Brian May Interview - Queen's Songs, Stories and Guitar Style

hey everybody i'm rick piatto after putting out my what makes a song great on bohemian rhapsody a lot of people ask me can you put out the full brian may interview which is going to be here but just to let you know this is on my second channel rick biato2 so make sure that you hit the subscribe button here i'm putting longer form content and different kinds of things on here so don't forget to subscribe here's my interview good to see you good to see you i've seen you a lot too i watch your stuff avidly i find myself clicking around about 3 a.m and i think oh there's rick and i just have a quick look at what he's doing and an hour later i'm still trawling through your stuff well i'm i'm great i am honored oh no you're amazing you you're scarily good you're just you know i love the insights and i love the playing and the sound everything it's just amazing you have been doing a lot of uh i mean since since kovitz started happening you've been posting you're you're on instagram doing a lot of social media i think it's fantastic oh good thanks yeah i had to really because all the other all the avenues got closed down and i just thought this is all i had this is the only platform where i can get up and actually communicate with people and it worked out really well i think it's a great kind of bonus in my life really my series what makes this song great i basically break down these these famous songs i saw your piece on you see i know you quite well now so eop is uncomfortably numb so i thought was phenomenal now i was aware of completely comfortable you know i know the record kind of it was never the big floyd album for me i mean piper at the gates the dawn is is is kind of the pinnacle for me yeah just surprised a very uh old-school thing to say but i still love that because it was just breathtaking and dangerous whatever but what i'm trying to say is i was aware of it but i wasn't aware of it and listening to your analysis i became much much more aware of what was going on in that song and much more appreciative of it now that's rare normally you listen to a critic a music critic and they tend to kind of spoil your enjoyment because they go oh yeah this was taken from here and the guy's being this out of tune or whatever you don't do that you say you know what you know what's in here lift up this little corner here look what's under here i love that so you've interpreted comfortably numb to me and made it grow in my in my estimation and in my life it's become part of my life and so thank you for that there's a lot of good stuff you're doing you're very welcome i appreciate that and i've been wanting to do bohemian rhapsody because so many people have requested it over the last three years it's the most complex song of any song i that i honestly can think of it's the most complex rock song that's ever been written if you look at the harmonic structure the chord progressions the over dumming of the vocals the vocal layering all the different guitar parts the sounds i mean everything about the song the tempo changes i i want to go back to the recording it was a long time ago in 1975 but the things that you can remember from being in the studio then for example i've watched interviews where you talk about you sitting in the control room well the other three were actually doing the rhythm track yeah yeah which is a frequent event our backing tracks were either guitar bass and drums or piano bass and drums and in this case his piano bass and drums yeah everything i had to do was going to be after so kind of deputy producer or associate producer or something yeah okay so how much did you rehearse the song oh no we didn't i don't think we realized it at all uh well you know there's a kind of rehearse and record situation in the studio generally we went in there with ideas and we start playing around but um in the case of john and freddie and roger um they would pick things up very quickly they they would sort of throw things at each other and very quickly they'd be very much in sync you've probably listened to the banking track on its own and it's immaculate isn't it there's no click i mean freddie himself was like a metronome but a metronome with a lot of balls you know it it had a bite to it the way freddie hit that piano um so he was incredible to play with you know in on the occasions where i'm doing the backing track with him is it's astounding but roger would instantly lock in and he had an amazing knack for just finding the right pocket and the right place to be and um so no it wasn't really it was like let's freddie would play it in the case of this i remember him playing it down in pieces like this is this piece and this is this piece and we're like okay and then well let's try this piece and he played a bit and then roger would join in d he would join in i'd be in the in the control room and pretty quickly it would come together so if that counts as rehearsal that's it i suppose and generally the um whoever was manning the tape machine would be running the whole time just in case something good happened and generally by the time they'd run it three or four or five times they'd have it they'd have the one and in those days we didn't do edits on on multi-tracks really um occasionally very very occasionally we tried an edit on one chat but generally we wanted the good take and we'd do it until the tape was good much later on we went and worked with mac in um in munich and he said oh it's no problem you can just drop in and we used to drop in all 24 tracks at once which is like at the time seen hair raising but he just went it's fine and so that was a way of hastening the process so you didn't have to do the whole take right you could if it messed up at one point okay we'll just drop in here drop everything in and it did work but in these days no we just did whole tanks okay so i i just have to go back to the original tracking with with the three with the piano bass and drums freddie's time is so good it's not just good it is phenomenal the performance the dynamics can you talk about dynamics and about how you guys played so dynamically on that track and in general you were incredibly dynamic band did you guys talk about that a lot i guess we talked about performance in the studio yeah because the trick as we saw it was to to get yourself in the space where you actually felt you were alive so it wasn't this is another take it was i am on stage this is it this is the only chance i get so you always catch yourself in the act of being spontaneous or being a one-off that was our sort of philosophy and it applied to backing tracks but also to overdubs because if you're sitting there doing an overdub and sort of waiting and then and then you do it it's never going to sound right but if you're kind of playing along and you imagine that you're on stage at madison square garden or whatever it's going to feel right and it's going to sound right you're not going to have to try to sink you're just going to be in it with your body and your soul so i think