That's this Deakey amp [pointing out a small homemade-looking box with a roughly five-inch speaker]. It's a little one-watt amp that John Deacon built and brought into thye studio one day. I had done "Procession" with AC30s and it sounded just a little bit too smooth. I wanted it to sound more violin-like and orchestral. So I double tracked some of the layers using that little amp. Incredible. I've used it ever since on anything where there's a real orchestral type sound. And depending where you put the microphone in front of the amp, you can really tune the sound. It's very directional. It's a germanium transistor amp, which is transformer coupled-unlike things these days; that isn't really done anymore-with silicon transistors.
Procession is a multi-tracked thing which takes melody lines from Father to Son and re-arranges them.
We did God Save the Queen and we did the beginning part for Tie Your Mother Down and we did Procession on the first [sic] album. Those little guitar pieces go back a long way. I had heard Hendrix's thing but his approach is very different really. The way he did those things was to put down a line and then sort of improvise another line around and the whole thing works on the basis of, er, things going in and out of harmony, more or less, by accident. It's very much a free-form multi-tracking thing, whereas my stuff is totally arranged. I make sure that the whole thing is planned and treated like you would give a score to an orchestra to do. It's a complete orchestration. So, it's a different kind of approach really but I enjoy doing those things. It's sort of indulgence really but, at the same time, I thought it would be funny for that Wedding March to come out that way. Because all our people, who know our music, would recognise that immediately as one of our treatments and anyone else in the cinema would think of it as a strange Wedding March. It's meant it to be a musical joke anyway, in the film, so it was just heightening that joke really.
The first double-tracked solo I did was on the demo for Keep Yourself Alive, then Procession on the second album was the first proper multi-tracked song. I was very into mediaeval and early English music at the time and recorded Procession with nine guitar parts. That's this Deacy amp. It's a little one-watt amp that John Deacon built and brought into the studio one day. I had done Procession with AC30s and it sounded just a little bit too smooth. I wanted it to sound more violin-like and orchestral. So I double tracked some of the layers using that little amp. Incredible. I've used it ever since on anything where there's a real orchestral type sound. And depending where you put the microphone in front of the amp, you can really tune the sound. It's very directional. It's a germanium transistor amp, which is transformer coupled-unlike things these days; that isn't really done anymore-with silicon transistors. There's this guy, Dave Peters, who is one of the designers of the AC30 and a real expert on valve electronics and the early days of transistors. I'm working with him trying to reproduce the Deacy amp. Maybe we'll put it on the market. I have to talk to John about it, as it happens. Because John made the thing. And he's very kindly allowed me to use it ever since. It's pretty magical.
I'm pretty sure I used it for making a demo of the multitracked Procession at home, probably because it wouldn't piss off the neighbours like a fully cranked-up AC30! I loved the sound it made so much that I eventually made the “proper” version in the studio the exact same way.