Queen "Somebody To Love" Isolated Vocals

Here's an interesting piece of history. It's the isolated vocal tracks from Queen's "Somebody To Love" off of their A Day At The Races album. You'll hear bits and pieces of the stacked background vocals as well as the complete lead vocal track of Freddie Mercury.

Take note of a few things while you're listening:

1. The distortion on the vocals. It's fairly distorted all the way through, although that personally never changed the enjoyment of the song for me and millions of others.

2. The compression. While the track is pretty compressed, especially on the louder sections, it's expertly done (I think by engineer/producer Mack). You hardly hear any compression artifacts, it's just one level throughout.

3. The reverb at the end. The lead vocal is dry until 2:41, when a nice long delayed plate is added.

4. Freddie's pitch. Unlike many hit songs of the period where vocal pitch problems were allowed to slide, this one is spot on for almost the entire vocal (he's just a hair flat at 3:50, which was after the fade on the record).

You also get to hear some ad libs at the end not heard on the original record.

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