What Makes This Song Great? QUEEN (Feat. Brian May)

bohemian rhapsody was off queen's night at the opera album which was released on november 21st 1975. the song was written by freddie mercury and produced by roy thomas baker and queen okay so how much did you rehearse the song oh no we didn't i don't think we realized it at all well you know there's a kind of rehearsal record situation in the studio generally we went in there with ideas and we'd start playing around but um in the case of john and freddie and roger um they would pick things up very quickly 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 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 um 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 there will be more of my interview with brian throughout the video now let's talk about the beginning of the song the song begins with an acapella vocal part all sung by freddie mercury goes into a ballot and then into the most epic guitar solo then into an opera and then it goes into a hard rock shuffle and finishes out with this beautiful ballad coda we're gonna get into the intricacies of this this is almost a progressive rock song but it's a number of songs put together perfectly okay so that sounds really complex right it is it starts out on a b flat six chord that's what the vocal harmonies are doing there but then he goes to c7 doesn't walk down and then it goes to f7 the v chord but then c minor seven two chord five and then it goes to the one to the four e flat b flat and then there's a quick f7 to b-flat cadence at the end and it's so beautifully done 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 listen 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 if you listen to a song called you take my breath away he does an introduction for that where he's multi-tracked 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've never heard anybody do that quite to that degree of perfection next the piano enters open your eyes [Music] okay starts out g minor seven right then b flat seven and then to e flat major and beautiful then then right to c minor let's listen on [Applause] [Music] this is what makes the song so unusual it starts out on the c minor chord i'm just he's singing the fifth of the c minor and then on the f7 uh he starts on the root i need no sympathy but then he goes into these chromatic major chords because i'm easy come easy go little high little low now that is so so unusual b major b flat major a major b-flat b b-flat a b-flat you never hear that in songs but what's even more amazing are the harmony parts that go over that let's check them out [Music] [Music] and next [Music] beautiful crescendo on the harmony vocals there and the harmonic regression or the chord structures that happen there so it's e flat major starts on the third right anyway the wind then wind blows on the b flat over the d and then goes down to d flat diminished listen really then to f7 over c to me this is so unusual these chord progressions e flat b flat over d d flat diminish and then f seven over c all these inverted chords dominant chords diminished chords things like that you just never hear in music anymore it's amazing let me solo the harmonies in piano in that section [Music] this next interlude is where bassist john deacon enters check it out then that six to five or g to f on the b flat chord sound like octaves to me but it could be single notes i've seen freddy play single note single notes would sound like this actors would be [Music] this next verse mama just killed a man continues to develop the active motif in the piano check it out [Music] oh [Music] [Music] and then the drum center there six five on the b flat then two to one so on the g minor chord he's playing then he goes the the ninth to the roots that's a suspension there and then the c minor he does the same thing ninth to the root of the c minor listen six five and b flat nine to root i'm g minor then and then he goes up to the ninth right here on the g minor just begun it's beautiful right so it's uh just began that beautiful upper extension on there the ninth and then resolving is used as a suspension and then we go into this descending progression right here i love how he goes from falsetto into full voice in that gravelly intense voice on the descending progression and it's so cool it's like c minor b augmented e flat over b flat and then a flat diminished then a flat major seven then really c minor over g and then it goes back to e-flat [Music] next we move on to i guess you would call this the chorus of this section right [Music] then [Music] okay so there's a lot of stuff going on here so this progression we've kind of heard before except for that four minor chords so it starts out so e flat to b flat over d c uh c minor then with a cross handed and then it goes to f minor then e augmented to a flat over e flat and then that's like a d diminished and then it goes to this b flat vamps so it's going b flat e flat to b flat seven carry on carry on then it goes to the four minor chord a flat minor and then it goes into this what i call almost a blues turn around so it's going a flat over e flat e flat g flat diminished over e flat f minor seven flat five will reflect even though it's not the full minor seven but i hear it like like that and then it goes to b-flat that's really a blues turnaround if you hear it on guitar my guitar's tuned down has to be exactly like this then back to b flat the next thing you want to talk about is the drum sound not just the drum part check out the drum solid they are massive sounding the kick drum is open the toms are open and you can really hear the tape compression let's see if you can hear what i mean what i find so interesting about this drum sound is that you have this low end extension on the kick because the kick drum is open does it has a lot of openness to it a lot of length to it same with the toms but the snare is very dead and the snare is kind of firmly rooted in the 70s so you kind of have this juxtaposition between the open toms and kick and then that the deader snare sounds great drum sound in this first we also have the entrance of the guitar check it out solo [Music] [Applause] [Music] except for there this part is this beautiful panning chime effect listen [Music] [Applause] that's amazing again [Music] [Applause] and then it continues on [Music] and then the distorted guitars enter for the first time on the descending part [Music] i don't wanna [Music] at die [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay i'm gonna come back to the solo in a second i just thought it flowed really nice to go into it i want to talk about this harmony part that happens in this section [Music] [Music] that leads right into the beginning of the solo listening [Music] and then drops out and you notice that the guitars those stereo guitars continue on during the solo as well listen [Music] now let me solo the guitar has the out of phase sound as brian explains that's the sound of these two pickups out of phase so it's very grunchy [Music] 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 the control room 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 [Music] 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 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 next we move into the operatic section check it out [Music] okay let's talk about this harmonically what's going on here first before we get more into the vocal harmonies so he's playing a perfect time like a metronome amazing then it goes d a a diminished to a major like a clock [Music] very very frightening let's listen in context [Music] okay there's so many things going on there i asked brian about how they did their harmony parts let's hear what he says 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 everything is so neatly laid out yeah i was gonna say no it's very well organized and generally speaking 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 yeah 