I often get asked how I came to layer all those guitar parts on the Keep Yourself Alive solo. The answer is that, like Pinocchio's nose, it just grew and grew and grew. Here's the full story: Before Queen had a record contract, we did a demo of Keep Yourself Alive (in fact, it's still my favourite version of the song). This was the first time I had an opportunity to play a three-part harmony solo, so I did it with relish. I employed my favourite pickup combination (the one I use about 85 per cent of the time) - the bridge pickup in conjunction with the centre one, in phase - to get that rich, saturated distortion. And even though the solo was largely instinctive (not written out beforehand), it worked out well. The solo sounded so good that I thought I'd simply play it again when we got to do the final, real version of the song. Well, you know how when you try to reproduce something, it's never quite the same? That's exactly what happened when it was time to do our first album. I was agonizing throughout the recording, constantly thinking I wasn't getting the solo right. I was never quite satisfied with it. And then I realized that the solo should have something different in it, by definition of the song being a newer version. That led me to think that maybe I should take the original solo even a stage further and start adding more harmonies, but with a twist. On a lark, I slowed the tape down to half speed, and proceeded to layer more parts - little snatches - throughout the solo (and elsewhere in the song). When those parts were played back at normal speed, they added a top-end sparkle and provided a nice counterpoint to the main three-part solo. There's nothing quite like analogue tape manipulation. The beauty of that old analogue recording gear was that you could do so much with it. Besides slowing the tape down, you could turn the tape over (which was also something we did a lot) and do backwards guitar parts. You could lean on the tape machine and get a “wowing” sound - a specific type or phasing. Of course, with the digital stuff that's out now (which I have been using for a while), you can't do that - you have to specifically dial in the effect you want. It's fast, clean and efficient, but I miss the flexibility and the “you never know what to expect” quality that analog gear provided.