I only recently heard that at some time in the past Queen released the 24 track masters of Bohemian Rhapsody. I really don’t think they where ‘released’ more like leaked, probably at a time when a re-mastered version of their tracks was being done. So, I went hunting and found it on the interwebs… ahhhh fantastic interwebs! and I could not resist the chance to take a listen and mix the track for myself. All I can say is that this must have been a feat of engineering prowess, nearly every second of all 24 tracks was used up, the engineer would have been working overtime on the faders to get this down, it would have been a fantastic performance in it’s own right.
This youtube clip is the end result of my attempt at it, with all the advantages of a modern DAW. I had fun with it, I did not reference the original because I figured there was not point in just doing the original over again, I wanted to put my own spin on it. I wanted to beef things up a bit and bring the vocals and harmonies out more, they are so epic! I took a little creative license with some panning, especially on the vocals to make the mix move around a bit more and I also went through and cut out a lot of noise and applied noise cancelling where required to get rid of that dirty 1970’s grunge. Anyway, it is what it is, I could play with this for days, but it’s always good to call it over and move on to the next thing. Oh, and you can download a high quality version here.