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.”

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