RUSH - The Trees/Xanadu Live 1981 - Special 2023 Laserdisc Restoration (Pre-DVD Audio Remix)

See my pinned comment below for all my notes on the making of this project, as it's 8700 words and Youtube description caps out at 5000 😂

[VGLSTO]

Dude, this sounds amazing bro, you have no idea how much of a treat you are to the RUSH community. Please don't stop making these

[claygilchrist]

Rush needs to hire you to go thru all their recordings.

[garylagstrom]

This is my essay to people who may not know RUSH or who Neil was professionally and his contributions to the art of drumming and lyrical writing! Enjoy!

RUSH is THE PERFECT EXAMPLE of the fluidity of MASTERING TIME SIGNATURES! I play drums and there are a few things that you need to know about Neil Peart’s ( pronounced PEER-T) character: First he writes the lyrics so he knows in advance what TYPE of song it’s meant to be ie ballad, driver, etc. Second he COMPOSES on the drums… like a carpenter who looks at a set of blueprints before building the object. Neil lays out a SKETCH in his mind of the VOICES of the drumset and builds the song from there. He is also a great LISTENER knowing when NOT to step over Geddy’s singing or Alex’s solos! Finally, he had perfect timing and fluidity of time changes. He said himself that it’s not about COUNTING the time signatures as much as fluid motion to change the tempo without counting: in other words it should FLOW! He hates repeating the same drum patterns in the same song meaning if he plays a fill one way the first time around he will play it differently the second time around. IE. Rolls down the toms the first time around and triplets or quads (all four limbs) the second time around. In short there will NEVER be another like him on planet earth 🌍 🌏 🌎! REST IN PEACE PROFESSOR!
With heart felt admiration and sincerity!
Gary

[pervysage]

Absolutely amazing! I’m noticing details in Alex’s Xanadu solo that I never heard before and everything just sounds spectacular. Thanks so much man.

[rchiare]

Wow ...I can really hear Geddy's rhythm during Alex's solo! Sounds great!!! Now let's find the rest of the video footage from this tour!!!

[Sheehy]

Regardless of the period Rush was always an impressive live band, but it would be an incredible tragedy if this footage didn't exist. They're at the top of their game and they know it, 100% focused on the music. And the tones from everybody in this period, just absolutely godlike, everybody is equally audible and down to every last tiny component it all sounds huge and clear. I totally understand why they changed things up later in their career but it's hard to say that they ever sounded better than this.

[XPrimeMoverX]

I SO LOVE seeing this!! The prog-rock Gods Rush in their PRIME! So amazing to see and hear this awesome show in such HD clarity! THANK YOU for all the work you're doing to restore this archive to modern standards - fantastic! I joined your Patreon channel today!! LONG LIVE RUSH!!

[IAmInfinitus]

Let's go!!! I can tell we're in for a rare treat of sound! I can finally hear Geddy's 12-string at the end now!

[StickHits]

*An unnecessary amount of detail about this project further down in this comment*

To mark the occasion of this upload I'd like to announce I'm re-opening my Patreon with a much more simplified system patreon.com/StickHits (dump of content coming soon as of March '24 - unfortunately have been extremely sick for 6+ months unable to even work on videos :( - but slowly recovering) where you can access my existing extra content not on Youtube, with more on the way as I roll out some new ideas. When I originally made it I created three separate tiers not realizing the amount of time and effort it would take to handle them separately from each other, and looking back now it was just not a good idea lol. So going forward I will now just have one flat rate $5 (with the option to tip more for the incredibly generous) tier to support the creation of these projects and remasters. Unfortunately I've been very sick for almost six months now with a (seemingly non-life threatening at least) digestive system illness that has made life very difficult and has left me unable to work indefinitely, which as you can imagine has become a bit of a problem - but I am more than happy to spend as much time as I can in the meantime working on these projects, hell, theoretically if enough people joined I would legitimately just work on restorations and remasters full time lol. I really appreciate any support either way though, as I tend to sink an ungodly amount of time in to these videos, this one to a horrifying degree due to this performance's importance to myself and the community and the fact that restoring the audio was the most difficult and complex task to date. (I have spent 2.5 months on this new ESL project, and almost seven days a week lol)

