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How Did Bohemian Rhapsody Break

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Bohemian Rhapsody was composed by Freddie Mercury, while its primary genre is rock, it is full of different textures, tempos, vocals and instrumentation. It is considered to be one of the greatest songs of all time and has been number one many times. It is also one of my personal favourite songs.

The song, instead of being song form, has no chorus and is split up into different sections, an intro, ballad, operatic passage, hard rock section and reflective coda.

The BPM of this song changes throughout,

The introduction begins with a five part harmony acapella sung by Freddie Mercury, all of these parts have been multi tracked and are in the key of Bb. The vocals are panned differently, with the higher harmonies in the right and the lower …show more content…

During this section, the vocals go from softly sung to a more powerful sound. The line “shivers down my spine” at 2:08 has a twinkle effect play, imitating a shiver, starting from the left ear and panning to the right. At 2:40, Mercury sings “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all”, after this, the guitar solo enters, subsequently starting the third …show more content…

When the next line comes in, drums, bass and a timpani come in, the sound is very sudden and can be described as sforzando, the sound is very full and is quite different from a few seconds ago, the dynamics are constantly changing. During the “Galileo” section, the higher “Galileo” is panned in the right ear, and the lower “Galileo” is panned in the left ear, it can be described as a call and response technique. When Mercury sings “Magnifico”, the “Oh” is canon and panned between the left and right of the stereo field. At 3:50, “No, we will not let you go” is panned on the left of the stereo field, with “Let him go!” on the right, after this, “Never, never, never” is panned from left to right, further showing that this song is full of creative panning. The operatic section ends with “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me”, sung with the “full” chorus, actually just multitracked vocals from Mercury, May and Taylor, the final note is sung by Taylor and is Bb5, sung in falsetto, consequently ending the operatic section, and moving onto the hard rock

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