How Brian May broke a golden guitar recording rule

I love the humanity of Brian, he is such a wonderful person, and reading something like this reminds me that is he is a person and capable of saying dumb ass things to make himself look good like us mere mortals:). Does anyone really believe that it was taboo to blend acoustic and electric guitars in the same song in the 70s? In the early 60s, The Kinks had Lola which was an acoustic based song and had some pretty great electric licks, and The Beatles had Eight days a week as an acoustic song and there are at least a million others I can't think of. Maybe it was a Trident Studios thing that a song should be acoustic or electric but not both, I am not sure other than house rules what rules they were breaking. Could be lost in translation. But I remembered reading this...

In the video The Making Of A Night At The Opera, Brian May explained: "'Prophet's Song' was built around a different tuning - the bottom strings tune down to a 'D'. And I became fascinated with what you could do with that - it gives the guitar a lot more depth. It wasn't a very common thing to do in those days. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was the first, I probably wasn't, but it was unusual." I wouldn't go so far to say I was the first, I probably wasn't? Then why would you say it at all? No one was suggesting that Brian was the father of drop D with TPS, plus he already used in on Father to son on Queen II so perhaps not so unusual. Drop D had been around basically forever, and again, while they weren't close to the first act to use it, The Beatles used drop D in the 60s for Baby you're a rich man. Next week a new interview will tell us that I go crazy kicked off the whole diss track with beef that hip hop picked up on.

Taboo to blend acoustic and electric guitars in the same song in the 70s? That's definitely news to me. The first thing I thought of when I saw that statement in LF's OP was a song by Alice Cooper: Hard Hearted Alice. A somewhat more obscure song so maybe not too familiar or known here, but it was also released in 1973 and features the same acoustic and electric guitar notes played simultaneously during the first part of the song, one guitar mixed to one channel and the other mixed to the other channel. So it's most discernible listening with headphones, but I consider it a great example of blending acoustic and electric guitars in the same song.

Ted

I, too, felt this is bollocks. But considering the rest of what he said, perhaps the sound guys at Trident around that time didn't like doing that and told him at some point nobody would do that, and it just stuck in his head.

Okay.. here's my take.

Brian notoriously forgets, or misremembers; dates, song titles, album titles, the order of recording/releasing things, which song was on which album, the chronology of events/ releases.

What he does NOT forget or misremember, I think, is what happened; why it happened, how he (and the band) felt/ reacted to things.

I do not think he is given to just flat out imagining events that never took place.

There might be some interpretation to be done here. The Night Comes Down as we know was the De Lane Lea demo. So perhaps it was the engineers there who told him what he wanted 'couldn't be done'? Rather than RTB/Trident. As we know, they fought a lot with the latter about sound, but possibly Brian has conflated events.

On the song in question, the electric guitars are a texture overlaying the acoustic, so perhaps that was the issue - the idea that multiple overdriven electric guitar overdubs might aurally swamp an acoustic guitar based song.

In the interview he also notes that double tracking solos was not something he enjoyed, and listening back to Queen I perhaps there are examples to be heard - I can think of Liar particularly where the solos are double tracked. So there's interesting stuff there too.

If you take the chronology, and sometimes the album/song he names, with a pinch of salt, I think there's always something interesting in the Doctor's reminiscences, worth paying a little attention to.  

Agree with the bulk of your thoughts, oreno, and I think that it is more how Brian, or the band, felt, but that does not make it a golden rule. And he didn't break any golden rules by recording The night comes down, as has been stated there were boatloads of songs from the 60s that mixed acoustic and electric. I think you are correct that perhaps an engineer felt that the song was softer in nature with the acoustic and didn't need, or wouldn't blend well with electric embellishments. But that would be a creative decision that I assume every band would have in every session over the volume and placement of every instrument in the mix, and what they wanted to hear. In that case every artist ever broke a golden rule every time they did something an engineer or producer thought went against the book.