Queen (1998 Remaster) vs Queen I (2024 Remix)

Queen (1998 Remaster) vs Queen I (2024 Remix)

Queen (1998 Remaster) vs Queen I (2024 Remix)

So I’ve spent the last few hours not only listening to these two side by side but I’ve actually ripped them into Pro Tools and done a full spectrum analysis in the studio and I have to admit my initial impression is…Wow. It’s flipping brilliant.

I’ve been a Queen fan since Christmas 1984 when little 5 year old me received two 7” singles as gifts. One was the Band Aid single, Do They Know It’s Christmas and the other was I Want To Break Free from The Works album. I’ve loved the band from that day to this and I would easily rank them as one of my Top 5 favourite bands of all time, so trust me I’m a fan. I’m also a studio engineer, mainly Mastering but Mixing too, and so as both a fan and an engineer I’m very happy with what they’ve done here.

My three main criticisms of the original have always been:

1) The drums didn’t sound great and the kick drum was often imperceptibly quiet on some songs. Here the drums sound significantly better and the kick drum is now sitting in a much better place in the mix.

2) The piano never sounded great to my ears. It was always thin and weak, but here it sounds like I always wanted it to sound. Just like the guy playing it it’s now “grand”. My Fairy King has been transformed and now sounds epic!

3) The Mastering was never great and there are noticeable volume differences between the songs on the 98 version. On this new mix Adam Ayan has done an absolutely brilliant job on the Mastering, and looking at the spectrum analysis and output metering in Pro Tools the output level is very consistent throughout. Great job.

Now to the elephant in the room. “Auto-Tune” or rather Melodyne which is what we actually use for Pitch Correction. Another indicator that the hysteria online about “Freddie being Auto-Tuned” is mostly coming from people who have zero idea about what it is they’re actually talking about!

Has Melodyne been used on the vocal? As someone who uses this software every week in the studio I would say, yes it has, but it’s subtle and very well executed.

Does it matter? Not a bit. Two reasons for this answer.

1) It’s nothing that every other artist and band has been doing for the last two decades, whether fans want to accept this or not, and at least Queen are being honest about it. Any band or artist, no matter how talented they are, will always use the tools available to them to improve and I’m certain that if these tools had been available to the band back in the 70s they wouldn’t have hesitated to use them. And that goes for every other artist too; just imagine what Mozart or Beethoven could have created in the studios of 2024!

2) As many of you will know, but I’m sure some won’t, in the studio on almost every single piece of audio that we ever record we use devices called compressors. These devices, whether they’re actual hardware units, or software plugins in the computer, artificially alter the dynamics of audio. They can and do change the volume, and the way that the audio is recorded and therefore heard. They’ve been all over every studio vocal performance since the 1960s, and not just in the studio, every live performance by every major artist too. My question is, why is it fine to artificially alter the ‘dynamics’ of a vocal but when it comes to altering the ‘pitch’ it’s as though we’ve literally murdered someone. Any recording that’s been Compressed has been altered and therefore by definition the sound is not actually the sound that left the singer’s mouth. Think about that for a minute before you criticise pitch correction.

It happens and has happened for years people. Even back in the days of Analogue Tape, pitch correction took place. Vari-speed on tape machines, dubbing from one tape machine to another to alter speed and therefore pitch and even recording pitched down at a slower speed so that when the tape was sped up the pitch would increase. These studio tricks have always happened. It’s just part of the recording process.

So there we have it, my ‘slightly’ educated opinion. If you’ve read ‘til the end thanks for sticking with me.

This new mix is great. Not only is it “the album the band wanted to make” it’s now the album I wanted it to be. Brilliant 10/10

Wayne McAloon | Now Spinning Magazine

Share
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Kurt
Kurt
2 months ago

This is the strongest defense I’ve read for the “auto-tuning” on Queen 1. I still disagree, and I suspect Freddie would NOT have used it were it available, but I appreciate the argument.

1
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x