Anyone got the new Bonus Tracks yet?

Thistleboy, not everyone in North America has credit cards that they can use to order shit onlline. Most major online retailers do not even take PayPal, which I find quite ridiculous by now.
You also have to take into account too the overall costs of buying all the albums plus shipping and (where applicable) custom duty charges.

PS. There are leechera ANYWHERE you go in the world. No use singling out one country.

please send me those songs.   obs@ukr.net
big thanks in advance!!

inu-liger wrote: Thistleboy, not everyone in North America has credit cards that they can use to order shit onlline.

Good point. Just steal the music then.

Wow, thoroughly enjoyed the remaster of You Take My Breath Away, a truly quintessential and underrated Queen song.

Now though, I can spot a couple of areas where the producers have polished things up:

1.  a couple of piano flubs, on the same part, 1)  right before the bridge and 2)  right at the end of the vocals
2.  generally, it seems like they've done some pitch correcting to Fred's voice and "filled" it out a little more at the places where it sounded a little dry and weak

Compare with the original audio track here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajdbgJcfcn4

I'm not sure that the pitch-correcting to Fred's voice was necessarily:  the original sounds almost pitch perfect and the ever so slight deviations (only perceptible to geeks) add colour to that fantastic, dynamic, and emotional performance. 

The pitch correcting is not anywhere near the Michael Buble, or Cher vocoder-like level, of course, but the purest can spot it.

Anyhoo, overall, the spirit of that performance is definitely still there and in spades. 

Man that group kicked so much ass.

Hi mike.riffone, as someone who really detests Michael Buble, does he use autotune and pitch correction a lot?  I always thought he was supposed to be a throwback to the great singers of yesteryear.

I'm not a fan of auto-tuning vocals and using vocoders or similar effects processors to anchor a singing career. Some bars and clubs I got to will play that stuff ad nauseum. If a singer can actually sing, they shouldn't need to rely on those. If an artist wants to use an effect on their voice for part of a song or only once in a while, no problem. To me, though, too much of it sounds like an old Commodore 128 trying to sing.

Sheer Brass Neck wrote: Hi mike.riffone, as someone who really detests Michael Buble, does he use autotune and pitch correction a lot?  I always thought he was supposed to be a throwback to the great singers of yesteryear.
Hi Sheer,

Yes, Buble does use some auto-tune/pitch correcting mechanism on his big Haven't Met You Yet.  To me, it sounds like it's being used to correct/perfect the vocal melody on that song, as opposed to Cher's Believe where it's used more as an deliberate artistic colour to the song.  The comparison to a Commodore C64/128 is a good one.  Buble's style is a throwback, but the originals never used autotune.

Again, what exactly is being used on YTMBA is hard to tell (any music producers out there?), but something has been used to smooth out at least the volume of Fred's voice, and I strongly believe the pitch too:  if you relax and listen to it, the vocal melody seems to "hang around" at discrete notes instead of flowing between notes and the volume definitely sounds filled in, compared to the original.  The volume, OK, I can live with that, but the pitch correction, sheesh, if there was ever a singer that so did *not* need that help, I give you Freddie.

But alas, the world of millions of mixing board knobs to twirl, analog sound dynamics, and, frankly, better production values (was listening to Judas Priest's British Steel recently - awesome *sounding* record in a completely analog way), are long gone, let alone, singers and players that have truly honed their craft.  For the most part anyway.

Thistleboy 1980 wrote: Someone just boot me if I'm being thick, but for all the guys who are moaning that the remasters haven't hit their nation yet - why can't they just be bought online, through ebay or amazon or something?  I don't think the sellers there would give a toss that you're not meant to have them yet.

I patiently await my imported discs from the good people at Amazon.co.uk, who promptly told me the remasters were on backorder and more were expected from the distributor. Tom Petty was right. The waiting truly is the hardest part.

I would absolutely love the bonus tracks! email them to me if you can, thanks! It's jasonite@hotmail.com

J

mike.riffone wrote: Wow, thoroughly enjoyed the remaster of You Take My Breath Away, a truly quintessential and underrated Queen song.

Now though, I can spot a couple of areas where the producers have polished things up:

1.  a couple of piano flubs, on the same part, 1)  right before the bridge and 2)  right at the end of the vocals
2.  generally, it seems like they've done some pitch correcting to Fred's voice and "filled" it out a little more at the places where it sounded a little dry and weak

Compare with the original audio track here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajdbgJcfcn4

I'm not sure that the pitch-correcting to Fred's voice was necessarily:  the original sounds almost pitch perfect and the ever so slight deviations (only perceptible to geeks) add colour to that fantastic, dynamic, and emotional performance. 

