Fairy Feller's Master Stoke - [Rainbow] Discussion

i think it sounds hideous. noise-reduced, overcompressed, drenched in cheesy digital reverb (that doesn't even attempt to sound real), pitch-corrected to hell and back and somewhat unbalanced.

about the origin of Fairy Feller, i doubt they in their financial situation could have afforded to multitrack a rehearsal.

Which one?

I still can't hear any autotune or other things...I'm getting older.

If I remember correctly, someone posted in QZ that, his mother was in a Queen concert. FFMS was played, The poster was almost beaten by replies that he was fake and spam, no evidences.

It is a very difficult song to reproduce live, only if another concert surfaces, we will find out.

exactly. yes, the live rendition is up for analysis and scrutiny, but not to the point of complaint about its very existence. just plain daft.

It was only (as far as we know) played fully live four times: Blackpool (1st March 1974), Sunderland (8th March 1974), Rainbow, London (31st March 1974), Birmingham (2nd April 1974).

In Santa Monica, California (29th March 1975), an audience member kept yelling for The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke between songs, and to appease him Freddie played a ten second snippet of the intro on piano.

I wonder how did it go for all the guys during the Birmingham 74' shows. If it's true that the band in the early days were very often listening back to the tape-recordings of the shows then Birmingham concert's FFMS should sound awesome.

Yeah, I'd say it's Auto-Tuned, because if they'd been using Melodyne, they would've more likely gotten cleaner vocal corrections. To those of you unfamiliar with how Auto-Tune and Melodyne work, they calculate and adjust the melodic lines to a perfectly tuned pitch, although Melodyne seems to go with a somehow softer adjusting protocol - you get fairly organic, if still notable, results with that.

Freddie was, as has been mentioned by both Brian and Roger lately, a pretty wild singer in the early days, sometimes to the point of being a bit out of control. Early concert bootlegs certainly prove this to be true, and Freddie's vibrato in particular was often a bit out of tune. Pitch-correcting a vibrato like Freddie had then, could be practically impossible to clean up, and if you get any voice cracks, pitch-correcting often makes it sound worse than if it were not corrected. It should be pretty easy to spot, since the vocal loses a certain amount of human character, and I can definitely hear symptoms of careless pitch-correction in the Rainbow FFMS. In a way, I'm a bit surprised they even bothered to work on it so far as to release it, but on the other hand, a rarity like that is a good way to entice fans to buy the music regardless of how it's produced.

Sadly that already happened on Twitter some months ago.

but you, me, none of us, have heard the original. perhaps the adjustments made have arrived at the best possible result? perhaps the original sound was so bad: “What if this is as good as it gets?” [thanks, Melvin]

well, you can doubt all you like - but until you hear the raw audio, you will never know one way (or the other) for sure...which is precise why i used the word perhaps.

...and, we are talking about a band who are known for being perfectionists. do you really doubt that Brian and Roger would've released this track in anything but its best possible state?

So it's true then, the band are now putting out official product with Freddie's voice auto-tuned in a pretty obvious manner. Disgusting.

Nothing alleged about it, the pitch correction is definitely there.
It seems that no-one knew that they had ever performed FFMS until this release. The song was only performed a few times in 1974.