Liar has organ, so does Now I'm Here and so do Wedding March and Under Pressure in the 80's. No more Queen tracks feature organ.
Father to Son is a combination of piano and guitars playing unison. Loser in the End has a phased distorted guitar. I know I did claim earlier that it was an organ, but I was wrong.
Jazz 78 wrote:
They did use an organ on those tracks but it's a little further back in the mix. You can hear it a little more in Loser in the End though.
Can you prove it was an organ? Maybe it was a piano with the "Red Special" treatment.
> All you hear are multi-layered harmonies from the Red Special. Nothing else.
Not 'all you hear'. A lot of the 'synth-like' effects come from other instruments: piano, bass, drums, organ, harpsichord, stylophone, different guitars, percussion, reversed stuff, e-drums, etc. The Red Special generated a lot of the no-synth effects, but not all of them.
Sebastian wrote:
> No sinths were used until The Game album.
An organ's not a synth.
> All you hear are multi-layered harmonies from the Red Special. Nothing else.
Not 'all you hear'. A lot of the 'synth-like' effects come from other instruments: piano, bass, drums, organ, harpsichord, stylophone, different guitars, percussion, reversed stuff, e-drums, etc. The Red Special generated a lot of the no-synth effects, but not all of them.
absolutely, as said before queen used combinations of genuine instruments to produced "compounded" sounds...kinda what synthesisers did.
liar is a great example of use of organ, and Fairy fella is a good example of harpischord...there are others - but not lots.
although if we want to be extremely literal queen did break their own rule by using a "synthesiser" before The Game. the "vocal orchestrations of woodwind/brass" on ANATO are i believ the "old trick" of using a comb like a kazoo... sythesis is the reproduction of soemthing using non-original or faked means.....these sounds were synthesised.
If so, guitar pedals would also be synths, as would prepared pianos, EQ'd basses, compressed vocals, etc.
So no: in terms of using keyboard electronic synthesisers, the band only started in 1979. Before that, they used a variety of instruments, none of which was actually a synthesiser (maybe a stylophone could be a grey area there). Organs aren't synths, harpsichords aren't synths, e-pianos aren't synths, jangle pianos aren't synths.
i agree you are right, but the point i was making was that the "ANATO vocal orchestrations" were not genuine. they were synthesised...albeit by very basic child-like means, but synthesised just the same.
if you made a "duck quack" on record by any means other than using a recording of a duck, then it's synthesised.
usually a guitar pedal still produces a sound that you can recognise as being played on a guitar, in much the same way as keyboard (synths) sound like keyboards no matter what when reproducing guitar sounds.
guitars a usually played to make new guitar sounds, not impersonate other instruments - that's what synths are for. there are exceptions - Boston used a couple of " tricks" with a Vox and a Rockman on "third stage", so i suppose i contradict myself a little - guitars can be used as synths
The difference between a synthesiser and another instrument is not whether they emulate other instruments or not (think about the 'sitarised' guitar in Jealousy or the 'clarinet' in Good Company) but the way they work.
Queen were adamant to clear up that none of their effects (up until 'Races', that is) had been created through Moog's, but instead using other means (prepared piano, harpsichord, e-piano, organ, guitar choirs, compressed vocals, vocal onomatopoeias, reversed rolls, flanged cymbals, etc.) which were more 'human' and relied more on craftsmanship than on pressing keys and manipulating waves.
For 'News' and 'Jazz' they didn't specify whether they'd used synths or not, and for 'The Game' they credited the OBX. The rest is history.
A stylophone is a synthesizer, though.
And they used it on Seven Seas of Rhye.
If I listen to bands who used synthesizers, like Genesis for example, I wonder if Queen didn't use them because they didn't like them or they didn't know how to operate them. I'm not a synth-whizkid but it seems to me that Queen started to use synthesizers when they started to add pre-programmed sounds to it.
Synthesizer: 'an electronic instrument (usually played with a keyboard) that generates and modifies sounds electronically and can imitate a variety of other musical instruments.' synthesiser. (n.d.). WordNet® 3.0. Retrieved March 23, 2010, from Dictionary.com website: link
Stylophone™ /’st?ilofoOn/ n. Also S-. M20. [f. STYLE n. + -o- + -PHONE. Cf. XYLOPHONE.] 'A miniature electronic musical instrument producing a distinctive buzzing sound when a stylus is drawn across its metal keyboard.' (The Oxford English Dictionary, 1993)
How does it work? 'With the original Stylophone, touching the stylus to the metal plate of the keys would close a circuit with a voltage-controlled oscillator, creating the distinctive, primitive buzzing tone. (guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009 16.27 BST)
So... unless a stylophone modifies sounds electronically, it's not a synthesiser.