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.

So I threw myself a challenge, to remake Labworks techno slammer ‘Psycho Green‘. The idea came about because of a thread on facebook. Firstly it was suggested that a track like this could be done on an iPhone these days, then I threw it out there for someone to try and re-program it in Rebirth….. well I can’t stand re-birth, the sound of it is great but the interface sucks beyond all belief and dealing with pre-programmed patterns is a workload that my memory cortex cannot handle these days, so I did it in my weapon of choice, Cubase 6. Now I know it’s not perfect… far from it… the 303 does not sound right and the hats are not programmed right in a few spots, but after spending ages trying to get it to sound perfect I realised that the track I was referencing from was firstly recorded off record, then compressed into a video, then converted to youtube FLV (ie: rubbish!), then ripped down as an mp3 by me…. ummm… yeah, so much for sonic quality….. but I’ve spent all the time I’m prepared to on this. To be honest I think it sounds better but not as dirty, which was exactly the problem I was faced with….. the sounds where far too bright and clear, more like 2011 sounds and less like 1993 sounds…… I found myself knocking the top off a lot of the sounds to get it right, thus the not-so-dirty 303, but I did use a bit-crusher and tube to overdirve it a bit. Anyway take a listen and you can download the high quality version HERE

We move on…. following the ‘massive’ success of the re-release of Reaver EP#1, I’ve decieded to do the same with EP#2…. yeah!  I hear you all scream….. anyway this is the first track off the EP, the only track on the A side, ‘Reavers Choice’, a cheesy rip off of an old rave track called ‘Ravers Voice’, which for some strange reason I cannot seem to find on youtube.