I worked with Stephen several times and learned a lot from him. He used the Bruce Palmer tuning EEEEBE for several of his greatest songs. The powerful chiming sound you hear in the studio recordings, and not hear when he performs live, is the combination of using a condenser microphone, usually a Neumann U-87, with lots of audio compression, usually, back then, a Urei.

Condensers are very fragile and not used live very often. Stills chooses not to use compression live for his own reasons.