The Isle of Wight 1970 Festival Revisited
In 2023, I posted the vast majority of all the music I could find from the 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival. It's a big one. In my opinion, it's right up there with the granddaddy of all rock festivals, Woodstock in 1969, in terms of the big name musicians and the musical quality of the festival. At that time, though, there were a few sets I didn't post, because the sound quality didn't meet my usual standards.
Now, I'm posting those missing bits. Specifically, I'm posting the sets by Donovan, Joan Baez, and Richie Havens. Most everything else I posted from the festival are from soundboard-level quality recordings. But for those three, we only have audience bootlegs, probably all recorded by the same person, since they sound similar. They all share the same problems. For instance, there was a lot of wind blowing against the microphones, which marred the recordings. There also were frequent airplanes flying overhead, sometimes quite loudly. There were people talking near to the taper. Worst of all, the sound quality of the recordings were just okay, probably due to mediocre tape recorders being used.
So that's why I didn't post these sets back then. But there has been a lot of improvement in audio editing technology in just the last three years. So I gave these a try. A big problem was the wind blowing on the microphone noises. Luckily, the audio editing program Izotope has a filter just to get rid of those exact kinds of noises. I ran most of the songs through that filter, and got rid of most of it (but not all!). I used other tricks, like separating out the lead vocals and boosting them over the muck. I also used MVSEP to reduce reverb and get rid of noise.
The good news is, I consider these sets sound decent enough for me to post them now. But beware! There's still a lot of problems. One can only do so much with problematic source material. I'll post the Donovan, Joan Baez, and Richie Havens sets after posting this.
It so happens that all three of these sets are from the last day of the festival, August 30, 1970. If you're going to download some of them, I'd also suggest re-downloading the other sets from that day. The reason is, the Donovan set is the second one, so that becomes the new "Part 2," and all the sets after that are renumbered with their album titles. By the end of the day, there are nine parts instead of six. Furthermore, the song numbering for each part continues from the last part, so all that changes too. There ends up being 163 songs instead of 115, so there are lots of changes on all the sets from that day.
On top of that, I've made some minor changes to the cover art of some of the other albums, now that the technology for that has been improving as well. That includes changing some of the covers from the other days of the festival, specifically the sets by Chicago, Procol Harum, Ten Years After, John Sebastian, the Who, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. So you might want to redownload those as well.
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