Why is there not more outrage?

Fairy Fellers Master Stroke at Live at the Rainbow sounds like the shittest thing Queen have ever officially released. Totally disrespectful to Freddie's legacy how they have manipulated Freddie's voice so he sounds like the fucking blue guy from Eiffel 65.

I don't neccessarily mind if they edit his voice to make it sound better without it sounding obviously fake, but this seems like such an amateurish job...something you'd expect some teenager on youtube to make.

If you can't edit it, then having listened to the rest of the gig, i can't imagine Freddie's voice to be that bad on one song? Just leave it.

However, by giving it a Cher/Kanye West/Britney computerised voice, it just sticks out and i can't listen to it. I know people will point out MK, Wembley, Live Killers have all been manipulated but i don't think they've released anything that shoddy before.

Yes, it is quite dodgy. I'd love to know what's actually going on with that track.

I kept saying this all the time when it was released. The falsetto in the beginning is hilariously badly edited. The rest of the track isn't too bad though - the ploughboy C5 has probably been edited one way or another, and there are a few slightly twangy sounding notes, but most of it seems genuine. They even kept an off sounding guitar chord after the A capella bit, so I'm not sure why they had to start fiddling with the vocals.

[QUOTE] [b]Oscar J wrote:[/b]
They even kept an off sounding guitar chord after the A capella bit, so I'm not sure why they had to start fiddling with the vocals. [/QUOTE]

Cos they'd been systematically fiddling with the vocals for most every other song thus far - why stop there? :P

By the way, the chord sounds bad because Brian played an A minor where he was supposed to play a D minor, making the progression into Am, Am rather than Dm, Am.

Outrage wouldn't achieve anything. It'd take a hell of a lot of outraged people to get QP to take ownership of the fact that they're hiring people to digitally alter Freddie's voice. I'm convinced no amount of outraged people would get them to release the track in an unedited form, which is a tragic shame. We can really only guess as to whether the harmonies were that immaculate on the night, what that falsetto line and the C5 really sounded like.

Based on the extensive comparing I've done from what unaltered stuff I could compare from previous releases to the 2014 one, the fact that these parts of Fairy Feller were edited doesn't necessarily indicate that they were performed that badly on the night - the 2014 release has autotune correcting the very slightest and most momentary off-key notes in some cases. Still, the amount of distortion on 'plough' certainly seems to indicate that the note Freddie hit was a decent way off the one he intended, and the one that was instated on the recent release.

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that the applause after the song isn't that big or enthusiastic - could that indicate that the performance had enough mistakes (including that guitar chord) to not go over so well as a whole? Who knows, really...

I agree, I was completely confused when I first heard it, and even more so when almost no-one seemed to notice it on QZ.

What's even going on there? Why must they do this?

I remember there being discussion about this "issue" right after the release.

I also was surprised that they'd release such a badly edited version of Fairy Feller's but I guess I didn't bother to contribute much to the discussion then because I was so glad (still am) that the Rainbow gigs were released at all (after 40 years). No, that bit ("ploughboy") doesn't sound very good, but I think what we now have is better than Queen leaving these in the vaults forever...

However, I would love to hear comments from Brian and/or Roger (or Justin/Josh/Kris) about this "issue".

[QUOTE] [b]tomchristie22 wrote:[/b]. We can really only guess as to whether the harmonies were that immaculate on the night, what that falsetto line and the C5 really sounded like. [/QUOTE]
well not really. there's no need to guess anything. fact is - they altered it - and if they were happier with this "tweaked" result than the original - means the original wasn't acceptable...by some distance


[QUOTE] [b]tomchristie22 wrote:[/b]Based on the extensive comparing I've done from what unaltered stuff I could compare from previous releases to the 2014 one, the fact that these parts of Fairy Feller were edited doesn't necessarily indicate that they were performed that badly on the night - [/QUOTE]
yeah it does. you don't hack n slash something to make it worse. also the only real evidence we need is there for all to see:- how many times did they perform this song live? exactly. they couldn't get it right live. so they didn't bother.

it also sounds like they flew in parts of the studio version or even edited in an alternate studio take in places. It just doesn't sound live. You can make mistakes in the studio too and that guitar note could've been easily fixed. Maybe they left it in to make it sound more live?

