Page 2: Inside Track: Blur 'The Ballad Of Darren'

Keep Your Headroom

In the case of the Blur record, Wrench received Pro Tools sessions, which, he says, “had been really well recorded. It makes the mixer’s life so much easier. I have an assistant who will, when a track comes in, clean up the vocals and any clicks, look for edits that aren’t properly crossfaded, and so on. But in this case it was all fine. I had to do a few bits of mouth de‑clicking, but I’m really fussy about that because I compress the vocal quite heavily, so I need them as clean as possible. Because of the amount of compression I use, I also bring the breaths down with volume automation. I like to hear breath in a natural fashion.

“The Blur sessions came with the routing and the plug‑ins they had used. The routing was pretty close to what I would use anyway. One thing I checked was to make sure there were no overloads within the busses. Once Pro Tools built in more headroom it started to sound really good, but I do go and check it’s not overloading before it’s hitting the plug‑ins or overloading between the plug‑ins. When you follow basic old‑school gain structure rules it sounds better. You’ve got to give yourself more space, more dynamics, more headroom, which allows you to EQ stuff without just adding more harmonics.

“Getting the gain structure right is part of your mix job done. If you’re clipping between the plug‑ins it just ends up clogging the track and then you do a volume ride on something and all you’re doing is distorting it. I always want to be sure that I can do volume rides and not push various busses or auxes into distortion. With regards to the plug‑ins in the Blur sessions, I had to get a few licences to make sure all the plug‑ins were working, but they were generally using a very similar palette of plug‑ins to what I use.”

Take It To The Limiter

Once a basic balance has been set up, David Wrench then turns his attention to the master bus, setting up his EQ, multiband and stereo compressors so that he can mix ‘into’ them.Wrench uses his mix session of the first single from The Ballad Of Darren, ‘The Narcissist’, to illustrate his mix approach. “My mix process is that I’ll first go through things individually. I check the drums, add the bass in, then the guitars, synths, and finally the vocals, getting a general good balance before I start doing all the volume automation. Once all that’s in, I get my mix bus to a good place. The Pro‑MB and the SSL G‑bus [on the master bus] are a very important part of the sound. I always have the SSL at a ratio of 2:1, fastest release there is, often quite slow attack. I just want it to tame things. It may be doing 4 to 6 dB of compression at most.

“At that point I’ll also switch the [FabFilter] limiter on and I’ll work with the limiter on for the rest of the mix. When doing volume automation I need the limiter in, so I know what level I’m at, always. I want to know that the mix can survive the mastering process and still sound right. It means working a bit harder to make sure the transient attacks and other things can pass through the limiter without problems.

“Once I have the master bus engaged, my main focus is sculpting the vocal. I’ll do a lot of automation so the vocal is really clear. I’ll go through line by line, word by word. That’s the most time‑consuming bit. It can take a good two or three hours just getting that right. During this time I’ll listen to the track with everything in. Often in a really brilliant mix, if you solo something it may sound a bit odd, but that’s fine because you’re not listening to it in solo, you’re listening to it in the context of a mix.

David Wrench: Once I have the master bus engaged, my main focus is sculpting the vocal. I’ll do a lot of automation so the vocal is really clear. I’ll go through line by line, word by word... It can take a good two or three hours just getting that right.

“You listen to what is special about each part in relation to the others. What’s this guitar part doing? How do I get the essence of this guitar part to cut through without getting in the way of whatever else is going on? Sometimes you have two things happening in the same frequency range, so you need to separate them out, or intertwine them, depending. You can separate them out using different spaces, or panning, or you do notched EQs so they are not quite in the same frequency space. Those are the main things you can do if something is clashing.

“Obviously the vocal is the key to everything. Everyone hears when a vocal sounds wrong. Vocals have to sound good, so I’m obsessive with EQ on vocals. I have an aesthetic of how I want the vocal to sound. I want it to be warm, clear, characterful, and in the right space. I want to be able to play it really quietly on a small radio and hear every word, but not for it to sound separate from the track. I also address occasional frequencies in the voice that need taming, either with a bit of multiband or with notches from an EQ. Once I’ve got the voice sounding great, I know where I’ve got to EQ the guitars around or the piano, or whatever. Nothing can get in the way of the voice.

“Damon’s a brilliant singer, Chrissie’s a brilliant singer, and they project well. But I still go in and do the details at the end of words, maybe lift it up a touch. Actually I thought Damon’s voice sounded amazing on this record. He’s got this beautiful warmth which has actually got better with age. When you’re working with people with iconic voices like that it makes the job a lot easier, because you’ve just got to make sure that the character comes through, and they sound at their best.”

David Wrench: When you’re working with people with iconic voices... you’ve just got to make sure that the character comes through, and they sound at their best.

The Rhythm Section

“I would say that I probably put the drums louder than they’ve ever been on a Blur record, and the bass is quite clear. But Alex James’ bass is picked and isn’t subby. I wouldn’t try to force that into being something that it isn’t, by adding sub or in other ways artificially strengthening the bass. What you hear is what was there, and I made the bass sound as good as possible within the context of the band.

“What’s interesting with Blur is that the bass is actually very melodic, almost like a countermelody to the guitar line a lot of the time. The bass doesn’t sit in the frequencies of a heavy bass as you have in much modern music. Instead it’s above that, it’s in the low mids and actually some of it is in the treble. And during the mix I was actually adding more treble to the bass, so you’re getting more of that counterpoint. That allows you to sit the kick drum underneath, so that’s weighting the record down.

“With more contemporary hip‑hop type music and R&B, the bass is underpinning everything and often it’s not even bass but an extended and tuned 808, and the traditional bass drum part is much more clicky and above it. When you’ve got both in the same frequency range it gets messy, and you’ve got to decide who’s going to get the low end, who’s going to get the mid, and who’s going to get the top end.

“People often will be like ‘We need more bass!’ when the bass is already sort of maxed out, and what you actually want to hear are the higher harmonics of the bass to make you feel the bass a bit more, and that’s what I did on this album. In general I’m very wary of adding sub to melodic bass parts, because you often get very weird harmonics and discordant stuff. But I will sometimes add subharmonics to a kick drum if I feel it’s not reaching quite low enough to anchor the song down.”

Personal Perspectives

Once Wrench’s mix is complete, he takes off the master bus limiter before sending his mix for mastering, which in the case of both the Blur and Pretenders albums was done by Matt Colton. Looking at the enthusiastic reception of these albums to two bands that have been around for a while, Wrench reflects: “People change as they get older, and from that perspective, I think the lyrics on the Blur album are brilliant. They’re very personal and from the perspective of someone in their 50s who has been through a lot. The same comes across with Chrissie. And these voices are relevant. Record companies have been guilty of amplifying just certain voices. But now there are many more diverse voices, which is the best thing ever. I want to hear people’s stories, and I want to hear something I have not heard before. I want to hear what people from all over the world, from different ages, and all sorts of backgrounds, are thinking and doing. That is what is exciting. Because it is a way of learning about human experience from all sorts of perspectives.”