Remember sometimes Not Playing in a section can be important too! Don’t feel you have to fill every bar with an instrument. You could also look into purchasing the ‘Off The Record’ music books which transcribes in much detail, the keyboard tracks for each song. Look at the song, see what instruments your synth or keyboard offer you and see where those might fit. So if you were looking at Keep Yourself Alive, which has no keyboards, you might just play Octaved 5th chords on a low register piano sound to create a support for the bass line, or, White Man you could do a Spacey Pad which would add to the ethereal mood of the song. You will find that you will get your own feel for what you can do with each song. If you are a casual player and just want to accompany the album tracks on keyboard, there is certainly no harm in looking at the chords of the songs and playing along. What you would want here is to fill out the sound while remaining in the background a small bit, and the keys would also support the guitarist while the solo is progressing, so that the signature chord progression is still in action. Watching Live Queen Concerts is also another way to find out questions like ‘What did Queen do in this case’, because in the studio you can layer but live you only have Freddie, John, Roger and Brian and in the mid 80s Spike joined, so you look at what was used here. Take a look at Tie Your Mother Down from the Wembley ’86 concert, I’m sure Spike Edney is adding some level of keys during that song. So, what would you do for Keyboard Playing in that case? For something like Tie Your Mother Down, which is also in the key of A, you could use an Analog Synth Pad with a decent attack, or indeed a Rock Organ Sound. one with no arranged Keyboard parts, however if you look at a song like Tie Your Mother Down, that song is 100% guitar on the album track. It’s basically chords starting with A D/A A D/A A D/A E/A A … so really Hammer To Fall doesn’t fall in to the category of a Queen guitar-only song, i.e. Hammer to fall, actually does have a keyboard part, which is about 53 seconds into the piece – I believe Queen called it ‘candyfloss piano’. During the Queen Guitar Songs, what should you be playing on Keyboards? e.g. If you have any follow-up queries on this topic please leave a comment below.

I always like getting emails, tweets and messages and during the week I got a Facebook Query from Ash in Wales asking some excellent questions about Queen songs. I have placed the answers here in case anyone else has the same queries about playing keyboards to Queen Songs.

How to play killer queen on guitar