QUEEN. A night at the opera.

QUEEN

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA.

Straining the boundaries of hard rock with the album 'sheer heart attack' Queen eventually broke them down by creating the album 'a night at the opera' labeled a heard rock masterpiece.

  

This album has a lot of contrast within, this is with the songs they produced, a there is a range of genres as the album goes on.

• Metal- 'death on two legs' and 'sweet lady'
• Pop- 'you're my best friend'
• 'Campy' British music- 'lazing on a Sunday afternoon' and seaside rendezvous'
• Prog rock- '39' and 'the prophets song'

Bringing it all together beautifully with the well known pseudo- operatic 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

This album was released in 1975 and was recorded in Sarn Roadhouse, it was produced by Roy Thomas Baker and QUEEN. It was also the most expensive album released at this time and was QUEENS 4th studio album.

In contrast a man named Ken Thomas worked with QUEEN and also worked with another band called Sigur Ros, this is contrasting on the fact that the two bands are so different with their genres of music.

The most iconic song from 'A night at the opera' is the famous Bohemian Rhapsody and this particular song is produced using surround sound to separate the vocal elements but not too drastically. A man named Elliot Scheiner worked with QUEEN with this song  and he had lots of tricks 'up his sleeve' for this song in particular, the section of the song that took the most attention and mixing was the middle section as it is the operatic part of the song which is the lines 'I see a little silhouette of a man' through to 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me.' 

This is in contrast to the normal first verse that has the center speaker lifting Freddie's vocals followed by the power chords from Brian Mays guitar, this is a bold contrast of the two sounds we hear. There is a harmony within the track and it is the phrase 'magnifico' it comes in progressively, panning across the tracks mix, the quantels visuals echos in this well-known video. the speakers that are placed pick up the different parts of the track such as the guitar riffs, vocals, piano etc this was to maximize and amplify the sound at any particular point where needed.
The multiple echos we hear had been distributed around all 5 of the speakers QUEEN used, this was to give the impression of the nose traveling around us and echoing all around us in 360, but in the final harmony of guitars it gets picked up on front speaker making the sound more impacting and loud to finish off.

 I myself have made recordings with vocals and instruments. Compared to QUEEN however, i only used singular instruments and vocalists, as they had more than one vocalist with a multitude of instruments being used in the tracks.