|
A team of various product specialists and engineers working
for the band Queen recently gathered together at Abbey Road's
Studio 3 to supervise the transfer of the original multi-tracks
of Queen's seminal Night at the Opera album from 1975 (which
includes Bohemian Rhapsody, You're My Best Friend and the epic
Prophet Song) into Steinberg Nuendo at 24-bit 96kHz. This was
in preparation for Elliot Scheiner's 5.1 Surround Sound Remix
for DTS. Elliot had settled on Nuendo having heard the results
on the surround remix of Jackson Browne's Running on Empty.
Although the mix itself is being done in Glenn Frey's Hollywood
studio facility, the transfers were done in London because Justin
Shirley Smith from Queen Productions was extremely worried at
the idea of putting the priceless multi-tracks in an aircraft
hold. Abbey Road was chosen as the venue for the transfers because
of their expertise in handling aging tapes and so Rob Hill from
Steinberg North America (who will be assisting Elliot Scheiner
in the mix and actually operating Nuendo) flew in from LA with
his customised Nuendo rack. There he rendezvous'ed with Sam
Wetmore of Steinberg UK and Paul Wiffen of Swissonic/Apple who
were running a second Nuendo system on a 733MHz Mac G4 with
Swissonic converters. Both systems were using SCSI Raid arrays
to handle the massive data transfer rates, Rob's PC with a 160GB
4 drive system built into the rack, the Mac with a striped dual
drive kindly loaned by LaCie's London office for the project.
From Queen's side, there was Justin and Chris, the engineer
from Brian May's studio. When the multi-tracks were taken out
of their boxes and loaded onto the 2" machine, an edit
flew apart on the first wind through and then the house engineer,
noticed that the tape was shedding oxide quite badly. Taking
advice from Kerry in Abbey Road's archiving department that
the tapes should be baked at 50 degrees for 4 days, they were
duly put into the Abbey Road oven.
Four days later the team reassembled in Studio 3 and began
the process of transferring the 24 track into Nuendo. The baking
had successfully dried out the oxide on the tapes and so shedding
was no longer a problem. Indeed the transfer of the Bohemian
Rhapsody multitrack, done first as it was possibly the most
problematic, as there were so many stories about it having numerous
edits and having worn so thin you could see daylight through
it, was accomplished quickly and with very little fuss. There
were no edits or thin tape, so clearly at some point once the
basic structure of the song had been edited together, the entire
thing had been copied across to a piece of multitrack tape.
However, there is no empty space on the tape, as every little
space has been filled with additional harmony vocals or guitars,
drum ambience or the famous gong. On one track Dolby A needed
to be switched in and out during the transfer because it had
been used on drums but not on anything else.
|
 |
The main thing was that everything from the original
release was clearly on the tape and in the first playback it
sounds remarkably like the mixed single, except for the three
alternative lead vocals.
Other tracks on the album were more complicated. The intro
to the opening track Death on Two Legs was found in two sections
after the main song on its multi-track, the loud guitars and
effects in one section and the stereo piano part which is the
first thing you hear on the record in a second, presumably spun
in from a two track during the mixdown and fortunately copied
to the end of the multitrack just for completeness. However,
Nuendo's editing capabilities soon had this reassembled in the
correct order ready for the mixdown.
Similarly, engines being revved in a separate place on the
multi-track of "I'm In Love with My Car" (originally
the B-side of Bohemian Rhapsody) were easily re-united with
the main song. Sadly all the three sections of the Prophet's
Song spread across two multi-tracks did not include all of the
original song from the album, although the third section did
go straight into "Love of My Life" as on the original
album. However, the only sign of the a cappella vocal section
in the middle was a tantalising 16-part track sheet which fell
out of one of the 24-track boxes. A search has since failed
to turn this tape up and so this section will have to be processed
into 5.1 from the stereo master (something that had already
been decided for the God Save The Queen guitar instrumental
which closes the album, the multi-track of which was known to
be missing before the transfer session started).
All the material transferred into Nuendo has now been taken
over to LA by Rob Hill for Elliot Scheiner to do the 5.1 mix
of Night of the Opera which should be released by DTS some time
in the autumn.
|