that's the way that was the philosophy yeah we talked about a live performance in the studio rather than a studio performance did you ever think when you're recording songs like this i mean you have so many huge hit songs but did you ever think that oh 40 50 years from now people will be listening to this that you'll be i mean you guys are massively big to kids my kids my kids are 14 12 and 8. they know all que the all your songs i mean it's unbelievable that's wonderful that's really great that makes me feel very very lucky and happy yeah it's great it's nice that the music does cross the generational boundaries and i think we're very fortunate and if you're going to ask me why i ain't going to be able to answer because people do they said how come you know it works for new kids and old kids i think it's just because we we spoke about normal things i mean the human raps is probably not a good example because it's pretty unusual situation you're talking about but by and large what we're talking about i want to break free i want it all um stuff like that it's the the hopes and dreams of every man it's not like rock star talk and bohemian rhapsody isn't rockstar talk either it's not it's about a fan a character in fantasy i would say it's projected on a on a fictional character and of course who knows exactly what's in freddie's mind but he's managed to to kind of distance himself from what he's saying enough to be able to paint that picture um so um [Music] yeah answering the question that you didn't ask i think there's a kind of i think in spite of all the pomp and glamour and sort of bigness of queen we're very much a kind of people's band i think we talk about what people want to know about i think and the disappointments the pain the the problems in love and in relationships and stuff um and the hopes and dreams that's kind of what we that's what we're dealing i think when you were gonna introduce a song to the band to be considered for recording what was that like was it even though you guys had played together you know for for years was it always kind of oh i've got a new song here it is and you're kind of nervous a little bit about playing for the other guys yeah yeah i think we're all a bit that way yeah yeah i've got this thing you know i don't know if it's any good but i got this you know i've got this riff and it's kind of about this and and everyone goes yeah okay so yeah i think you feel you feel kind of uh some trepidation um but you quickly get over it because then you want to get people involved and and in the case of myself i'd pretty soon be telling people what to do i have to kind of stop myself doing that because the group situation benefits from having an equal input from everybody but i guess there was an unwritten law that the author of the song the guy who brought it in would have the final say in the mix and everything but along the way it was i think we trained ourselves to step back and let the band possess it and develop it and i think everything benefited from that we were a powerful interactive force with each other very critical with each other quite horrible with each other sometimes like you can't do that it's naf it's crap you can't do that you know yeah i can you know and well you're doing this you know that's why it isn't working you know it's very but then you come to the point where okay this seems to work this is good so brian you hear songs your entire life like bohemian rhapsody but there was a time when it didn't exist okay and you actually have to go in you write the songs and then actually record all the parts mix it right and in this case there were all the the bouncing which i want to talk about in a second about bouncing vocals and things but you're tracking you're you're there in the control room with with roy i imagine you guys are sitting there and these guys are playing the the take down crucially mike stone as well yeah yeah and and you're like okay that was that was pretty good after they've done done this unbelievable rhythm track i mean did you realize that okay this that was amazing or was it kind of like yeah that was great i think we could work with that yeah i think a bit of all of that yeah because partly you're you're in it and it's a kind of little industry but partly it is exciting it's wonderful to hear stuff developing and to be a part of it so yeah i think we were always excited actually yeah it's like yeah will that do yeah i think that'll do no that's that's great you know we'll have that and why don't we try this it was a lovely sort of continual um updating process and chucking things in to see if they work yeah i think we were always excited which is the great thing i suppose now as far as your guitar playing i mean you're a massive influence on me your lyrical style oh my god your vibrato everything about your playing was a huge huge influence on me i started playing guitar in 1975. this is this is the these are the first things that i learned were your songs i mean this this came out literally right when i started playing guitar well i had no idea i mean you're a phenomenal guitar player apart from everything else that you do um and i was watching you i don't know how i discovered you i'm sort of drifting around three three o'clock in the in the morning and thinking oh what's that what's that you know and finally i think i saw you talking i don't know what the first thing i saw you talking about but it was like a critique of a piece of music and mostly people's critiques are very negative but you were just finding more and more stuff and and bringing stuff out to the audience and making them aware of all the little nuances i thought this guy's great but then i heard you play guitar and i thought ah i don't want to talk to him because he's you know he can do all this stuff that i can't do you know and he's going to embarrass me yeah that's going to be too scary i don't want to talk to him brian i literally learned guitar by learning your solos i mean this is the first things that i was learning everybody wanted to play of course i played the solo all wrong and everything but at least i was trying to do it but then you listened to jaco pastorius and became a super god i want to ask you some some guitar questions but i don't want to ask you all the normal stuff that you've talked about a million times for i want to ask you like um did you use eights on your guitar eight gauge strings yeah everybody i knew back in the 70s played really like age strings and well yeah of course i come from a generation before you and we didn't have 8k strings you know the fender and gibson sets were 10s or 11s or whatever right that's what i started off with but then the rumor went around that if you went down to clifford essex and cambridge circus you could get a banjo string which you could put on your guitar and you could use that as the top string and that was the key to everything because suddenly you could move all the strings over and you could start bending strings so that that was the most fantastic thing that happened to us as kids watching eric