Queen I Box Set Announced - Pre-Release Discussion Only

It's probably good that they took Hangman from a concert that's not available on bootleg. The fact that there's no polar bear is of course bad, but maybe the track is either from a different year, or Tim Staffel didn't allow it. I'm not sure about the latter.
I don't understand all this squabble over autotune. Well, they raised Freddie's voice by half a tone, but it didn't make him sing any worse. Moreover, maybe the situation required it. Moreover, the recordings are almost 50 years old.

Don't ask me, cause I don't know. I can only assume they wanted it to sound "current". However, judging from replies here, for people who don't mind autotune these new vocals are not much different from older vocals, yet for people who care - this is quite detrimental. So overall the producers have gained nothing and yet aliented a part of fanbase, so a very dubious decision.

I'd imagine he wouldn't veto it, purely on the grounds of potential royalties. No doubt he earned a pretty penny from Doing All Right being on the biopic soundtrack.

And maybe this will be the wake up call for them, that plenty of these young fans they've gained from the biopic are able to detect autotune and AI as easily as you and I can walk down the street. Brian's Instagram was blowing up with comments about it, and no doubt he took notice and the feedback was forwarded.

This release is no doubt going to be amazing, but this is a completely needless blemish on it that hopefully won't be repeated after this.

I didn't watch that carefully - but I read somewhere that he disabled comments on a post at one point, which clearly meant he noticed.

I just cant listen to autotune. Makes me sick. Reason i dont listen to the radio anymore. No wonder Brian had a stroke. Autotuning Freddie. The most beautifull voice in the world. Be prepared for the new My Fairy King. Its gonna be awfull.

Sorry, that's fucked up. Pitch correction has literally been used on Queen releases for 20 years with 2004's Live At The Bowl. I don't like it either, but let's not use it to celebrate our beloved doctor's very serious medical issues.

No, Live Killers was the first officially released correction of any live vocals...

...But, there was work on a Rainbow live album in 1975 (We know it as Sheetkeeckers today), so those would be the first overdubs in Queen history. 

But pitch correction and overdubs are two totally different things.

I completely agree with this. This feels like the first time that criticism has come from mainstream fans, as well as hardcore fans. Hopefully, they will listen to valid criticism this time. I only complain because I love Queen and want them to be the best they can be. 

I hope so

What I meant by the source is the original demos. I have no doubt that the remixes will sound fantastic, but flying in the original vocals won't be as easy as they're not in great quality.

Each to their own, but all this squabble is because they tampered with individual notes rather than moving Fred's voice (i.e. entire vocal take) up indiscriminately, and the situation clearly did NOT require what they did. I get it that it might have bothered Brian or Roger for the last 50 years that the vocals are off-pitch on TNCD, but as the Wings of Pegasus video demonstrates shifting the entire vocal track up roughly by a quarter step or lowering the backing track by the same amount would do the job. This would be the modern equivalent of speeding up the tape to change pitch, although since you're doing it digitally you can do it to individual tracks and you can alter the pitch without affecting the speed. Perfect use of modern technology! Unfortunately, either it didn't occur to the people responsible for the new mix to try it or they had an idiot on board who managed to convince them otherwise.

I know this is debatable, but to me this way of processing vocals makes Fred sound worse. His pitch on TNCD is spot on like it has never been on any other song in Queen's catalogue except for the official release of FIA, which was also corrected and which sounds equally robotic to me. On both he sounds as pitch-perfect as any given 21st-century pop singer on their studio recordings and the last thing Queen needs is to compete with those guys. And even if they wanted such competition pitch correction alone will not make the album sound modern.

The main problem is that what you hear isn't effectively what Fred sounded like when singing. His vocals are mediated through an algorithm and/or a human deciding which notes to change, so that the outcome only partly reflects Fred's artistic decisions and vocal idiosyncrasies. Of course, if you raise the pitch of the entire vocal track the result will also be a departure from the original, but the nuances of articulation and phrasing, and the relative pitch fluctuations within the take will remain the same, so that it still sounds like him. Think of AOBTD, where the entire track was sped-up and sounds up a quarter step relative to what was played and sung in the studio, but Fred sounds as natural as on any other song. 

The comparisons to earlier tampering with performance quality on live tracks are not convincing to me. I am not going to defend the cut-and-paste work on Live Killers or doctoring other live recordings, but using this kind of selective pitch correction on a track that's been out there for 50 years is a whole new level of cheating combined with laziness.