[QUOTE] [b]brENsKi wrote:[/b]

[QUOTE] [b]tomchristie22 wrote:[/b]. We can really only guess as to whether the harmonies were that immaculate on the night, what that falsetto line and the C5 really sounded like. [/QUOTE]
well not really. there's no need to guess anything. fact is - they altered it - and if they were happier with this "tweaked" result than the original - means the original wasn't acceptable...by some distance


[QUOTE] [b]tomchristie22 wrote:[/b]Based on the extensive comparing I've done from what unaltered stuff I could compare from previous releases to the 2014 one, the fact that these parts of Fairy Feller were edited doesn't necessarily indicate that they were performed that badly on the night - [/QUOTE]
yeah it does. you don't hack n slash something to make it worse. also the only real evidence we need is there for all to see:- how many times did they perform this song live? exactly. they couldn't get it right live. so they didn't bother.

[/QUOTE]

I didn't say we need to guess IF those obviously doctored notes are doctored - I said we can only guess what they sounded like before being doctored. As for the harmonies, they're probably doctored, but I don't hear any digital artefacting on them to solidly prove that they are. I'm happy to be proven wrong on this if someone can offer evidence.

You chopped out the part of my post where I explained that they DID hack and slash parts completely needlessly throughout the entire Rainbow release, even to vocal parts that were only minutely off, such that they weren't offensive in the slightest, yet still obviously needed digital fixing by QPL's reckoning. See my Rainbow releases analysis (http://queenlive.ca/queen/misc/Rainbow_comparison_Tom_Christie.pdf) if you need further proof that their philosophy really was this nitpicky when it came to Freddie's vocal. So, I maintain my original point, which is this: the fact that they're autotuned doesn't give us any indication of how bad they were before, as the release contains pitch correction on everything from the tiniest to the greatest of bum notes.

the worst digital distortion is NOT on "ploughboy" but on "come to hear the sound". Blecch. How this slipped past QC is beyond me.

All we need is a good audience recording to know how it really sounded.

[QUOTE] [b]Mrmarioanonym wrote:[/b]
You can make mistakes in the studio too and that guitar note could've been easily fixed. Maybe they left it in to make it sound more live?[/QUOTE]

I think it's quite possible - they did the same sort of thing in March of the Black Queen (November concert) by using the vocal from a night where Freddie's voice cracks on 'QUEEN of the night', when there was the alternate night that they could have drawn on (which we know is smooth on that line based on the VHS version of the concert which uses it, unless that's an overdub. Either way, we can probably assume that his voice didn't crack the same way both nights).

So, what we're left with is an overall very autotuned 'I rule with my left hand, I rule with my right, I'm lord of all darkness'... and then the crack on 'Queen of the night' to create some sort of impression of rawness and authenticity, contrary to the manipulative perfectionism on the entire line prior.

Still, perhaps there was no such intentioned reason for the inclusion of the bad chord on Fairy Feller- perhaps they just couldn't fix it. They had no alternate night to draw on, and the correct chord isn't played with the same tone, resonance, or slowness anywhere else in the recording, so patching it in would've been pretty difficult to do well. They could've pitch shifted Brian's mistaken Am up to a Dm, but such a jump in pitch would've sounded quite hideous (even more so than the most egregious vocal edits on the release).

It's possible that studio overdubs were done in 1974 or 75, but there's no proof of this, nor proof that they were even planning on Fairy Feller being included on the eventually scrapped live release of the March concert. I tend to believe that they only recorded overdubs for those tracks which we hear on the bootleg of the March show, which is indicative of what the Sheffield bros. wished to release. Still, this is only guessing based on the fact that it would've been completely impractical to record overdubs for all the tracks, then cull it down to only eight of them.

[QUOTE] [b]people on streets wrote:[/b]

All we need is a good audience recording to know how it really sounded.[/QUOTE]

I'd take a bad one. Anything for certainty on matters like this. One can hope that something will come to light one day...

Do we know who exactly did the editing work on the 2014 Rainbow release? I may try and get in touch with them, see if they can provide some insight into how Fairy Feller sounded before Pro Tools work... It's probably expecting too much to hope that they'd even reply, let alone acknowledge the edits, but it's worth a try.

EDIT:
No luck finding contact details for Justin Shirley Smith, Kris Fredriksson, or Josh Macrae, who reportedly engineered the release. Quite a shame.

Tom, you can contact Gary Taylor, who is on FB and he could pass your message or even write it to him as he has a share in responsibility for the Rainbow release.