Why Brian May revamped all the guitar parts on Queen’s debut album for new edition: “I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s no ambience, Brian’”
Queen has unveiled a completely reworked version of their iconic self-titled debut album more than 50 years after its release.
Arriving in a lavish 6CD+1LP box set, Queen I Collector’s Edition features a brand new track list, alternative takes, demos and live recordings, including audio from Queen’s first-ever live performance in 1970.
READ MORE: David Lee Roth told Eddie Van Halen to play fewer solos, Alex Van Halen claims
More importantly, the album has been remixed and restored by recording engineers Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae, and Kris Fredriksson “to sound the way the band always wanted it to”. As Brian May notes in a new interview with MOJO, all of the guitar parts in the reissue have been revamped to deliver “the debut album we always dreamed of bringing to you”.
“I’m not saying the original version was bad – it just wasn’t what we dreamed of,” says the Queen guitar legend of the band’s latest musical project. “Freddie [Mercury, singer] and John [Deacon, bassist], too, were always conscious of this thing in our past which seemed like it couldn’t be fixed.”
Explaining that “everything” in the original record has been improved, May says: “Every instrument has been re-examined from the bottom up. The guitars were originally recorded very dry, so we’ve remedied that.”
“I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s no ambience, Brian. I don’t feel like I’m in the room with you playing next to me.’ But we weren’t in a position to lay down the law, and we felt that if we stepped out of line we would lose the opportunity altogether.”
He adds that while producer Roy Thomas Baker did an excellent job on the original given the circumstances, “he was wedged between us young hopefuls and this management company [Trident Audio Productions] who saw us as a can of beans.”
“This is not just a remaster,” May writes of the album’s significance in a post on his website. “This is a brand new 2024 rebuild of the entire Queen debut album.”
“All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973, but every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sounds we would have liked to use originally. The result is Queen as it would have sounded with today’s knowledge and technology – a first.”
Join Brian May in an unboxing of the Queen I Collector’s Edition below.
The post Why Brian May revamped all the guitar parts on Queen’s debut album for new edition: “I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s no ambience, Brian’” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