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 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 guitars and 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 um 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 and generally the three of us would sing it at the same time and for him but here 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 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 gonna 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 and 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 sometimes we would do octaves so then you each time we're bouncing him 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 on any further we would have lost everything so a section like this [Music] and that easily could be let's say you've got three tracks on one harmony part three tracks another three tracks on another and then you've got a three-part harmony i don't even know how many tracks that is that's a lot of tracks and they had to commit to those sounds meaning they had to pre-mix them and hope that the levels the balances between parts would hold up later on in the mix because once you've bounced them that's it that's one of the things about working on analog tape honestly that makes it so creative this is why this is such just a brilliant masterpiece beyond the writing of it the actual production part of it too is so amazing another cool thing that happens in this section is this cascading vocal effect i love that that spreads out across a stereo image and it's a it's a big e flat six chord e flat major there's a six and there's the b flat in the bottom but they hold the first one minifico and add a part each time and spread it out over the stereo spectrum so it has this cascading effect they use it a few times in the song it's beautiful what's really interesting about this it starts out the first part he's going b major b flat major to d flat which is different from earlier in this song when he goes b major b-flat major a major b-flat matrix and then when the huge vocal section comes in it's a flat major e flat major e flat diminished e flat major right that just sounds massive with all those layered vocals let's listen to it again i want to just go back to one thing and talk about this vocal bouncing because you were limited to 24 tracks and you have all these tracks of vocals what you'd have to do is you would pre-mix them like brian talked about so you take three of them singing the low part for example he's just a poor boy from a poor family and then you add three tracks of the middle harmony that's three tracks of three people singing each track and then you do the high part okay then i put those all together and then i'm gonna add in a couple tracks where they're actually singing the these parts together right to make it even thicker they're doing all three parts [Laughter] so then you blend that all to one stereo track and you get the bounce there but you have to commit these levels early on before the mix so you're pre-mixing these things and hoping that it all sounds good later on 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 anybody still know about digital tape i do yeah you do okay well you get digital 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 on hard disks instead of tape easy go will you let me go okay so that section there that descending section we've kind of heard that before that blues turn around [Music] right so and then into the b major b flight major d flat diminished b flat major and then [Music] let's actually break some of this apart listen to drums first huge sounding toms oh then the timpani so there's timpani in there along with the with the drums and the and the toms being played right huge and the bass [Music] so this is all played live they had to leave spaces for these vocal interludes so they literally had to pause without any metronome so that those vocal parts could fit in the middle of these listening [Music] okay so that alone had to if that's just so brilliant right that vocal layering that entire section once again okay let's talk about that really odd base motion here on this okay it's going b a d c sharp f sharp b flat e flat and then okay so that part though is going um it goes e flat uh to a flat then d major g minor and then down to b flat major listen [Music] now we start getting into the shuffle [Music] let's talk about the choir on the build-up on the b-flat chord the b-flat seven listen [Music] that's roger on that high part i mean that is really unbelievable all the high vocals he's doing and they're amazing there's also a guitar note that comes in here [Music] love it let's talk about the piano feel on this outro shuffle section check it out [Music] oh and it works perfectly against the bass and drums listen [Music] and then you have the guitar overlaid with it [Music] [Music] right [Music] me let me solve the guitar parts on these runs that happen at the end of this section so you can hear how these pan from side to side and they're all different sounds they're all different settings on his guitar or maybe they're even the dk amp which we'll talk about in a second [Music] the dekey box or the this this uh can you tell me about that what is that exactly um i could probably even show it to you if we we may be able to show you that it's um it's d he was a bit of a genius really he got a first-class honors in electronics at chelsea university about the time when i got my first degree and was failing my second degree uh only to return 30 years later to get my doctorate it's another story but dehu 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 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 here it says on it i've written them 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 for myself hey all right good to meet you he's rick piatto so this is the dekey 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 saturations things and compressors and and phasers and whatever nothing sounds like this so you think you can stone me and spit in my eyes so you think you can love me and leave me to die you hear one of his voices actually goes in you hear that upper partial that he's singing like it's like a harmonic in his voice listen [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] just an amazing rock singer i mean freddie mercury could do anything with his voice and then we have the piano build that leads up to the ending guitar solo [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] nothing really that survives to me beautiful then you think it's over [Applause] then [Music] 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 behemoth 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 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 that why won't they 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 we wanted [Music] [Applause] [Music] anyway the wind blows you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 492,274

Rating: 4.9800477 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, brian may, freddie mercury, bohemian rhapsody, red special, john deacon, roger taylor, bohemian rhapsody cover, bohemian rhapsody movie, bohemian rhapsody queen, bohemian rhapsody piano tutorial, brian may solo, brian may bohemian rhapsody solo, brian may (musical artist), electric guitar, night at the opera queen, Piano Cover, isolated tracks queen, john deacon bohemian rhapsody

Id: 3Ym7X_wCsPQ

Length: 38min 33sec (2313 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/batgranny]

Watched it this morning, it's a great video.

[u/45x2]

This blew my mind!

I saw 'inside the Rhapsody' (think thats what it was called) and that was amazing especially because Brian showed the notes Freddie made, and it was the first time I've heard a breakdown of the song.

But this really gets down to the nitty gritty of how the song was made. Absolutely amazing.

It just boggles my mind every time I think about what these musicians went through to make a song. I mean everyone, not just Queen.