Michael Allred
Screenwriter
Bri's personal notes on "The Game" - 5.1 surround mix 2003
I have been having fun again!
(with Justin, Kris, and the staff at Sphere Studios, Battersea)
The surround thing really gets me going!!! Once again I'm fascinated by this business of going back into the old master multi-track tapes of Queen songs, carefully taking them apart and reassembling them in a way which somehow I always secretly dreamed of!
You see, so many of those old recordings of ours were so dense, so layered, and so intricate, that it was agony trying to mix them down to just stereo - so much information had to be sacrificed - so many choices made seemingly for ever. What we can do in 2003, with the VASTLY superior technology available now, is lovingly rescue every original nuance, and mix to a medium which allows us to sit right INSIDE the performance - to turn our heads and take in many different vistas as we please during just one song. And of course the quality is wonderful - compared to either vinyl or CD, this new 192k system is a triumph of transparency.
We worked yesterday on Sail Away Sweet Sister. As always it's much easier for me to go into details on the songs I wrote or was very involved in, so forgive me if there's a bias in my attention. This one has always been a favourite of mine - I wished it could have been a single at the time, but really it would not have worked to put something out as a single on which Freddie was not the principal singer. Of course he DOES sing the middle eight - and beautifully too. We made a decision to locate this piece of vocal in the centre front speaker in the new mix. This is different from putting it in the "stereo centre" - equally in left and right speakers.
When you get the mix on DVD Audio, as I hope you all will (!), give it a listen. If you are sitting in the exact "Sweet Spot", smack bang in the centre of all the speakers, looking forward, it's impossible to distinguish between a sound which is actually coming out of the centre speaker, and one which is coming out equally in mono from the front left and right speakers. This has led some technical writers in the Press to conclude that the centre speaker is redundant. In OUR world - the world of Vinyl, tapes, CD's etc., we have all got on perfectly well without a central speaker, so there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a surround mix which has little or nothing in the centre speaker. But they have missed an essential point. But there are now other considerations, new possibilities. Try moving around, as it's very entertaining to do while the music is playing in 5.1 surround.
Suppose a central voice is indeed coming from the outer two speakers; it will start off apparently in the centre of the stereo, but you will find that, as you move outwards, to the right, say, the image of the voice will rapidly move out to the right too, until very soon this 'central' voice will appear to be coming from the right speaker. So the geography of the mix is completely changed. But try the same test with Freddie's voice in the "Hot Child" section of Sail Away. No matter how far you move off centre - even outside the array of speakers, Freddie's voice will still appear to be coming from that centre position. So there are many choices here - every time something which WAS in the centre in the old stereo mix comes up, there are a number of possible decisions as to how to treat it. Generally, in the old stereo mixes, the bass (kick) drum will be in the centre, as will the snare drum, the bass guitar, and usually the lead vocal and the principal guitar solo.
You might think it would be a good idea to get the best of all worlds and put a voice in all three front speakers. But when we try this we find there is a price to pay - there is a phase discrepancy between two sound images - one real one in the centre speaker, and one virtual one also in that direction, but formed by the two outer speakers (provided you are listening in the centre position). The effect is - well - different! It may be something you like, but it is definitely not the pure sound as it was recorded - it suffers from phase distortion. A little bit of this may be OK on a vocal, we reckon, and in 'Sail Away' we have done this with my voice. There is also a bit fed through the back speakers (where the real double-tracks and vocal harmonies mainly live too), which has the effect of bringing the voice apparently forward into the room. We have also done this trick frequently in these mixes with the drum kit, to achieve that feeling of the kit being all around us. There is also a choice of where the returns from the treatments (echoes, added ambience, etc.) on the instrument or voice are located. In Sail Away we have put them mainly behind as well - so the vocals feel very spookily close to our head!
There is still more to this subject, depending on what kind of system you have at home. The centre speaker is really a left-over idea from the cinema systems as developed by Dolby, etc, years ago. Usually in a film the centre speaker was reserved for dialogue ONLY. This made sure that the talking was always audible and didn't wander away from the centre, no matter where you sat in the theatre. (See above!) When we, Queen, first worked in Cinema I found it all very odd, and was quite disparaging to the whole idea of the central speaker. I soon learned!!!
There is a problem with central speakers in the home. Many people these days have a large screen to watch the visuals on. So where is the position for the central speaker? My own system suffers from this problem. The solution can be
a) put a smaller speaker in this position - but this unbalances the system and makes any voice which is ONLY in the centre speaker position sound weak.
or b) dispense with the centre speaker and feed this signal equally into the front outers.
This produces a 'phantom' centre speaker. This adjustment can be made in the menu of most home systems when you install them. Of course if you do this all the subtleties of the last few paragraphs are lacking. But if you DON'T make the adjustment, but remove the speaker anyway, you won't hear certain things AT ALL - for example, Freddie in Sail Away Sweet Sister! So if you can't hear him - that's why!
There is much more that can be said, and the discussion will undoubtedly continue. Our attitude is that ALL the variations are there to be used as we wish, at different times in different ways - that's part of the fun in being creative with these things....
Ok - this bit is for those people who are interested in guitar stuff - if you're not - skip down the page! The solo in Sail Away was always intended to be Killer Queen revisited in a different way (for reasons which are obvious to me, but do not need going into!).
