Yes
Providence Civic Center
Providence, Rhode Island
June 10, 1976
Solo Albums Tour

Yestorrent

An outstanding 1976 audience recording of uncertain origin. One of the absolute best for audio quality. Remaster begun in 2010 and completed in 2023 by Balrog and Lestat using the Magic Bullet.*

Our most sincere thanks to Kev and Carl of Team Lampinski for allowing us to distribute this recording.

Audio format: 96kHz 24-bit **

1. Intro – Apocalypse
2. Siberian Khatru
3. Sound Chaser
4. I've Seen All Good People
5. Gates Of Delirium
6. Long Distance Runaround
7. Patrick Moraz Solo
8. Clap (Steve Howe Solo)
9. Jon Anderson Solo
10. Heart Of the Sunrise
11. Ritual
12. Roundabout
13. Starship Trooper

Yes
Jon Anderson - Vocals and various instruments
Steve Howe - Guitars
Patrick Moraz - Keyboards
Chris Squire - Bass guitars
Alan White - Percussion

Recording Lineage: Unknown taper and equipment (probably Nakamichi 550 with high-end microphones)

Transfer Lineage (performed by Carl Morstadt): Maxell cassettes -> Nakamichi CR-3A -> M-Audio Firewire Audiophile 2496 -> WAV

Lestat Remaster (2010-2021): WAV -> Adobe Audition -> Izotope Ozone -> Izotope RX -> WAV

Balrog/Lestat Remaster (2023): WAV -> Magic Bullet -> Adobe Audition -> TLH -> FLAC

Equalization and other work to reveal detail as the audience heard and felt it to every extent possible. No alteration of band-crowd-venue sound balance or reduction of local crowd noise as they are perfectly natural in the recording and do not interfere with music signal.

* The Magic Bullet is a whimsical name given to a process for improving the sound quality of audience recordings discovered by Balrog after years of research. The process is less precise but much less labor-intensive than the iterative process used by Lestat in the past. Lestat's process still produces finer results but the time and effort saved by the Magic Bullet is significant. Its efficiency has allowed us to remaster and share some old master tapes that otherwise would never have seen the light of day (see Notes at end).

Balrog Notes

You may find it hard to believe that a superb audience recording of Yes from 47 years ago has suddenly surfaced but it's true. Lestat and I have been working on this show off and on since the Lampinski tapes began to be circulated, years longer than any other project we've done. Kevin and Carl of Team Lampinski were generous enough to let us have the raw source but asked us not to circulate it because, although the cassettes were found in Dan's collection of master tapes, the concert wasn't recorded by Dan. Now that sufficient time has passed, Kevin and Carl have agreed to allow us to distribute it and we're extremely grateful to them.

However it was recorded, this concert sounds a lot like a Lampinski master tape. The taper was almost certainly using a Nakamichi 550 portable cassette deck with high-quality microphones from excellent seats. The Providence Civic Center (now the Amica Mutual Pavilion) is, in my opinion, the best of the New England indoor arenas for taping a concert. The acoustics are worlds better than the old Boston Garden and there are no dead spots.

There's something special about the Summer 1976 North American (Solo Albums Tour) with the lasers and the extraordinary “Crab Nebula” stage. I didn't find out about this concert in time to get tickets but I did go to Boston Garden on June 18 and Colt Park in Hartford on June 19. I recorded Colt Park, an outdoor venue, on a monaural cassette recorder. It was an incredible performance, if not the most enjoyable concert experience, and it may become a future Magic Bullet project.

Some of you may remember the BLG (Balrog, Lestat, Gromek) releases of Yes in Boston and Providence in 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980. This recording is of similar quality but I'm sorry to say that Gromek has retired from doing artwork for audience recordings. We're thinking about doing fresh transfers of those shows and re-releasing them.

I have no photographs from this Providence concert so I've included a folder containing the ones I took at Boston Garden eight days later on June 18. If they look familiar, it's because they've been used in many other places with no credits, and in a few cases with fictitious credits. It's my own fault because I didn't watermark them.