As you can hear it has a lot of dynamic range, but sounds quite flat, with significant stereo / instrument balance issues, and if you turn the treble up, a LOT of noise/crackle/distortion is revealed that took a month to figure out how to clean up without damaging the high frequencies of the music. Every moment of every instrument in this remix was gone over with a fine tooth comb, and every instrument was isolated, deconstructed, and re-constructed with extra layers where necessary, with a lot of weird little fixes and adjustments like trying to improve the weird double-recorded wood blocks in Xanadu and adding back in some missing guitar notes the moment before Alex's solo.

So, I will explain why this video was to me what recording Hemispheres was to Rush 😂: About a year and a half ago when I was working on the A Show Of Hands laserdisc videos I started wondering to myself whether the Laserdisc version of Exit Stage Left was also different than the 2006 DVD release, and it was an exciting prospect knowing how much better (IMO) the old version of A Show Of Hands was. I tried to do find out if this was the case, but strangely I could find no information about the original version anywhere online. I made a community post, reddit post, and a post in a couple Rush FB groups looking for more info, but I think I only got one response of someone claiming that yes ESL used to sound different, and more like the LP version under the same name, which many sources confusingly label as being recorded in Montreal like the video - when in reality the only song that matches the video (I carefully compared performances) is Red Barchetta. The reality is that some of the audio version of ESL consists of Scotland 1980 and apparently various unknown Canadian locations during the Moving Pictures tour.

So after some time trying to find this elusive classic version of ESL finding nothing, I basically gave up looking for a few months, that is until I stumbled on to a 15+ year old clip of the encore medley one night that I immediately realized sounded distinctly different than usual despite being a degraded potato quality VHS rip. 99.99% of ESL videos you've seen on Youtube come from the DVD in 2006, with a controversial mix that if nothing else is excessively compressed with no dynamic range and has a lot of weird differences and anomalies to Terry Brown's 1981 mix. After this, I started making new posts asking for help in tracking down a copy of the Laserdisc audio to finally hear for myself and finally a couple people reached out to me who had a Laserdisc copy which they were able to capture off their LD players (Special thanks to Terry and Dan for that). Someone also pointed me to a bootleg called Canada 81' which featured a compilation of audio from the Moving Pictures tour including about half of the Montreal performance in amazing quality, better than either of the Laserdisc copies I obtained which makes me wonder if the Laserdisc rips I have could be even better if captured using high end equipment, so if anyone reading this has access to that, please let me know. Both The Trees and Xanadu were only available on the lower quality Laserdisc rips, which is why it took so much time and effort to bring them up to what I thought their potential was.

The video for this was already completed by the time I obtained the Laserdisc audio, as I already was in the process of remastering a new DVD based version. The process for that was my usual mix of AI upscaling & manual adjustments/editing, except in this case I cranked it to 11 and excessively refined the video lol. I split the video up shot by shot so I could attempt to even out the extremely inconsistent color and lighting, some of these shots were upscaled, tweaked, downscaled, re-upscaled & repeat up to 4-5 times, with a layer of Kodak 16mm film grain in attempt to restore that analog film look.

