Original subtitles

I seem to remember Travis came by here for the afternoon.

With this record in particular, I just sort of got on with it, did it,

and we'd send it to Trav and go from there.

For whatever reason, this mix was literally the second ref mix we sent.

But I think it took a minute to process.

Quite a lot of work done in really short space of time,

and if you'd been living with the mix and I'd think he'd had the mix

he'd had for a minute, it just took a minute.

I think again, he's probably lucky that it's Trav who's obviously a producer>

as well as artist, that he's going to have access to these parts.

This is Metro's drum, separated that.

It's not available to everyone.

You're usually going to get a two-track.

I'll be honest, I was surprised.

And if you give me drum parts, I'm going to do stuff.

But all you can see I've done there is a couple of places

I've dropped that hat there.

It starts to slow down into that verse, why?

Because Travis is about to come in and scare us all

with whatever he's going to say

and you've got an opportunity to make that a little bit more.

I don't know, [inaudible].

This is it, back in...

Trap hats took out. You can see.

And this one to the second, the drop.

I think, again, with all these tracks, the balances

and Travis had these tracks going on for a long time.

They've been going for a minute, while you're waiting to collate verses

from people and parts and so on, but...

So, in my head I'm like, don't...

You're not trying to reinvent the wheel.

But there was definitely room, and I talked to Trav about it

and that's what he wanted.

He wanted me just to have a go and have fun.

So, that's super liberating when you're mixing.

And we often talk about trying to put yourself in a place

with whatever you're doing where you are not predetermining the outcome

because that's going to fuck you.

Again, the beauty of this particular track for me was that I only had

an X amount of time to do it, and therefore I'm looking at it now

and I'm having a couple of regrets about some little things,

but at the same time, that's what it was then.

I was talking to someone the other day about critiquing work after the event.

What would you call that? Hindsight.

And you've got to remember the record that comes out or that

becomes available at that point, at that time, everyone who worked on it

agreed that that's what it was.

So, when you sort of pull apart a mix or pull apart a production

or whatever, it's not rude, but remember that at that moment

everyone was agreed that that was solid gold, and that's something

I try and sort of respect as well.

So, you've got all Metro's drums at the top here,

then you've got all the 808 stuff going on here.

It's got its own bus.

And I'm running a music aux, which there's very little going on.

Again, like I sort of mentioned, I was still figuring out a way,

my template, let's call it.

And I'm still working on it because you can really quickly in the box

just get lost in just endless subs of auxes.

It's just hell.

And I can't handle that and I'm not going to handle it,

so I just have to try and keep it quite straightforward.

Although this might look a bit chaotic down here, it's not.

It's actually really... it's all quite sort of simple.

I've still got traditional auxes going on, and I think some of these were inherited.

These came with the session.

So, and then below that, I've got what looks like a sort of

effects tracks, if that makes sense, sort of vocal effects.

All this is pre-made.

And then I've got the majority of all the sends, which, maybe not.

It's pretty traditional layout.

So, it was really interesting to me the idea that underneath

all the James Blake stuff, it's much more swimming, much more low-end driven.

And anything that's got long-held legato information I'm going to use,

so that when we get to that savage drop again, it's going to feel

even more like a stop.

The punctuation will be greater.

And I've also got to try and save some shit for later on.

This is a fascinating track where the artist, the principal artist,

doesn't come in 'til three minutes in.

You don't hear Travis until that drop in the middle eight.

It's really different, the low end on that.

Again, when you've only got six hours to mix a song...

I knew going into it I only had six hours.

It doesn't make your decisions finite, but you're really going to be

trusting your instincts at that point.

From what I remember, I'm working in a room I've never

worked in before, so all the obstacles were sort of

stacked against me, if you like.

A room I don't know, speakers that I don't completely know,

other things going on, physically, that are destructive

to my sort of mental capacity to be calm.

But I suppose that's all the reasons why...

that's when you better get on with it and...

It's really smart to get...

Part of production is obviously using different mixers and different...

And I think where it works in the collage, you got to remember I hadn't heard

the other 17, 16 songs on the record or whatever by then,

but you're going to get these different tastes coming really.

It's this great production by Travis because you're just going to get

these different feelings.

If all the mixers had the feel of the reference, that's just going to be

the flavor for the whole record, and he didn't want that and had enough

between him, Mike Dean and lots of other people.

You're just getting all this different taste and how you choose to sort of

jump from that is, I think, what turns a good record

into a really great record.

What I'm surprised by is just the sheer speed that it happens at.

But that's part of it.

That's what makes I guess...

I hope now you can keep the mix exciting that way, I think.

This is Savage's.

His vocal needed a bit of work.

I'd say some of these plug-ins on Savage are inherited again

because I don't use RVox.

I'm trying to be as sort of unproprietary about this as possible.

If it sounds okay as it is

and they've had it working like that, I'm not going to change it.

There was just so many people involved.

By the time you've got to this stage of this song, so many other engineers

and producers have been involved.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel.

This is totally inherited.

I didn't do anything to Savage's vocal, unless I did some stuff here, which I did.

So, these tracks down here again, my fun tracks or whatever,

I can do all that and not interfere with any of his preset halls or reverbs.

We're just going to leave all that.

But if we solo all his vocals and then we can add all this stuff down here.

So, I can just do quite a simple delay track running underneath,

really quiet leaf, and then some chorusing happening on a couple of lines.

Nothing extreme.

Like I said, in terms of sort of the architecture of this mix,

by the point where he drops in that second verse,

it's like the beginning of the song, really.

So, you're leading up to that point, and that's quite an important moment.

The whole timbre, if you like, of the song becomes a bit darker.

His voice is menacing.

I'm just trying to sort of picture things that will make that more

dramatic for the mixer... for the listener, sorry.

And the mixer.