The pitch correcting is not anywhere near the Michael Buble, or Cher vocoder-like level, of course, but the purest can spot it.

Anyhoo, overall, the spirit of that performance is definitely still there and in spades. 

Man that group kicked so much ass.

-------------

Sorry but they not used autotune for these song...
The youtube video is from an Old,worn-out and high generation Vhs source that Run a bit SLOW (or at least out of tone) and the audio is From the Video feed (On fact Has some inconsistences of tone,noise,some lines are lost,etc)
They not improve these Vhs sound but they used the Multitracks or at least a good Soundboard Source....
(Anyway If you listen the audience recording you will to realise a bit)

There is definitely no auto-tune used here.  The Hyde Park video soundtrack we've heard for years has this horrible fluttering sound.  Listen to the audience recording from the bootleg LP, and you'll hear that Freddie sounds exactly the same as he does on the official release.  But Mike is definitely right about the piano fixes... good catch there.

Sorry but they not used autotune for these song...

The youtube video is from an Old,worn-out and high generation Vhs source that Run a bit SLOW (or at least out of tone) and the audio is From the Video feed (On fact Has some inconsistences of tone,noise,some lines are lost,etc)
They not improve these Vhs sound but they used the Multitracks or at least a good Soundboard Source....
(Anyway If you listen the audience recording you will to realise a bit)

----------

It would be very surprising if the vocal was not cleaned up, pitchwise, by some digitized process (not necessarily autotune).  Of course it's difficult to hear the granularity of the vocal sound recording on the bootlegs/audio track of the video/all the other generations of that recording that have been out there for years to be sure, but that's a given and it's not at that level that we're talking about.

The remaster vocal track of the song, there sounds like, to me, a lack of dynamic range that comes from digitally compressing the sound into the appropriate key.

An analogy would be when you blow up a say 5 MP digital picture of a scene and a high quality 30mm exposure of the same scene:  the digital pic will show block-like and discrete "stair steps" whereas the 30mm print will show a continuous flow of  colours in the scene.

Using that analogy, the remaster vocal is being compressed into those "stair steps", whereas the original tape from that night probably has vocal sound continuity across the ever so slightly flats and sharps in the vocal melody that make it sound, well, human and warm.

I'd put money down on that being the case, but only the audio producer, with access to the original recording, could confirm that.

mike.riffone wrote: Sorry but they not used autotune for these song...

The youtube video is from an Old,worn-out and high generation Vhs source that Run a bit SLOW (or at least out of tone) and the audio is From the Video feed (On fact Has some inconsistences of tone,noise,some lines are lost,etc)
They not improve these Vhs sound but they used the Multitracks or at least a good Soundboard Source....
(Anyway If you listen the audience recording you will to realise a bit)

----------

It would be very surprising if the vocal was not cleaned up, pitchwise, by some digitized process (not necessarily autotune).  Of course it's difficult to hear the granularity of the vocal sound recording on the bootlegs/audio track of the video/all the other generations of that recording that have been out there for years to be sure, but that's a given and it's not at that level that we're talking about.

The remaster vocal track of the song, there sounds like, to me, a lack of dynamic range that comes from digitally compressing the sound into the appropriate key.

An analogy would be when you blow up a say 5 MP digital picture of a scene and a high quality 30mm exposure of the same scene:  the digital pic will show block-like and discrete "stair steps" whereas the 30mm print will show a continuous flow of  colours in the scene.

Using that analogy, the remaster vocal is being compressed into those "stair steps", whereas the original tape from that night probably has vocal sound continuity across the ever so slightly flats and sharps in the vocal melody that make it sound, well, human and warm.

I'd put money down on that being the case, but only the audio producer, with access to the original recording, could confirm that.
-----------

But darling as Sir Gh and i said, if you listen the Audience recording (and the audience recording don´t lie) you will to realise that the vocal is the same!
An audience recording is captured live in the moment of the concert and is just the gig sound.

You can found the audience recording on Youtube (maybe has a lot of audience noise but the vocals and piano are audible)

Sir GH wrote: There is definitely no auto-tune used here.  The Hyde Park video soundtrack we've heard for years has this horrible fluttering sound.  Listen to the audience recording from the bootleg LP, and you'll hear that Freddie sounds exactly the same as he does on the official release.  But Mike is definitely right about the piano fixes... good catch there.

They did an excellent job of fixing the piano parts but there is still one part (I don't remember where it is) where they left in a smudged note.

Oh Mike... silly, silly Mike. That is all!