clapton ill pie island or the crawdaddy or whatever and thinking yeah that's what he's done he's got his he's been down to cleveland essex and he's got his banjo strings that's why you can bend those strings i wanted to do what james burton did on the hello mary lou solo that's what got me going um [Music] you know suddenly the guitar wasn't the backing instrument anymore i mean i heard django reinhardt i heard um which is phenomenal you must be into tango right now absolutely i can't play that stuff i'm sure you can i tried when i was a kid but he wasn't bending the strings it was still and it was totally um it was like an amplified acoustic the django rhino yeah i listened to charlie bird there wasn't much around to listen to when i was a kid in terms of pure guitar playing apart from uh when i had a segovia record of julian bremerick i started to try and learn classical stuff i had um charlie bird playing uh jazz stuff yep and um and chet atkins who was a phenomenon i wish i'd met that guy who was doing all kinds of stuff including picking and sort of multi-tracking and all sorts of stuff and i i sort of vicariously i got to hear les paul because he that was sort of pre my generation really that was kind of my dad's generation yeah but i got hold of some les paul records and tried to figure out what he was doing and a lot of time he was speeding things up of course but at the same time he was a very dexterous player so years later i played with him and he was phenomenal um grumpy old sod but phenomenal a bit like me really um so yeah this string thing is funny yeah of course another reason i like the uh the nines opposed to the eights is because you get a little bit more see i'm going to contradict myself you get a little bit more level out of that and in in the days before we had radio links that tiny little bit more level going down the y would help the sustain it wouldn't help the sound necessarily but it would help the sustain it would just make it go look these days i can cheat because we have a lovely radio link which pete is just updating from analog to digital horror of horrors but it will still work i think but with that you can just tweak it up a little bit and you can just cheat that little extra bit of gain which will give you a bit more feedback and i i sort of find it hard to do without that now and i tend to ask for it in the studio as well as on stage because i'm used to it now i'm used to that force coming behind me so i have an ac30 behind me that i've had forever and they're incredibly loud amps they are crazy enough i have one right here brian how loud would you play back then i mean you it just sounds like on bohemian rhapsody it sounds like the amp is ready to explode it sounds incredibly loud at least it has that power to it yeah it's it's 11 you know it's as loud as it goes it's very spinal tap and yeah no it is totally yeah i always did that everything's always full up really not all the time but for the bits where you're trying to go for it yeah um and it's the guitar i learned this from rory gallagher who's the master of sound that i used to go and see when i was a kid tell you lots of rory gallagher stories but he told me in person when i was a kid and you know still at college not a rock star at all he said brian i had this guitar and i have this ac30 amp which has a particularly beautiful sweet sound like nothing else and i had this little box which was the range master treble booster yeah and that's what sits in the middle he said that's what makes it speak that's what gives me my sound so i went off the next day down to water street bought myself two ac 30s found a range master plugged it all in and that was my sound and it hasn't really changed in the 40 50 years since that's wow in the studio when you're doing these records would you have a standard setup for miking the amps or did you not even care about that ah we cared a lot no we spent a lot of time marking things up and a lot of time i had a little trick which was to turn everything up full but not play so you just get this sound and uh i'd have it in headphones i would be in the studio not in the control room and i say look turn it all up for me and i would hear the sound coming back from the amp in front of my speakers and i could tune the this by moving the mic around like onto the axis of the speaker a little bit off finding another speaker trying another speaker and i would tune it until it sounded like that sort of the sort of broadest what ed van halen would call a brown sound that's what i was looking for the sound that would act like a voice so yeah we did a lot of microsoft also we used to put mics in the back of the amps to get a little bit of uh more lively kind of sound and tune that as well then we'd have a mic somewhere at the edge of the booth to get a bit of ambience if we wanted it um i was very into ambience because because of our first experiences in the studio where it was robbed we were robbed of our ambience because roy baker love him love roy baker but he was very much the the trident sound guy and the trident sound was stick sticky tape on everything deaden it all down and then add echo later to make it sound big work doesn't work not really as you know and roy used to say oh it'll be all right in the mix and i'd go well okay this is the first album time i go okay roy but we don't really like that sounds if you listen to the first album the drums go you know that's it yeah um no matter how much stuff you put on them unless you put samples on much later as you know you can't make them sound good so same with guitar um there wasn't any ambience and i really we all regretted it and we all got together with roy after that first album even though it was a good album i think the sounds were not what we wanted we said we never want to do this again so when we started making queen 2 we moved the drums out of that little drum booth took all the tape off them put them in the middle of the studio put mics all over the place and suddenly instead of they went and that was it so we became an ambient uh we were hungry for ambience and i know i'm pretty sure les zeppelin went through a similar thing and deep purple you know i i hear stories of deep people putting drums in lift shafts and things you know to get that genuine room sound which you cannot really reproduce no you can't fake it you can't fake it with reverb there's something about having the room react and having the microphones in the room that's so totally yeah yeah so that's it we wandered off topic didn't we but it's all fun on your first solo in bohemian did you have the idea for the solo just from listening to what freddie was playing during the solo section did this did the melody idea just come to you yeah i had ample opportunity because i'm sitting in control of the control room listening to them do it over and over again yeah so yeah and i said i think we talked about solos i don't know how the thing came up but i said i think freddie said you know where what do you want for the solo what do you need and i said i would like basically