As for the audio, getting it to the point where it was truly "good enough" was much, much more difficult and tedious than any previous project by a long-shot, but I know for the average fan the difference may not actually seem that significant lol. The biggest problem was that, the raw LD audio was very flat with very muted treble, and I wanted it to sound as crisp as a studio album, but simply increasing the treble only made it apparent that perhaps the high frequencies were kept quite muffled intentionally due to the amount of noise, crackle, buzzing etc. hidden in that range (similar to what happens if you crank the high frequencies on an old vinyl record, it usually doesn't work out well). After initially experimenting with various noise-reduction and crackle/pop/buss reduction, I found myself in quite the snag, as none of them could even come close to cleaning it up without destroying parts of the instruments, especially the drums. Over the course of 2-3 weeks, I had to try and come up with a new solution to this problem (and this particularly was the most difficult and brain-scrambling part of this video lol). I finally had a breakthrough when I rigged up certain stem tracks, mostly drums and guitar (Stem separation uses AI in attempt to isolate and separate the instruments in to separate audio) with their polarity inverted which allowed me to use various audio repair tools targeting only specific parts of the mix in order to preserve important elements. I am very happy with the discovery as it is definitely going to be a game-changer for future projects. Beyond that, I probably used every plugin you could think of for one reason or another, like FabFilter Saturn to fix the stereo panning of certain frequencies that were lopsided, plenty of EQ's and double tracking instruments to highlight certain things that I thought were lacking such as guitar, which I doubled and ran through a virtual cabinet with volume and reverb controlled by drawing automation tracks. I also stripped away most of the original reverb in order to add my own side-chained reverb in order to add ambience without muddying up the mix during busy sections.

Honestly, I could have spent months more on the audio and likely would have never been truly satisfied, but it got to the point where I had to just draw the line for my own sanity and the sake of my subscribers 🤣 . This performance is not only my favorite Rush performance of all time, but I would argue it's the most historically important Rush video of all time, so my standards and the level of responsibility I felt to get it right turned what would have just been a couple week project in to a couple months, and I promise other tracks are going to be much more efficient lol, especially since half of the other songs I have in superior quality to what I had to work with here.

If you read this to the very end, let me know so I can pay my respects lmao. Cheers guys, I hope I did it justice.

[ToyBoys]

Another triumph. Those drums! I can really hear him whacking the bell of that ride!!!
Love it!

[alexeidson]

I got an ad right as the Xanadu solo began...what a buzz kill.

[sonofnothing]

First time being able to hear Geddy playing rhythm guitar CLEARLY at the end there I just kept saying out loud “oh this is so much better” which is insane bc it’s already perfect as is. Great job, dude.

[MrBostonrobb]

Neil Peart's the reason why I've played Tama Drums and Zildjian Cymbals since 1982. Geddy Lee fronts the Band, sings lead vocals while playing a double-neck and keyboards with his hands and right foot. He gets points off for not playing harmonica with his putz. Alex is absolutely phenomenal and so overlooked.

It's the most influential live album ever in my opinion. Most influential band and drummer for me personally as well.

Do you have YYZ and Neil's solo on video and can you work your next level audio remix magic to it?

Thanks for what you do! Fucking Fantastic!

[PrattFan]

Damn! That was amazing . The first things i noticed was the clarity and thump in Neil’s kick, the ping on his ride and better stereo separation going down the toms, especially the 2nd time. Everything was brought up in the mix and sounds stellar! You do a fantastic job and thanks for the time and effort to do these and post them❣️

[fever_spike]

Dear StickHits:

*THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO FOR US…IT IS TREMENDOUSLY APPRECIATED.*

Sincerely,
Fever Spike
A Rabid Rush Fanatic

[roguebear]

Incredible!! Thank you for posting this! Xanadu is my favorite song and one of the greatest songs of all time!

[Musicman]

I'm 15 and I play guitar. I also just also so happen to be a huge Rush fan and Alex has really influenced my tone and playing as of late. He had the best Flanged / Chorused guitar tone. Also your remastering work has really inspired me to do it. Keep going!

[satwatchers]

Thanks for this and all your AMAZING restorations

[mamamamarino]

Just spectacular work. A nigh perfect performance and painstaking remastering. I have tears in my eyes.

[Kolinu]

You're providing a fabulous archive for every current and future Rush fan. Wonderful quality work