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One Vision
"One Vision" is a song written and recorded by the British rock band Queen, first released as a single in November 1985 and then included on their 1986 album A Kind of Magic. It was conceived by the group's drummer Roger Taylor.
The song was inspired by the life and exploits of Martin Luther King Jr., with the lyrics recounting a man battling and overcoming the odds. In the 2011 BBC documentary, Queen: Days of Our Lives, Taylor stated his lyrics were "sort of half nicked off Martin Luther King's famous speech". The song's music video featured a "morphing" effect of the band's famous pose in 1975's "Bohemian Rhapsody" video to a 1985 version of the same pose. The song was included in all Queen's live concert performances of The Magic Tour, as the first song of each concert. They claimed they chose "One Vision" as the introduction song because its intro made a perfect concert introduction.
"One Vision" was, for the most part, a group effort with no-one taking sole credit. This, however, made it more complicated to put the song together as nobody had the final say. A week was spent coming up with various ideas in the studio with four or five songs-worth of material to choose from, out of which came "One Vision".[citation needed]
The song's introduction was done with a Kurzweil K250 synthesizer. Mack acknowledged that lead singer Freddie Mercury wanted "lots of strange noises and swirling sounds", so he came into the studio one morning, sampled some of the vocal lines Mercury sang into the Kurzweil and toyed around with them by creating a downward pitch change and applying various effects to it. The ending was done in a similar fashion, with Mack playing the word sample "vision" repeatedly to create the jet-like sound that finishes the track. In fact, most of the keyboard parts in the song are K250 factory patches: for example, the main string sound is the "Fast String" preset.
To create the song's guitar sound, Brian May used his custom Pete Cornish distortion box to process his guitar signal before it was run through a pair of Vox AC30 amps with a simple MXR delay between them (slowly alternating between 7 milliseconds and 12 milliseconds) – using his Red Special guitar, as in most other Queen tracks. Moreover, the three-part guitar harmony heard in the last chorus was done with two AC30s. The lead guitar break was recorded later on at Maison Rouge Studios in London, using a single Gallien-Krueger amp – in the mix, Mack would add a little reverb to the lead part while the rhythm parts were left completely dry.
The backing vocals consisted of three-part harmonies with an occasional fourth part, with each part sung and recorded three times by May, Taylor and Mercury. This, according to Mack, gave the song "a very full, final sound". All vocals, including Mercury's lead vocal part, were recorded with AKG C414 microphones.
The rhythmical section in the middle of the song was Taylor's Simmons kit triggered by a LinnDrum drum machine, along with some real drums played on top – to thicken the snare sound and make it "more cutting", a Simmons snare was sampled into an AMS delay and triggered along with the real snare. In that section there was some "live" Roland Jupiter-8 and a few guitar fills.[citation needed]
In terms of recording, three multitrack tapes were used throughout (as the process was rather vague), with two used for mixdown – a Studer A80 and A800. The song was mixed onto a Mitsubishi X80 digital stereo, a Sony PCM-F1 and a Studer A810. Reverbs used during mixdown include an EMT 252 (on the non-linear programme), an EMT 140 (on the bass drum), a Quantec room simulator and a Lexicon 224 (gated reverb).
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One Vision
"One Vision" is a song written and recorded by the British rock band Queen, first released as a single in November 1985 and then included on their 1986 album A Kind of Magic. It was conceived by the group's drummer Roger Taylor.
The song was inspired by the life and exploits of Martin Luther King Jr., with the lyrics recounting a man battling and overcoming the odds. In the 2011 BBC documentary, Queen: Days of Our Lives, Taylor stated his lyrics were "sort of half nicked off Martin Luther King's famous speech". The song's music video featured a "morphing" effect of the band's famous pose in 1975's "Bohemian Rhapsody" video to a 1985 version of the same pose. The song was included in all Queen's live concert performances of The Magic Tour, as the first song of each concert. They claimed they chose "One Vision" as the introduction song because its intro made a perfect concert introduction.
"One Vision" was, for the most part, a group effort with no-one taking sole credit. This, however, made it more complicated to put the song together as nobody had the final say. A week was spent coming up with various ideas in the studio with four or five songs-worth of material to choose from, out of which came "One Vision".[citation needed]
The song's introduction was done with a Kurzweil K250 synthesizer. Mack acknowledged that lead singer Freddie Mercury wanted "lots of strange noises and swirling sounds", so he came into the studio one morning, sampled some of the vocal lines Mercury sang into the Kurzweil and toyed around with them by creating a downward pitch change and applying various effects to it. The ending was done in a similar fashion, with Mack playing the word sample "vision" repeatedly to create the jet-like sound that finishes the track. In fact, most of the keyboard parts in the song are K250 factory patches: for example, the main string sound is the "Fast String" preset.
To create the song's guitar sound, Brian May used his custom Pete Cornish distortion box to process his guitar signal before it was run through a pair of Vox AC30 amps with a simple MXR delay between them (slowly alternating between 7 milliseconds and 12 milliseconds) – using his Red Special guitar, as in most other Queen tracks. Moreover, the three-part guitar harmony heard in the last chorus was done with two AC30s. The lead guitar break was recorded later on at Maison Rouge Studios in London, using a single Gallien-Krueger amp – in the mix, Mack would add a little reverb to the lead part while the rhythm parts were left completely dry.
The backing vocals consisted of three-part harmonies with an occasional fourth part, with each part sung and recorded three times by May, Taylor and Mercury. This, according to Mack, gave the song "a very full, final sound". All vocals, including Mercury's lead vocal part, were recorded with AKG C414 microphones.
The rhythmical section in the middle of the song was Taylor's Simmons kit triggered by a LinnDrum drum machine, along with some real drums played on top – to thicken the snare sound and make it "more cutting", a Simmons snare was sampled into an AMS delay and triggered along with the real snare. In that section there was some "live" Roland Jupiter-8 and a few guitar fills.[citation needed]
In terms of recording, three multitrack tapes were used throughout (as the process was rather vague), with two used for mixdown – a Studer A80 and A800. The song was mixed onto a Mitsubishi X80 digital stereo, a Sony PCM-F1 and a Studer A810. Reverbs used during mixdown include an EMT 252 (on the non-linear programme), an EMT 140 (on the bass drum), a Quantec room simulator and a Lexicon 224 (gated reverb).