a piece of a verse i want i want to be joining in and taking the story a bit further so i want a verse pattern and so they built that into the into the backing track and yeah i could hear it in my head and i'm sort of you know i come from a strange place i come from a world where mantavani and the laughing policemen were in the hit parade so my melodies are not really rock melodies as such i could just hear something very sweet and melodic which seemed to be a continuation of what freddie was doing telling his story in the vocal uh that might sound pretentious or it might sound plain stupid i don't know but i hear the always hear the solo piece as part of the vocal it's just like the vocalist hands over to somebody momentarily who's going to continue the story and then give it back to the the main wreck on tour who's the vocalist the dekey box can you tell me about that what is that exactly hmm i could probably even show it to you if we we may be able to show you that it's um it's dekey was a bit of a genius really he got a first-class honours in electronics at chelsea university about the time when i got my first degree and was failing my second degree only to return 30 years later to get my doctorate it's another story but d he was very clever with electronics and he found a piece of um electronic equipment which i think is a piece of a radio or something that somebody's going to tell me i'm wrong but it's a printed circuit board with some stuff on and he thought oh that's a nice little lamp i'll hook it all up and he found some speakers from a sort of local hi-fi thing which was also in the skip i think and he put the two together and this is it this is the dekey amp so it says something i've written and it just sounds like nothing else really it saturates in particularly in a particular way which is almost impossible to reproduce we've had teams of crack scientists working on this for years they there's a great guy called nigel knight who's just about managed it recently but i'm going to show you pete who's just putting this in he's here he is he looks out on myself all right good to meet you he's rick piatto so this is the tiki and you know it's another thing like the ambience thing there is nothing which can reproduce this kind of sound that i have ever found there's racks and racks of all these beautiful saturation things and compressors and and phasers and whatever nothing sounds like this okay now what would that have been used on was that used on bohemian on any tracks uh yeah it was used first by john himself i think on misfire and he did that multi-tracking did literally all himself we just left him to it and he used this amp and i said oh no i can't remember what i said but i started using it i could make up a story but i'm not gonna um i'm using it for my stuff but i started using it on well i don't know when the first time was but all that stuff in good company where i'm pretending to be a clarinet and a trumpet and a trombone uh that's all the deaky stuff but i was using uh some volume pedals and and wawa pedals for tone with that as well but i've used it for loads of stuff like the god save the queen track that i did which is all multi-tracked um fairy fella's master stroke has lots and lots of little firefly guitars all in harmony and stuff is all this and it's all this thing because it can sound like a violin or it can sound like a trumpet depending on where you put the mic very much or how hard you drive it and what pickups you've got what does that have just like a six inch speaker in it or something uh i think it's smaller than that i think it's a four-inch speaker probably yeah um i mean that's it that's the original one right there yeah and there's nothing i would use the treble booster and sometimes yeah a while pedal which i would set to a particular point to get a certain coloration rather than worrying you know no actual moving just using as a tone control but that was my setup and it's very low tech but my god it works and d has been very kind enough to let me have it in perpetuity because i did fall in love with it i used it for all kinds of stuff or the other thing that i love about this was for one of its great moments i think is the solo in winter's tale talking years later now the very final uh album that we made when freddie had already passed away yeah and i had that solo in my head and i had this little amp in my head um for about a year and a half because all kinds of stuff happened we were in such grief after losing freddie we just didn't want to look at the material for a long time and then we came back in the studio and i hadn't let anybody touch a winter's tale because it was such a precious thing also mother love you know those tracks i just thought i don't want anyone to look at until i look at them because i know the way they should turn out and um so i plugged this in here in allerton in surrey where i am now and having had this kind of tune in my head for all that time all those months and months started playing it through this amp and it spoke to me it was just like the sound of the mountains in switzerland where the song was written the duck house where freddie used to sit and do his writing and and relaxing and uh it was this amp has a definite magic to it yeah strange enough steve bai's just been in touch with me see one of my favorite people in the whole world wonderful i mean extraordinary musician and the nicest guy in the world the greatest gentleman and he's had a guy build something very much like the d key and he's got his his own logo merged with mine on it and they're going to make me one because they say it's great so i'm going to swap him i'm going to do him one of ours and we'll we'll compare notes um so i want to ask you about the um the vocal layering and the bouncing that was going on so for the people that are listening to this or watching this that don't know about bouncing i mean i'm gonna i will explain it but yeah there's really nothing like this you guys were on a 24 track but there are so many vocal tracks and you had to to uh you had to pre-mix all these layers of vocals i guess it's because we started off with four track and then eight track and then 16 track and we realized how precious the tracks were yeah so in the beginning when we made this record called earth uh i think it was on four track and we had to drop the solo into the vocal track and then drop it out quick when the vocal comes back in and you can hear it i have seen you're never going to get rid of that drop-in sound so we were very conscious that we didn't want to be dropping in on a track something foreign every track would be pristine and would only have that instrument on it so having said that you like you say you have to clear up as you go along which means you have to make a lot of decisions as you go along which you can't go back on right um so for instance uh you've already used up quite a lot of tracks on on drums i forget exactly how many you probably have that in front of you there's probably like seven or eight tracks for drums there's there's guitars