# ‘I Wanted It Perfect’: Roger Taylor Fixes Queen Debut Drum Sound — 50 Years Later
**LONDON — For half a century, Roger Taylor heard something wrong.**
Not the songs. Not Freddie’s voice. Just the drums.
“It bothered me every single time,” Taylor, 76, admits. “The kick drum was weak. The snare had no crack. I knew what I wanted it to sound like. I just couldn’t achieve it in 1973.”
Queen I, the band’s raw, underproduced debut, has long been considered their roughest recording—not by design, but by limitation. Budgets were tight. Time was shorter. Taylor left the sessions frustrated.
Fifty years later, he finally fixed it.
Using AI stem separation and modern remastering technology, Taylor isolated and reconstructed the original drum tracks for the newly released Queen I Collector’s Edition. The kick now cuts. The snare bites. To Taylor, it’s what he heard in his head in 1973.
“It’s not rewriting history,” he says. “It’s correcting a mistake we couldn’t afford to fix then.”
Not everyone agrees.
Critics have called the move “revisionist,” arguing that the original’s limitations are part of its charm—documentary evidence of a legendary band finding its footing. Some fans hear the new mix as cleaner but colder. Others applaud Taylor for honoring his younger self’s intentions.
Brian May, Queen’s co-founder, defends his bandmate: “Roger heard something we couldn’t. Now we hear it too. That’s not sacrilege. That’s completion.”
The controversy hasn’t slowed sales. The reissue debuted at No. 2 in the UK, and a new generation is discovering Queen I as its creator always wanted it heard.
Taylor is unmoved by the debate.
“I’m not erasing anything. The original is still there. But I spent 50 years wincing every time ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ came on the radio. I don’t have to do that anymore.”
He pauses.
“It’s just… finished now.”
*Some call it revisionism. Others call it permission—an artist finally allowed to sign his name to work he never felt he completed.*
