giving me.”

For songs that had been recorded on 16-track, Ainlay had to re-create a surround audience from only two audience tracks. “That was one of the reasons why we used ‘canned’ audience to fill in gaps from song to song and make it sound like you didn’t leave one venue and go to another,”explains Ainlay. Similarly, Ainlay found that on the 16-track tapes drums had been grouped onto a stereo pair plus a separate kick drum track. “Toms are more out front in recordings today, and on these recordings, they were basically nonexistent on those stereo tracks of drums,” he recalls. “In fact, I don’t even know if they used separate tom mics—it may have just been overheads. So in order to get the tom fill levels up, I had to do major rides on those stereo tracks, just to make those toms sound like they were up at a proper level. You can imagine trying to make the drums fill out a surround mix with a pair of tracks. It is pretty difficult.”

Even on the 24-track Winterland recordings, some drum tracks were compromised, because in the excitement of performance, Frampton inadvertently knocked the kick drum mic out of position. “We had the old big dance band bass drum with mufflers on the head and the back,” recalls Frampton. “I think I tripped over the bass drum mic, and it ended up facing offstage.”

“I could’ve gone in and replaced all of the drums with samples and everything, but then it wouldn’t have sounded like the original album at all,” says Ainlay. “I used what was there and just tried to EQ it and compress it and rely on all of the tricks that I used to have to do 20 years ago.”

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