Sorry about the mangled quote don’t ask, the edit window closed before I could fix it.
Well yeah ;). At best, they are a starting point for discussion.
Yes Queen should be much higher.
Chorus, Flanging, Delay, Echo - it’s all a plot to drive me insane. That’s why I’m a Tele > Dirtbox > simple tube amp kinda guy ;).
Queen were never as popular as their latter day rep would indicate. Then they were out in the wilderness after punk came. To be frank they looked and sounded a little ridiculous for a long time. I think when Axl Rose showed his devotion, then Grunge happened and Led Zep came into vogue again, and Waynes World came out, it looked like they were more in tune so to speak.
Things being a little off and harmonizing happens naturally in the course of events. You don’t have to be a mastermind or a genius. To get things exactly unison would be much harder. But it doesn’t happen, unless you run the same part twice. Guitars and voices too. And this doesn’t have to do with passing chords in music. It’s variations in pitch. If the Beatles recorded vocals twice, it wasn’t to get unison sound. It was to pick up incidental variations that sound better. I think their favorite thing to do was to alter the timing (and/or the pitch), electronically and rerun the track. That’s not the genius of the singer. It’s the engineer. Artificial double tracking.
I’ve looked up the time queen usually spent in the studio. Even later when they went and wrote in the studio, they generally finished a record in four months. Queen II was recorded in a month, and had “over the top” production, even by Taylor’s estimate. So they weren’t only good in the studio, they worked pretty quick. Heck, the first record was made in free time the studio didn’t have already booked, and it is a great sounding record.
Ehh, flanging is a subset of phasing. Phasing is shifting the waveform and not caring if the shift remains constant over time and frequency, flanging is shifting it and not letting it move from the specific time shift. Attempts to flange by tape always end up including elements of a phaser anyway, the tape machines aren’t ever going to play at exactly the same rate. I’m thinking that pure flanging is only possible with electronics delaying the signal.* So, you’re right either way. In the case of Queen’s records, it sounds like a phaser to me.
I completely back up your skepticism of May’s claim, by the way. It’s not just pitch that causes it, but the phase of the sound waves getting out of sync. Mercury was good, but he wasn’t matching phase. It’s easy (and very common) to do with a recording or an effects box, pretty much impossible to do with the human voice alone. Now, doubling vocal parts will add plenty of thickness, so he was probably doing that, and May is embellishing or misremembering.
*Plus: pure flanging sounds like warm ass, phasing rules!
Keep your Dirtbox out of this, WordMan!
Between '73 and '86 Queen released 12 albums. Twice releasing albums in one calendar year with several years without a release. Not sure what Rush was babbling about.
You can’t handle the dirtbox, Catfish Man! 
(I knew a distortion pedal and a phaser could be put to good use when I heard Atomic Punk. Eddie has a nice overdriven tone and rubs the knuckles of his pick hand against the strings, with his fretting had flat against the strings to mute them. He’s going for a dry strum, and the whole purpose was to bring out that whooshy phase shift goodness. He made up / took new places a lot of really cool shit.)