The solo starts the same way, on one guitar, and is then enjoined by two others which add in "Bell" type harmonies, a la Mantovani (which I think I talked about elsewhere) In other words the first guitar hangs on, and each guitar that joins in adds in a harmony. The three guitar melodies go on for just a few notes, and then there is an interplay of 'Bells' going upwards in pitch (rather than downwards as in Killer Queen), and there are FIVE of them and they step in very quickly! Now four of them keep playing in harmony until the end when they all become bound into a tight set of ascending chords leading back into the final chorus.
Here's the funny story. I wanted to mix them originally so that the 5- part interchange zoomed in a logical way across the stereo. But the recording process had been so confusing in terms of drop-ins to achieve the parts, that Mack had not drawn a map, and could not find whereabouts on the tape they were! In those days there was no graphical way to find where individual notes were, and the thing musically happened so quickly that it was almost impossible to disentangle. We actually gave up in the end, because even if we HAD pegged exactly which track each note was on, on the multitrack tape, we didn't have enough facilities to redirect them to where I wanted them in the stereo. So we eventually just pushed up the faders until at least we could HEAR everything, and accepted what come out!!!
Now of course Justin and Kris had already transferred every note on to 192K Pro Tools. (it's a system of recording purely on a computer Hard Disk - such systems have largely replaced Tape Recording in the Industry now) In Pro Tools you can see, in a very clear visual display, not only when a particular instrument is playing, but, by zooming in on the wave-form, exactly WHAT it was playing and how. Justin and Kris's attention to detail is stupendous - they clean up and organise every note, without messing with its analogue character, check that it's the one used in the original mix by phasing them against each other, and meticulously recreate the original stereo mix before they even begin to construct the new surround scenario. So Kris presented me with each note in the solo all nicely mapped out in colours, and we were able to reconstruct my original intentions exactly in time and space. The result is that the 5-part piece goes completely all around the 360 degree space. But better than that - each guitar is actually located in a speaker - there are 5 of course in 5.1 surround (the "point one" is the low end "Woofer" speaker which is non-directional and can be located anywhere in the room, within reason). Call me insane, but the satisfaction this stuff gives me is indescribable. It's like being able to go back and re-write history - getting another chance!!!
For Crazy Little Thing we have opted for a very airy spatial arrangement, which keeps the original rock 'n' roll 'wet' slap echo sound.
For Play the Game we have gone for a big fat solid separate structure - the kick drum ONLY in the outers and spread forwards, the lead vocal ONLY in the front Centre - so you can go up to it and effectively get inside Freddie's mouth! If you so desire!!!
In Dragon Attack we put Freddie EVERYWHERE - and as the rest of the track, experimentally at the time, was based on a number of consecutive stereo mix loops of tape this material is spread around as a back-cloth for the overdubs. I wanted it to be as 'rude' as possible, like the original, so each new voice is very starkly separate, in some corner of the landscape. The big harmony section was always tantalisingly short - but it's even bigger here because we were able to multiply up the backing vocals and the percussion (in different ways - it would take too long to explain!). It's very enveloping indeed.
For Roger's Coming Soon track not all the original tracks used for the mix survived - somehow a final mix tape must have been lost. So the boys re-assembled what they could and then used different takes of, for instance, the vocal harmonies at the beginning. Roger gave this the OK when he popped in to hear it. I think the mixes for this, and also Rock It, are distinct improvements on the originals - they were done on loops as was Dragon Attack, so the chaps have now been able to give the kick drum a good ol' thumping low end. It's cool!
And again the opening up that takes place around the 5 speakers is a joy.
I do hope that gradually as people get to know what a "DVD-A" (Audio) actually IS, and that you can play it back on any DVD player, that this will become a popular standard. It sure is with me.
Just to clarify things further....
At present you can hear two Queen products in true 5.1 surround -
1) the Queen Greatest Video hits - which of course has visuals too!
2) the DVD-A of "A Night at the Opera" which came out in the USA first, but is now available (behind the counter in most cases, not in the Racks) in shops in the UK. As yet few shop assistants even know what it is, or what it does, but YOU DO!!!
And why is there such a thing as a DVD-A? Why don't we just make visual DVD's with no visuals? The answer is that the extra space on the disk, available because there is no visual information, is used to carry the highest quality sound now possible - the full surround signal, with no information lost, (it's called MLP - Meridien Lossless Packing!!! - don't even ask!!!) and also the highest quality stereo signal ever available, re-mastered form the original analogue mixes, but again with no digital formation compression, no surface noise, and a better-than-CD sampling rate of 96 KHz, each sample having 24 bit resolution. (This "bit" thing tells you how many digital ones and noughts are used to store the magnitude of the signal at any point in time. The higher the number of bits, the closer the digital "steps" approximate to a smooth analogue waveform - music to our ears!)
Well there you have it for now. I hope this is useful - especially when this stuff comes out.... Justin and Kris are going to add a page of technical details to the package of THE GAME in Surround for those who are interested in the finer points - you will be astonished at the lengths we have gone to give you the best that can be achieved today! The use of a top-quality analogue mastering stage to reproduce the original feel of the mixes is a great touch. And the information we will provide will ensure that your system is set up the same as ours so you will get the maximum benefit of the new work that has been done. I, for one, don't ever want to hear this album any other way now!!!!
Cheers
Brian
courtesy of www.brianmaynews.com