Lestat Notes

Source and Remaster:

Of the four or five long-circulating, absolute best sound quality, full- stereo audience recordings (ARs) from Yes’ 1976 tour I’m aware of, two especially stand out: Milwaukee and Detroit, the latter occurring same night as the Yesshows selections so sometimes omitted from shares when copyright a potential issue. Both were as ‘top shelf’ as any AR could be at the time. Detroit also reveals just how savagely someone mixed out things Yes actually did before the official release but that’s a whole essay for another time.

None of these ARs had the kind of handling we do and it’s depressingly evident. For decades I’ve been wishing the original Detroit master might turn up but it’s probably too degraded by now anyway.
The pristine recording offered here thankfully found us, and while possibly a first-generation tape dub, it probably would have been done Nakamichi to Nakamichi and made by Lampinski himself, so it’s as good as we could hope for.

Getting its stunning detail fully audible has been the most difficult of any such project I’ve ever tackled. The taper’s location was probably dead center but so close to stage some stack output went right over the microphones. Vocals most notably sounded distant and drowned, and it affected snares, toms and even some of Moraz’ keys. I worked on it for more than a year and while much progress was achieved remained unsatisfied. When it was then decided around 2011 not to distribute the recording for other reasons, I was frustrated enough, put it aside, and forgot about it.

Then around 2020, with the Covid Pandemic raging and in need of some serious music escape, I revisited it if only for personal and closed circle enjoyment. More progress was made, but still not everything it needed. The detail was there, and if my familiar audio tools couldn’t dig all of it out then something new was needed.

Enter the “Magic Bullet.” It finally got “P76” sounding close enough to what I know that audience heard/felt, wherever their seats were. The MB took it over the finish line perfectly.
Result is actually our best 1970s Yes project yet for sound quality, beating even Boston Garden 1978 which had long been my favorite. Other than a few quibbles like a case of 1970s 'swish and swirl' in Gates, which nothing can cure, it’s now just about everything we can dare hope for in any 1976 AR of any artist.

Keen hearing and educated listening of course remain critical no matter what software involved and I’m happy to report my hearing remains sufficiently intact. Younger ‘beta test’ listeners were also recruited for this project, as we have always done in the past.

Yes Performance:

Providence was just the third stop having a set list that, excepting some encores, stayed fairly consistent over the remaining tour. Solo album pieces such as Hold Out Your Hand were dropped in favor of familiar Relayer Tour standards. As such it was rather subdued, with many a great arrangement and jam from other '76 tour dates either missing or not as developed. Examples are less exciting solos including Moraz’ Sound Chaser Moog frenzy, Squire’s Ritual bass jam (here also partly lost to tape flip) and Howe’s breathtaking later-tour polyphonic arpeggios in Gates.

But it was still 1976 Yes and this stunning record captures them in rich detail matched only by the Milwaukee and Detroit ARs far as I recall, and performance by no means a disappointment. Overall, the best ’76 Yes concert time portal I’ve heard yet, sans a real one. “Starship Trooper” is also a major treat and Moraz’ interpretation of Wakeman’s Trooper Moog jams another treat by itself. My only complaint: too short!

Do Not Alter or Sell This Recording in Any Form

Lestat and Balrog emphatically curse and condemn anyone who would publicly distribute an altered copy of this recording and/or make it into a commercial bootleg, as has happened to so many of our projects in the past. If you must convert it to MP3 or CD-burning format, keep it to yourself.

** Where Is the CD-burning Version?

You don't need a separate CD-burning version. Modern CD-R burning software can burn high-resolution FLAC files to "Orange Book" CD-R format by downsampling 96kHz to 44.1kHz and converting 24-bit samples to 16-bit samples on the fly. If your CD-R burning software can't do this, download and install the following free application. It's some of the best freeware that's ever been offered on the World Wide Web. Don't be concerned about the XP in the name: CDBurnerXP. It has nothing to do with Windows XP. [Link]

Magic Bullet Notes

So far, there are two other Magic Bullet recordings in circulation:

Electric Light Orchestra 1978-09-27 Boston Garden
[Link]

Boston 1978-11-06 Boston Garden
[Link]

More are coming, including The Kinks from 1978, Phil Collins from 1985, and fresh transfers of some of the previous BLG projects. We’re willing to process other people's audience recordings with the "Magic Bullet" but please understand that it’s a real-time process. In other words, a two-hour recording takes two hours to process. If you would like to submit a sample of your recording for processing, contact Balrog at barry@brogoff.com.