uh there's bass whatever so you might have i don't know a dozen tracks left to to play with through the vocals that's not very many if you're doing a lot of overdoses yeah so generally speaking we'd have it all mapped out in in case of bohemian rhapsody freddie's coming with his piece of paper with his little notes all over it this is dad's company note paper and he's written like a b c c sharp f whatever for every every line of o because he's worked them out on the piano which is something that we very often did just work out all the nice harmonies on the piano and then you just steam through them you'd like turn in the sausage machine uh play them on the piano we learn it we sing it uh and generally the three of us would sing it at the same time and for him but he would actually we kind of sang them in character there's a kind of acting thing going on because we're not going bismillah we're going you know we are sort of being these strange characters in the scenario which bohemian rhapsody is so it's partly sort of arabian it's partly very english no we will not let you go you know and we're sort of being these characters the three of us so we sing the line uh and we make sure it's nice and it's probably well maybe a couple of lines that we sing and we listen to it and make sure it's all in tune and in time wherever we feel good and the thing like i said before it's got to sound spontaneous it mustn't sound like we're trying to get it right on the beat it's got to be like yeah we're seeing it on stage and the spontaneity is there so we have the one track we then sing it again we double it listening to the first one in our headphones and we check that there's no nasty grating it's it's roughly in tune with the other one not too much in tune because i think you've been here as well if you make it perfectly in tune it's not going to sound big it's going to sound small so you you there's a sort of reality about it you see and that happens because you're seeing it with passion and spontaneity and you do go a little bit above and below so it starts to sound nice and fat then normally we do three so you have three tracks on the tape machine and each of those tracks has three voices on it now that's nine tracks so you're already getting a bit shaky so you've got to get rid of that you've got to just compress them down so we would listen to them back bounce them you know balance or bounce whatever you want to say yeah make sure they're all balanced up so you can hear more equally roughly maybe spread them throughout a stereo bounce them to a stereo or if you're really short of tracks bounce them to the mono and hope that you can fix it and make things big later on so that's one part we would then do the same for maybe the next harmony line up the next harmony line after that but sometimes we would do octaves so then you each time we're bouncing them down you're building up and building up and sometimes you've got to bounce your bounce because you and then you start it's dodgy because there's a certain amount of loss in analog tape it's a lovely sound but you are losing every time you're not cloning you're actually losing some quality every time and in the case of bohemian rhapsody i'm sure you know this story we started thinking oh we're losing a lot of quality on this you know we're losing all the top maybe we better put some top end back on this why is this happening and then roy takes the tape off the machine the tape is two inch holds it up to the light and you can see through the top so that's actually true then yeah yeah so because it's really because the machine was faulty to be honest there was a piece of i think it wasn't as smooth as it should have been so it's going over the record head or the playback head and a little bit of the oxide is getting scraped off each time yeah and you can see a pile of kind of sawdust underneath the head you can see this oxide this brown oxide stuff which is the piece of your music that you've just lost yeah so what we did was we quickly uh copied the tape across and started again and we're not starting again but but started with a fresh piece of tape with the information that we had because if we'd gone any further we would have lost everything and of course that gives you an idea because later on we started doing that routinely so that we would have what we would call a slave machine yeah so you can actually run these two machines in sync and effectively get more and more tracks and that became a thing for a while because with analog they wouldn't sync up perfectly so you had to be a little careful or things would phase when you didn't want them to phase but when digital tape came along i don't know does it does anybody still know about digital tape i do yeah you do okay well you get digital tape now you can sync those up exactly they will lock in so that you have effectively hundreds of tracks if you want all on different bits of tape all on different machines and you have a sort of infinite recording studio that's before things got to be digital in the sense of on hard disks instead of tape so brian if pro tools were around right back then would it would you have made the same kind of music would you have made bohemian rhapsody like that if it were that easy yeah i think you just use what you've got in front of you and you use it to its best effect and some of the stuff we could do in the early days it's actually better than you can do with pro tools i think uh you know pro tools gives you an enormous amount of choice and can't get away from that but there are certain things you could do with the old analog stuff which it's hard there's a feel to it now i saw your thing on tuning the other day which is great this magnificent piece that you did on auto tuning and stuff and what it means in munich in music and in munich um now i used to do that before there was any digital stuff there's a little machine an analog machine called a public song french machine you ever come across that yeah it did a lot of stuff including phasing but one of the things was a little pitch change one little knob did pitch change so if we had a great vocal and there was just one note in it which was a little sharp so it made it sound weird a little flat i would run it through there and i would tweak the publish on when it came to that bit and re-record it on another track yeah so effectively i'm doing auto-tune and this is 19 yeah but you're doing it you're still doing it by ear though brian exactly you've got a feel to it yeah that's what i'm saying so in some ways it's better because you're listening rather than watching on the screen because that's a trap to fall into you you can you can believe what you're seeing and it's not really what you're hearing right right we've all done that yes you can test it you can do it we can all fool each other and it's embarrassing you know because people say oh can you just sharpen that note a bit you know it's a bit flat and they go yeah how about this and you see it happening on the screen and you go oh yeah that sounds much better and then the guy says