Nord User Forum

Hi Guys,

I´m a big fan of the band Queen and I´m looking for some Queen programs.
Who can help me ?

About 20 years and quite a wide variety of song styles along the way... Which specific tracks are top of your wish List?
NS2 is well equipped for this job

Hej Neo!

I'm at home doing some math:
1970 - 1992 = 22 years, but
Queen II 1994 - "No Synthesizers!", on the album sleeve
then three more albums without ... so it's 1977
1977 - 1992 = 15 years of "synth window" ... or?

Roger Taylor:

On the first album, Brian did a lot of stuff on guitar featuring specific harmony guitars, which was a fairly new thing at the time. And a lot of reviewers in England - I can quote one, Chris Welch in the Melody Maker, a paper famous for its inaccuracy, I might add - said "Great use of synthesizers here!" and of course it was all guitar, and that got up our noses quite a lot... We were a bit put off by the early synthesizers and decided we would actually say from then on - for the next 4 albums or so - that we had no synthesizers on them."

(You know I'll always love to tease you, young man )

/Amicalement
Michael in Scania

You are right neolithic,

there are many songs.

Here is my "wish" list

A Kind Of Magic
Radio Ga Ga
Who Wants To Live Forever
The Show Must Go On
One Vision (Intro)

Hey Michael - nice catch!
But it's not all about synthesiser sounds is it? They used plenty of Rhodes, acoustic piano, and even Bryan May's famous guitar *could* be sampled and played on the NS2....


... But Ratsche, you're talking about the synthesisers right?

Correct @ Neo

Hi - i've been busy with work so long delay...
I was interested in seeing if the arpeggiator voice in Radio Ga Ga could be reproduced on the NS2... I had my doubts, but thought i'd give it a go.
The results are more "Radio BooHoo" than "Radio GaGa"! But as always, you can get something usable with the NS2.

First off - no samples. That's cheating!
I tried to reverse engineer the sound and decided to use a square LFO to modulate the cutoff frequency on a staccato synth with the arpeggiator latched on.
It works surprisingly well, but I discovered a big drawback with the NS2 synth - you can't reset the LFO when you press a key - it just runs.
(EDIT: I added an item to the NS2 wishlist if you want more detail on this. nord-stage-forum-f3/ns2-wish-list-somet ... tml#p52622)
Anyway, with both the arp and the LFO synced to the master clock running around 104BPM it's ok.

If you Tweak the Frequency knob up to 12 oclock, and the Freq 1 (LFO mod) down a bit and Freq 2 (Mod env) betwen 12 and 3pm, you can mess with the arp and see how the LFO does its thing. (you can hear the results of some of this in the MP3) To any synth noobs beginners out there, i am willing to go into more detail on this kind of thing, but in another post
I put this in Slot A and mapped it to the Lower part of the keyboard (Try F1 - i think the song is in Fmajor), and then tweaked a kindof generic pad I made for something else in Slot B, and added a Piano slot for a bit of attack (I used the Yamaha Studio Grand i think), I don't like the results myself, but I thought i'd post it anyway.
Personally I would probably use another synth to handle the arpeggio and go for a fatter, fuller sound on the NS2 using both synth slots.

As usual the disclaimer: this is not a demo of great playing, nor is it meant to be a fully authentic patch. Just an education in tweaking the synth.

• Radio_BooHoo.mp3

EDIT: DO NOT GET THE PATCH FROM THIS POST! - it was just a quick first attempt. Get the better version on the next page of this thread, which sounds like this:

• Radio_GaGa.mp3

Spike Edney, talking about some patches he plays on tour with Queen (Korg Kronos....sorry!)

Maybe useful as example.

Hey no fair! If I had a Kronos I could do pretty much anything with those layers - and it would make coffee and massage your shoulders too

Nice to see how he breaks it down though cheers! Maybe I will revisit it

Close enough for the pub! (Punters )
I thought it was just me that got hung up about the LFO not restarting on key press.
...I see you have a new addition to your straw bale. Aren't you worried about getting muck under your key contacts?