Elliot let me sit in on the Doobie's session at Westport Studio near his Connecticut home and I got to hear all the individual elements of 'Long Train Running' as he built up the surround mix, including that famous riff, which is actually constructed from two acoustic and two electric guitar parts.Įlliot Scheiner, Paul Wiffen and Brian May in Capitol Records' Studio C, Los Angeles.However, when the time came to begin work on the Queen remix, Elliot realised that the HD24 would no longer suffice. The system worked well and Elliot elected to continue using it for his surround mix versions of America's Homecoming (including 'Ventura Highway'), The Eagles' Hotel California and The Doobie Brothers' Captain And Me (including both 'Long Train Running' and 'China Grove'). Up to this point, Elliot had been using Swissonic AD96 and DA96s digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital converters to digitise the analogue multitracks he'd been working on in readiness for surround mixing, and on his previous couple of projects, he had then stored the converted multitrack recordings on an Alesis HD24. Of course, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to find out more about this fascinating project, particularly how Elliot was planning to go about remixing the song that most people consider the centrepiece of the album, the worldwide number one hit and all-time rock classic, 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

While SOS were interviewing Elliot for the Surround series, he happened to mention in passing that one of his future 5.1 remixes would involve none other than Queen's 1975 album, A Night At The Opera. One of the parts of this series (see SOS March 2002) featured production and mixing tips from top surround producer Elliot Scheiner, who has been responsible for remixing albums by many big-name artists into 5.1 surround, including REM's Reveal, The Eagles' Hotel California, and Sting's Brand New Day. If you're a regular SOS reader, you may recall that we ran a technique series on surround-sound mixing and production. Now guitarist Brian May and engineer/surround specialist Elliot Scheiner have remixed this masterpiece for what promises to be a genre-defining DVD-Audio release.

Queen's seminal 1975 album and the worldwide hit from it, 'Bohemian Rhapsody', might almost have been tailor-made for surround sound.

A night at the opera 2