Queen recorded so many voices for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' that the recording tape brown coating wore off

In August 1975, Queen went to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record their famous hit. Back then, musicians used 2-inch wide magnetic tape that could only hold 24 separate sounds at once. To get that huge opera sound, Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor sang for up to 12 hours every day.They used a trick called 'bouncing.' They would record several voices, mix them together into one track, and then record new voices over the old ones. They did this until they had the sound of 180 different voices layered on top of each other. This was a huge risk because every time the tape ran across the machine, it lost a little bit of its magnetic coating.The producer, Roy Thomas Baker, noticed the tape was getting thinner and thinner. Eventually, the tape became so worn out that you could see right through it when you held it up to a light. If they had recorded just a few more times, the tape might have snapped and the song would have been lost forever.The whole process took three weeks just for this one song.