oh no actually i didn't do it i mean then you feel really stupid the when i listen to the drum tracks uh that you can hear that tape compression the beautiful tape compression on the low end of the kick drum on the toms it's so it sounds like nothing else and this really sounds you guys are hitting the tape hard i can tell that and really into that yeah it's not just the tape i mean there's a lot of compressors in there the analog compressors there's a whole chain of things and the tape is the last compressor in the line really right but roy was into really overdoing it especially the snare drum he just turned it up and up and up and you go that sounds nice and distorted doesn't it neddy we go right maybe a little too far there you can hear it on some things like the jazz album it's very extreme but yeah i i'm a fan of the way tape sounds and always will be so brian looking back on this you know uh how many years later uh 46 years later bohemian rhapsody do you ever go back and actually just put it on or listen to it or if it comes on in the car when you're driving will you turn it off oh no no i won't turn it off no i'll turn it up because i don't get a chance to listen to it at home really i very seldom do that stuff i started listening to my solo stuff just recently because we're i'm doing reissues and that was a revelation to me and i just thought i never sit down and listen to our stuff really if it comes on in the car it's great it's like being a kid the first time you hear your record played on somebody else's radio is an enormous thing it's like suddenly you've become part of the fabric of society i remember waking up when we were mixing um the night at the opera and i'd been working all night on the prophet song trying to get all these um delays working and everything trying to mix it and i woke up and i could hear it and i thought am i imagining this but no kenny ever had given it to my neighbor upstairs and my neighbor was playing incredibly loud on his radio so that's what i woke up to and it was horrible but it was also wonderful because i thought oh my god you know what we're doing is actually in the world it's part of what people are experiencing right now this is being welded into their their lives at this moment what amazing thing that is is there anything that that you want to say or that you've never talked about in relation to this song that human rhapsody yeah that somebody's never asked you before that you say this is kind of an interesting thing i'll tell you a little story about the end of rhapsody now the end uh everything's coming down it's coming towards the conclusion and the guitars are going [Music] in harmony um and then the piano comes back in nothing really matters nothing and i remember soon after we done it listening to it on the radio and thinking the piano has gone out of key what's gone wrong why is the piano sounding weird sounds flat the reason is that i'd push those guitars too hard and edged them up so the guitars were a little sharp and so your your perception is that the piano comes in too low right and it bothered me for years and i didn't talk about it to people because it's a bit embarrassing i'm not embarrassed now i don't care now but when we came to remix it for the surround the 5.1 surround me which i'm hugely proud of i don't know if you ever heard that mix but we did that i heard that ah we did it in los angeles with the guy who mixed frank sinatra his name he's a wonderful guy and roy and um some dear friends of mine and we sat there for days mixing everything redoing bohemian rhapsody so everything came from all around you've got to hear it sometime and when it came to that bit i thought i'm not standing for this so i got in and i tuned all the guitars and their spot on and now when the piano comes in it sounds perfect so that was a sort of circle that i had to complete it was very comfy nice feeling for me to to do that so that's my my admission story well i never noticed it so well if you didn't notice it chances are not that many people did but i did but that shows you how people when they're actually making a record those kind of things that they obsess about when you're the artist and it's your music you hear things that other people don't hear yeah it's also a whole topic for your series if you want you know what happens when you vibrate when you do vibrato on a guitar string because it's not a sine wave like with a tremolo arm you can make it go above and below and it's perfectly centered on the note when you're doing this on the string and stretching it the only way it can go is up right so so it has to go sharp which is a weird thing isn't it and you can hear it on so many records if people get into it which which is nice if they do they're really pushing the vibrato so it goes too sharp and everything does start sounding flat so you've got to be really aware of that and i like to use the tremolo arm to do a little adjustment if it's a sensitive area so it actually does stay in and sometimes i use the tremolo like hank marvin to do the vibrato instead and that's that's a nice effect too as well because it also works on all the strings if you're on a chord you can make the whole thing just gently ripple and it ripples around the center line it's a sine wave it's not up up up so it's not like a violin guitar is different from a violin in that way violin the guy can make it go go above and below yeah yeah yeah one other thing that that i always forget to ask people is back then what what would you tune to would you tune to the piano would you have a tuner how often would you tune not often enough some people would say [Laughter] we used to say we tuned to the a30 the a30 is a road which right which comes out of london and takes you down i thought you're gonna get me to play this thing oh if you want to play well i didn't know if you were set up to play or not well you told me i had to be it was somebody told me well great i did i was like i didn't know if you guys were ready to do that or not well we could be i i didn't want to set up in i didn't want to set up a little amp because it wouldn't be me really so we have the ac30 over there it's about 15 yards in that direction in a room okay can i can i hear what it sounds like here does that i don't know how that comes across a lot of ambience on that but that's the that's the sound of these two pickups out of phase so it's very grunchy it's very you gotta i probably need a six months but it's it's a very it's a harsh sound but it's good for the um it's good for this as soon as we're on the subject of bohemian rhapsody it's good for the harmonics it screeches you know but if i turn this pick up the other way around so they're in in series they sound very and it's a very warm sound and i love the fact that this guitar will make all these different sounds my favorite is putting these two pickups in phase here that gives me my sort of tiny mother down sound and the general rhythm sound it's sort of tough it's very much like ed van halen's putting his pickup right here to get his brown sound because