Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

Each month we take a look at a classic track or album and discuss it from a music production perspective, examining any sonic innovations that took place during its recording. This month we explore the lavish production of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. This track and 'A Night At The Opera', the album it was lifted from, took Queen to a whole new level of popularity, turning them into global stars. The track is the only single to have been Christmas number 1 twice in the UK with the same recording; once on its release in 1975, and once again after Freddie Mercury's tragic death in 1991. 

At the time, the single was one of the most expensive ever made, and required one of the most complex recording processes ever attempted. Describing the recording of the song's central, operatic section, producer Roy Thomas Baker explains: 'That section alone took about three weeks to record, which in 1975 was the average time spent on a whole album'. 

The single as a whole required 180 overdubs – an incredible number that necessitated a huge number of bounces, as the band were forced to use a single 24-track tape machine for the recording. Although they had never gone quite this far before, Queen had a habit of making complex records that required multiple bounces, and this process added distortion to some aspects of their recorded output. Baker, speaking back in 1995, explained how the distortion that this process caused on the drums became a signature part of the band's sound: "On Queen II and some of the big Queen themes, especially 'Bohemian Rhapsody', the generation copies caused so much distortion on Roger's drum tracks that it became a trademark sound in itself -- which people have since tried to copy with outboard equipment. Even today, people are still trying to recreate that in-your-face distortion with machinery! So by accident we started a trend without even knowing it, in the same way that with an electric guitar, if you turn it up to 10, you'll hear distortion. But that became the band's sound."

Bohemian Rhapsody was mixed at SARM (East) Studios using the absolute cutting-edge technology of the time. A few days before mixing began, SARM had the first automated mixing system in the world installed in the studio. This was a huge help in certain ways but also caused its fair share of problems. A quirk of the technology meant that using the computer driven automation system caused the output to distort. This distortion added to that caused by the track bouncing, meant that when the track reached its final, 'Rock' section, the mix got too 'hot'. The computer had to be switched off, and this final section was mixed by hand.

The song still has a powerful hold on rock audiences more than thirty years after its original release; just take a look at the video below; 65,000 people singing along in London's Hyde Park earlier this year. 


Comments:


profile
Ruslan Gapirov
Nov 29, 2017
Cool! Thank you!

Login to comment on this post