Queen has always loved playing live. It is one of the bands with the greatest number of live concerts in the history of rock. In fact, Queen has performed around 680 concerts.

    When live, Freddie never sang the songs as he did in the albums. He kept on making changes to the songs. In concert, seldom did he resort to the falsetto and hardly ever did he sing the highest notes he sang when recording in studio; he either took the note an octave down or harmonized with seconds, thirds or fifths which were lower than the original note. In other cases, he sang the high note directly, and in doing so he used his head register. But in most of the cases Roger did the backing vocals in falsetto and sang the high note.

    Now, I’m giving a link for you to download an extract of the song 'In The Lap Of The Gods…revisited', taken from the album Live at Wembley ‘86. This is an ideal example, since it is mostly done in falsetto. In the studio version he sings the most important phrases of the song like "It’s so easy", "so risky" and "so funny", in a piercing falsetto, while, when live he sang the first two in falsetto and the last one using his head voice. Now I’ll give you the link; each file is 5 seconds long, and they are rated in 44.100 hz and 128 kbps: itssoeasy.mp3 and sofunny.mp3. This song is, also, a great example to show how Freddie's interpretation has changed over the years. Between 1974-1975, Freddie used to sing the first twos sentences of the song in falsetto, but on the '75 concerts, he sang the falsetto parts one octave lower, and avoided to have to use that resource. The audio clip is 14 seconds long, and it's rated at 128 kpbs and 44.100 hz: inthelap75.mp3. From 1976 till 1986, he sang it the original way, again.

    Contrarily, in other songs like 'Somebody To Love' or 'Play The Game', he avoided the falsetto or sang directly with his chest or head register. In 'Somebody To Love', at the beginning of the song, he sang the word "can" in falsetto (an Ab4); when singing live, he shouted it with his most resonant register. Such is the case in the first phrases of 'Play The Game'. Instead of singing them in falsetto as he does in the album, he preferred singing them with his most powerful register, which gave greater body and volume to the song, while depriving it of the typical sweetness of the falsetto.

    The fact that in other songs, like the demanding 'Brighton Rock', Freddie alternated between his falsetto and his full voice, is a different story. Freddie always sang the lowest octave of the song while Roger sang the highest octave in falsetto.