Queen have posted the sixth and final episode in their YouTube series The Greatest, this one focusing on the recent reissue of their 1973 self-titled debut album, now called Queen 1.
In this last episode, Roger Taylor talks about how recording the album at London's legendary Trident Studios was detrimental to his drum sound.
"They had a drum booth and it was a well-known sound: very dry and dead, which is not what I wanted. I wanted to hear the drums resonate. I didn't want it to go ‘thud, whack.’ But that's what they wanted. There was cloth over everything, and everything was taped down...
"I didn't even have my proper kit in there. I had to play this [crappy] little kit. It was just awful. We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound.’ But we didn't want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound. I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea Studios – it's a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it's just better to listen to.”
To demonstrate what he means, at the end of this final video you can hear the three versions of his drums on the song "Liar" starting with the "sparkier beats" from the demo at De Lane Lea Studios, the "flat" sound at Trident, and finally the remastered version from the re-release.