A discussion that began in the REP Recording Forum here on ProSoundWeb that’s packed with relevant/useful points and references.

Question by kifaru
I’ve been brought a song to record that has a part in it that requires a chorus to sing part of it. The performer told me that what he had in mind for the part was a sound like the choral parts in Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

I’m really not sure how to achieve this sound and the performer does not have the money to hire a choir to do the part or an arrangement to give them if he did.

So here’s my question. Did Queen do the choral parts themselves and if so did they use any effects to achieve the sound?

I have a large church space to record the part in if it’s just four guys singing the harmony. However if not is there a way to achieve this effect with a few guys? I’m assuming that I’ll use no more than two mics: one for the room and one close for the choir. Any help would be appreciated.

Reply by Fletcher
From what I’ve heard, the vocals on Bohenian Rhapsody were all Freddy Mercury. All of it. Every voice, every harmony, everything that came out of a mouth came out of his… So you might want to explain to your client that he has about 40 vocal overdubs in his immediate future, and it’ll really help if he [or who ever gets the arduous task of singing on the project] has a great voice, and an excellent sense of harmony and vocal arrangements…

With a choir you end up with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” - which may be the case anyway…

Reply by pricey
If memory serves, the liner notes say that the vocals on “Bohemian Rhapsody” are all four of them. It certainly doesn’t sound like one person. The key to that beautiful, glossy sound is
1) EXTREMELY good pitch and timing
2) Massive overdubbing
3) A neutral, uncolored tracking room.

After listening to “A Night at the Opera,” the Beatles and the Beach Boys sounded like crap in comparison!

Reply by rivers
I’m pretty sure most of those parts involve more than one voice but will require layers of overdubbing(not to mention talent) and many dedicated tracks (at least before some mixdown or reduction mix).

IMHO the Queen vocals can’t really be replicated with a “plug-in” or simple doubling but usually requires triple or quadruple tracking of harmony parts AND the right arrangement to make it happen. All of this assumes talented vocalists and a engineer/producer that has an ear for vocal arrangement.

Long and short - .it’s easy to do poorly and quite difficult to do well.

Reply by chrisj
I hear breathy compression on their stuff - is it me? I’d love to have more information on, say, the “Sheer Heart Attack” background vocals. Sometimes they get a peculiar edgy chime that’s like the Beatles got with out-of-phase combinations of mics.

It’s not just EQ doing it, or just compression. I keep thinking out-of-phase. They had to be savvy to this - Brian May’s guitar always had the capacity for out-of-phase pickups. Could it have been applied to vocals?

Reply by kifaru
I don’t think the young man has the bucks to achieve his vision, but I think I will subsidize his project because this has intrigued me. Let’s say that I am able to get the men’s chorale at my local university to donate their talents, how many mics do I use to record them and should I switch mics when doing the overdubs?

Reply by Fletcher
I think the biggest part of the thing is going to be to have the parts clearly defined. As for switching mics/pre’s and other elements of the recording chain, it usually makes it way easier to mix when you do.

Best of luck with it!

Reply by hiltonius
My money’s on Fletcher on this one. Here’s why:

Shortly after the untimely passing of Freddie Mercury, I had the honor to work on a Freddy Mercury track for the “Great Pretender” record. Our mission was to peel the vocals that had been recorded previously off multitrack and build a new track around them.

The opportunity to examine that legendary Queen vocal texture in this detail was appreciated by us all. Every single vocal on the song we worked on was quite obviously the voice of Freddy, and the overall texture (thick choral - you know, that Queen thing) sounded just like all that other stuff they did, including Bohemian Rhapsody. I think he had bounced (that’s right, bounced) all the finished vocals to an entire 24-track slave - there had to be upwards of 100 voices bounced together on that song.

The unfortunate title of the track we did was something on the order of “Time Waits for No One”, and was taken from some west end London show that he’d written it for (which, by the way, was produced - the show not the record - by Dave Clark. Yes, that Dave Clark from the Dave Clark 5).

Reply by slipperman
Call me crazy but…. No way, Jose.

Roger Taylor, Queen’s drummer, is the only guy in the band capable of hitting half of the Hi-D#(+) stuff on ANY of the Queen records bvox topology. If you guys dig around, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna find a ton of documentation to support that claim.

Freddy had a great voice and a decent “full voice” range, but a modest and maiden-feld falsetto. Roger had the “high” voice, hard and sharp/clear. This was common knowledge “back in the day.”