the combination of these two gives you the harmonics that you need it's quite tough but it's warm i don't know how that's coming across because it's a long way away but it needs to be bobby [Laughter] brian and the uh and and the solos at the end when you're doing all those harmony parts the the the uh the kind of cascading things in the guitar it sounds like you're changing the phase of the pickups you're you're changing pickup combinations on each part is that true yeah rhapsody i had this thing i wanted to use every combination you just seem to to want it because there's so many differences in in mood throughout the song like you said so yeah i think i used every combination in in the heavy bit you know ding ding ding ding ding every time that happens it's on a different setting right up to the end where there's i think there's a there's a there's an octave piece and they they sort of go in active and it's it's a the harshest sound of all their thing but yeah those pieces at the end what am i doing there i can't remember i think that's a bit of d key there there's a combination of d key and the ac30s on that track got it i was wondering about that because some of it doesn't sound like your regular uh like your regular setup yeah it would only be geeky it would be it would only be the ac30 or the geeky amp yeah pretty much yeah i've thrown everything else out by then on sheer heart attack i remember using a fender twin amp or something to get that sort of rock and roll um like the hoople kind of sound but now i'm here but i think that's the last time i ever used a different amp in the studio you can't really go wrong with an ac30 no they're beautiful there's another whole program why is that there are good reasons behind that which you know i'm sure is the configuration of the way the output powers are set up and you don't get distortion at low levels like you would in a in a martial arm it's part of the martial sound but in the ac30 it's very pure at low levels everything's like hi-fi and as you go up the the the curve at each end it bends around it goes straight like this and then it straightens out that way so you get a gradual journey into compression and eventually distortion but it's really smooth that's what i love about do one more time the ac30s and let's see if i can show you what i mean at very low volume [Music] it's very kind of liquid and metallic and you can hear every note and no no note interferes with any other right as you turn it up it starts to get a little more creamy and things start to interfere with each other but if you're clever you make them interfere in in a nice way like the fifths and the then the fourths and whatever will give you a nice sort of uh creamy sound so and you can still the funny thing about the ac 30 is you can still play discords and it doesn't sound that bad in fact it's rather nice you get all this strange kind of interaction of the harmonies like this chord here which is what i use for uh radio gaga when we when we do it live it just gives a nice breath because it's it's you can still hear all the notes but they're really messing with each other and making all these strange sort of overtones that that weren't there in the beginning you know it's not quite as sweet so i'm holding this the whole time just to try and just kind of edge things into sweetness i suppose and are you um when you're i know you're you're re-releasing all your solo records now yeah and and uh do you want to talk about that for a second no i thought you'd never ask yes back to the light is out i'm thrilled it took us a long time to just polish it up we didn't actually change any of the mixes but we looked carefully at the remastering and the packaging and how it was cut and the color of the vinyl all these sort of things which to me are part of the process you know how how it feels how it smells this is important stuff yeah and so i'm thrilled that we now have the box set it's oh i don't know i don't think i have the box here but this is this is what's inside it and the vinyl is the is the key piece really the vinyl is what people love did you know in britain at least the vinyl has overtaken the cd in terms of sales now wow yeah it's the biggest seller i was in emi yesterday and they said finally is now our biggest physical seller amazing that's actually great yeah it's brilliant people have an appreciation of what it's like it's wonderful you know you take it out you feel it you smell it you and you have you have an experience with it because you can you get good stuff to read you get nice big pictures you get a booklet which is big has lovely pictures my booklet is gorgeous you will love it and then here's the the fiesta resistance the actual itself yeah which you hit yourself with and you put on your turntable and you put your little needle on and magic happens human magic oh pete's got me a box thanks pete yeah this is the box so inside here is beautiful wow yeah i love it you get a white vinyl record in here as well which is really a bit special and you get the cd original exactly as it was and you get another cd which is all things that weren't actually uh included in the original sort of bonus tracks but some of them are live and stuff like one of them is when we there's a live version of um time of the day that we did we slashed on the jay leno show just things which happened in that epoch so to me i love it because it's buttoned it all up and when i die these things will be scattered around the world and they will be the best that could possibly be done with that part of my life so i'm very happy with this it's not going to sell billions but to me it it's defining what i think is some of my best work and it was done under probably the most painful conditions of my life because i was deeply depressed and back to the light is about that it's about finding your way out of the dark the darkest place that there is so um there it is that's my bit of a promotion thank you very much brian you're such a great singer i mean you're you're not only one of my favorite guitar players but you're also i mean beyond your songwriting you're such a great singer i mean it's it's really incredible to have a band that has the uh you know so many people that can sing it and queen and and when i hear your solo records it's just you're i mean just amazingly good singer oh thank you even even the times that you sing on instagram that i see i always think to myself wow that's pretty nice of you yeah well it was stiff competition in queen you know you have to keep your end up you know because roger's a a terrifyingly good singer you know he's saying in his own band prior to being in queen he was the the drum the the singing drummer you know the legendary singing drummer of cornwall and he would sit there and he would sing all the songs so roger and he has a really excellent voice and uh so the three of us and john wouldn't sing john was just not uh of the singing ilk he just wouldn't do that i don't know even when you imagine he's trying to tell freddie how to sing another one bites the dust and he