Brian May sitting at the desk,  discussing, analyzing and soling tracks of Bohemian Rhapsody.  This is the real stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z85YsUAU6pA

Wow that mixing board looks just like my old small one that was in my bedroom.
 
Great info, Thanks

Shhhhh.. I heard that you can get the raw tracks from the interwebs somewhere. But you didn't hear that from me.

As a matter of fact I've heard these perticular tracks, and it's a real eye opener. Mixed tracks of guitar and vox everywhere a mishmash as they say. It's an education just to listen to. Funny to hear then "crashing about" at the end and Freddy say" oh for f$&@ sake" at the end, makes me smile.

I don't know if it's said on that vid but the bulk of Brian May's guitar was bounced to two tracks. And a lot over vox tracks.

Old news guitarmikeh !

They were available as a 24 track rar file from a website I forget. So were other Queen tracks. There was a competition to see if you could make a better mix IIRC.

I got them, but haven't really listened. You can load all the mp3's in Sonar ........

Cheers,
Jerry

It's amazing how raw the guitar tracks sound. You have this illusion that professional recorded guitar tracks sound smooth and polished but they certainly don't. They sound great in the mix when all finished off though.

That's the trick of these classic tracks... played mostly LIVE and RAW... even the mixes have the RAW sound to them... all the noise disappears behind the music but it is all there and helps create the magic.

Very clean recordings don't have the energy that these limited resource tape tracks offered.. we had to be more creative back in the day to get everything to fit... and the mixing sessions were performances in themselves... 2 or 3 people would rehearse the mix and if we got it wrong at one spot, we would continue but wind up doing it again if one track was late coming in or too soft or too loud....

This was the most stressful part of the sessions because everyone always thought their part wasn't loud enough.  Go figure.

Jim

That was geat. Thanks for posting.

There's a good write up in last Audio Technology magazine about this track and the clever way it's mixed etc.... lot of use of levels and bringing the appropriate part into focus at the right time. Quite interesting... and now I know where they got the audio files from. Cheers.

strikinglyhandsome1


It's amazing how raw the guitar tracks sound. You have this illusion that professional recorded guitar tracks sound smooth and polished but they certainly don't. They sound great in the mix when all finished off though.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. After the shock wore off and I was done being blown away to have the actual tracks from Bohemian, I really sat and listened. Simply amazing how some of those tracks sounded so poor yet came out so good once they were all together. Intonation issues, bad chord execution, some really bad instrument prints that I don't think most of us would be happy with if we got them in our studios...yet...the darned things sounded good together. That's the one thing I hate about this field that I wish could change. Sometimes you literally have to degrade an instrument to make it work in a mix with everything else.
 
On the other side of the coin, soloing up Freddie's tracks were just pure bliss. Even when he screwed up it was great. That's one thing about someone that is talented...it doesn't matter what quality their recording is...true talent will stick out no matter how things were printed. :)
 
-Danny