Reply by ccgreg
Wasn’t it recorded on a Stephens 2-inch 40-track? If so, because of the incredible small track width, phase alignment was almost impossible, which made ping-ponging sound very bad. I’ve done it with extremely poor results.

Reply by mwalker_mw
As a tip to the question of the original poster, try to get ahold of the cast recording from “We Will Rock You” - it’s a West End stage production based on Queen music. The final number is Bohemian Rahpsody done by a full chorus live (I’m pretty sure, but you never know these days) on stage.

No, it doesn’t sound like the original recording, but it is a good showing of how to do something similar with a large chorus rather than extensive looping. By the way, the recording is a live multitrack, so it isn’t great, but you should be able to get some ideas out of it. Brian May and Roger Taylor were fairly heavily involved in the creative process as well, I understand.

Reply posted by heef
An article in Sound on Stage magazine several years ago had a story on the remix of “BoRap for” 5.1. Has a nice quote from Brian May too. All the extra high falsettos are by Roger. Brian and Roger make up a fair amount of the opera section too. Apparently vocals were still being tracked on the day of mixing.

Rob Schnapf tells me that Roy Thomas Baker used a Stephens Electronics tape machine. Whether this was one manufactured by Stephans, or a 3M modified by Stephans, I don’t know. I do know that “A Night at the Opera” was one of the first 24-track recordings, so it was obviously recorded on a 24-track.

Reply by dwo
There’s no real trick to achieving those vocals.. .it’s just #6 cattle wire with the tri-barb configuration, 10-inch barb spacing. Just adorn the singer in an appropriate fashion.

Some use this in conjunction with a run of electric fence wire, hookup is on a low voltage 100 amp slo-fire power supply set to gap on a 4 second interval, partly to let the deep surge caps recharge, but also to avoid singeing the singer with back-to-back DC whacks.

The high voltage/low ampere ones work better and are less cruel to the animal, but when they spark they make a distinctly audible ‘snap’ that is inappropriate for audio work.

Don’t be shy, man. If you want results, you gotta pay for ‘em. There simply isn’t a more effective inspiration for a singer than employing his genitalia as the dielectric between a sharp piece of metal and a sharp surge of DC.

Reply by doc dave
Is it worth mentioning 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” in this thread? It is sometimes discussed alongside “BoRap” because of its amazing vocal overdubs. Noteworthy, too, that the only engineering/mixing/production credits are to “10cc”.

Among other things, I take it patience and perseverance are required in large measure. Come to think of it -  would a choral group give you the same feel as one or two voices recorded ad nauseum?

Reply by mcallister
If you get a choir to do it great. If you get one guy (or the band) to do it great. Whatever works.

However, do everyone a favor and write out the parts BEFORE you start tracking. Nothing is worse than getting into overdub #4 and hearing “wait, lemme figure out what to sing.” Similarly, you would never say to a choir, “here’s a part. . .” and start singing it to them.

If going the choir route, you’ll need to write it out, all of it. No mistakes. Mistakes will either a) cost you time (money), b) prove to everyone that whoever wrote the ‘score’ is musically illiterate, or c) both.

If going the one guy/band route (presuming that their reading/writing music skills are scratchy at best) have a demo done first; jot down ideas; have a game plan before diving in.

Reply by Fletcher
As long as we’ve strayed from the original topic… this weekend I’m going to be working on the desk that was used to cut Bohenian Rhapsody. Had my choice of that desk [a Trident A-Range] or an 8078…

Reply by murray
I’m coming in here way late, but wanted to answer the original question. I know RTB, and have worked lots with engineer Mike Stone (RIP), who recorded about everything Queen did up through “News of the World.”

Anyway, they did the same thing on all their records - all sang the low part together (three times on three tracks), then the middle part (three times, three tracks), etc etc. Freddy would keep a finger on the piano and hit a note for pitch before each take.

Later, Roy (with engineer George Tutko) did the same with the Cars (same stacked treatment even though Cars weren’t on pitch). Also, Queen worked in “deadish” studios. I think Bohemian was done at some funky place in England (Olympic?).

Mike had a stack of snapshots of them recording there, real retro, cramped control room, console tiny. I’ve messed around with Roy’s Stephens-40 (which is actually small, portable) but very cool lookin’. As I recall, he just used it for show and conversation piece, almost positive he never used it for Queen.

By the way, I have a Stephens 8-track and love it. Roy still has his. If you listen to the chorus on Bohenian, it’s actually quite dry, might hear a bit of room. They recorded dry then usually added a bit of Lexicon 224 at mixdown. If you recorded that in your church, it wouldn’t sound tight enough.