doesn't sing that's quite interesting so he's playing playing bits on the piano and he's giving freddie the words on the piece of paper he's like no no no another one you know it's like but we the three of us we were kind of i suppose so fiercely competitive in a way but we were aware that together it was such a great fortunate thing because freddie had that incredible sort of razor edge to his voice beautiful sort of silk and razor roger had a sort of very broad sound very high top sort of huskiness on the top and quite a bit on the on the bottom and i had something in the middle i had to sort of warmth and if i pushed it i would sort of get into the more husky territory but the three voices together had a natural blend which you couldn't buy it just worked whenever the three of us were on there and we did it well three times like i told you with the multi-tracking that was the sort of queen sound we didn't have to try very hard to do that would you sit there would freddie go over to the piano though and say hey this is our line we're going to sing here let's practice this for a second and and play it yeah we'd always have the piano at hand and so the next line is um okay run it and we would just run it because no problem yeah because i mean there's some really weird inter lines so they're very weird chromatic lines in bohemian rhapsody oh my god i mean yeah really intricate lines yeah that really makes it fun though because you've got to learn things it's hard but it's fun to do that and when it works when you hear it coming back in your phones it's just magic because suddenly it all blends together and freddie had done his homework see freddie was very industrious in those days and he would come in with it all sorted later on he was much more like sort of laissez faire so even like crazy little things oh brian you do some harmonies you know just just tell us what to sing him so he he was he he had the knack of letting go which he developed over the years but rhapsody he's on the button he's on every harmony every single one it's amazing yeah his pitch is so ridiculously good too the whole intro i mean it's it's just it i mean it's so beautiful it just the blend everything of it and it's just the the tuning is is astounding yeah he had amazing he's a self-made man he went in the studio when we first went in um and he'd been singing with us live we'd been rehearsing and writing and everything and he was pretty out of control i have to say i mean even he knew it you know he'd run around screaming and posing and whatever but the vocals would be kind of all over the place he went in and we laid i think four tracks down and freddie said i'm not having this this is not good enough i don't want to sound like that and he went in again and again and again and worked on it listened to it coming back and molded himself into that singer so by the time he's on bohemian rhapsody he's phenomenal after bohemian actually the the um record after that is the day at the races you listen to a song called you take my breath away he does an introduction for that where he's multi-tracked it all himself and it's so close it all phases he's so accurate so in tune yeah yeah it's incredible that's not an effect there is no effect on there whatsoever you listen to it and it's all just delicately phasing with itself all the separate parts it's beautiful i never heard anybody do that quite to that degree of perfection yeah freddie just became a kind of superhuman in doing that stuff yeah yeah amazing yeah he had the you know freddie wouldn't have called himself an intellectual but he had incredible vision and he was utterly unforgiving of himself so he would never let it go until it was perfect and he'd work and work and work and if it wasn't right you're trying to figure out trying to figure out why and dedicated lived it loved it just all his life loved him during the breakdown i've done a whole introduction everything and it's it's difficult to figure out how to talk about it because there's so many parts to it i mean i i did i started out by doing a breakdown of the harmonies in the introduction he starts out with a b-flat six chord he's singing uh uh d f g b flat as the first voicing he sings and i say then i i go through and i kind of play on the piano and talk about these and talk about the progressions and i like to to do it from that and then i like to then i like to talk about the songs from a production point of view and uh and explain about i'll talk about bouncing and things like that give people a because people that will watch this will be people that don't know anything about recording people that love the song will watch it you know and i want to kind of explain without getting into the nitty-gritty just about the the challenges of of doing these kind of overdubs what you guys kind of were doing at the time so that's interesting it's a lot of it's a lot of stuff this is by far the most complex song i've ever had tried to break down before that's funny i mean it really has it has no parallel no i guess it doesn't no it's unusual and it's still got secrets that's the lovely thing it's kind of in a way i think it's nice that freddie didn't sit down and do this because you'd have been trying to get out of you know what did you actually mean why are you saying this why won't the video go what's going on and i'm just so glad that it never happened because it's all in our minds which is what he wanted well in the future you and i are going to do a breakdown of one of your songs like you said so uh uh i definitely want to do that but i i want to come there and and interview you in person at some point i'd love to schedule that yeah come see come see my place love to brian thank you so much for spending the time today this is really great talking to you rick such a teller [Laughter] goes on want to once again thank brian for being my guest and remind you if you've stuck around this long to subscribe to this channel brickbeatto2 that's all for now don't forget to subscribe ring the bell and leave a comment check out my new quick lessons pro guitar course that just came out also the biato book if you want to learn about music theory that's how you do it and check out my beato ear training course at beautiertraining.com and don't forget if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato 2

Views: 947,219

Keywords: brian may, bohemian rhapsody, freddie mercury, red special, john deacon, roger taylor, bohemian rhapsody movie, music theory, brian may guitar solo, brian may guitar, brian may back to the light, bohemian rhapsody queen, electric guitar, roger taylor singing, music theory piano, Vox AC30, brian may guitar sound, brian may sound guitar rig, Deaky box

Id: mgkvU5eCaYo

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tellman1257]

And the video about "Bohemian Rhapsody," which includes some of the above interview:

https://www.reddit.com/r/queen/comments/pled06/what\_makes\_this\_song\_great\_queen\_bohemian/

[u/Ravinguard404]

I like Rick Beato, educational and entertaining.

[u/ozzraven]

It's one hour