We are used to considering Queen, as a hit machine, also the daughter of the advent of electronic keyboards that gave life to their great hits such as Radio Ga Ga, Who wants to live forever or The Show Must Go On. But not everyone knows that it was by no means love at first sight between the London band and the new discoveries of contemporary music.
As we know, synthesizers began to take over in "pop" music from the second half of the 60s, thanks to the genius of Bob Moog, inventor of the first and unforgotten Moog Modular which went alongside the only existing electric keyboard instruments: electric pianos or organs like Vox, Farfisa, Hammond, Wurlitzer o Rhodes.!
The first close encounter between Queen and the Mini Moog it happened in the early 70's, when the band was already composed in its final line-up. The problem is that the four were not in the least impressed by the potential of this great invention, despite as we all know Brian May e John Deacon loved to experiment with electronics.
According to what John Deacon said in an interview years later, we discover that this 'thing' that emitted sounds unattainable to anything musically catchy was absolutely not to their liking. They probably saw this type of instrument as not very versatile and almost useless in the huge instrumental layers created using almost exclusively Brian May's guitar, who spent whole days setting up his Red Special and its Vox AC30, bringing out very special sounds. Let's think about the "trumpet" effect of Good Company present on the album A night at the opera 1975. So for all the '70s Queen were very proud to bring the wording "No synthetizers" on all the records made in these years. The only electric keyboard instruments used were the organ Hammond in the sessions of Queen ii e Sheer heart attack (almost imperceptible on songs like Ogre Battle e Now I'm here) and a Wurlitzer, used by John Deacon to record the riff of You're my best friend always on the album A night at the opera. Here comes the end of the '70s and as usual, Queen begins to think about some sonic innovations for the years to come after closing a decade of pure rock. The most important houses of the time, began to produce multi-note synthesizers of polyphony and this convinced Roger Taylor to personally buy a Oberheim OBX, which the entire band began using in The Game sessions in late 1979, and then abused in the Flash Gordon soundtrack the following year. This unique example of Oberheim owned by Taylor, began to be used indiscriminately by the whole band, Roger Taylor composed practically all of his first solo album Fun in Space since 1981, but Mercury himself began to be interested in these new toys. For example, we can listen to an instrumental piece whose main riff was made by him with the OBX for the Flash Gordon soundtrack, namely the Football Fight track. The peculiarity of the subsequent tour in Japan in 1981, where they participated in the launch in theaters of Flash, was that it was the turn of Freddie Mercury himself to use a synthesizer for the first and only time live. In fact you can see the glorious OBX (Fig.1), mounted on his Steinway grand piano, of which unfortunately there are only audio bootlegs as evidence of these performances.
In I want to break free, on the other hand, the initial "paddone" was pulled out of a Fairlight CMI-III.
For A Kind Of Magic ample space was given to Yamaha DX7 IID (Fig. 3), used by Brian May for Who wants to live forever, one vision, A kind of magic and probably here and there a little in all the songs, alternating it for the orchestrations to the historical Kurzweil K250. We recall that Brian May himself used a Dx7 to play the intro of Who wants to live forever live, as you can see from the DVD of the Magic Tour 1986, even if in the rehearsals of the tour he is seen playing a Emu Emulator II, which was then used live by the new keyboard player Spike edney (ex Bob Geldof) who also had the Jupiter 8 and the Vp330 in his setup. For the next album The Miracle, the latest addition to the Roland house was used a lot, that is the legendary one Roland D-50, in addition to the equally brand new Korg M1. Their "presets" can be heard very clearly, as in the case of the D-50 the "Rock Organ" in Breaktrhu, played by Mercury himself, in Was it all Worth It and in the "pizzicato" at the beginning of the song that gives the title to the album.
For innuendo, the last album with Freddie Mercury still alive, the Korg M1 was strategically used, widely used for example in the classic The Show Must Go On, in the riff of I'm going slightly mad, in Innunedo itself and in Don't Try So Hard . For Made in Heaven, the only unreleased album following the death of Freddie Mercury, the usual M1 was used in the studio, as well as a Ensoniq Asr10, present in Mountain Studios in Montreux where the album was completed.
In the following years, both for solo tours and for the various reunions with Paul Rodgers e Adam Lambert, Spike edney has always used the latest Korg devices, having become an official endorser. In the early 2000s it passed from Triton Studio at the Extreme flanked toorgan Cx-3 and to a MicroKorg used as a Vocoder on Radio Ga Ga and A kind of Magic before moving on to Korg M3 and now to the only one Kronos. On youtube we can also find a video where he explains his current setup and presets for performing alongside Queen.
At the next setup.
Vincenzo Siani
