Quote related to 'Sail Away Sweet Sister' from 'The Game'

One more memory from the Mack days. We're mixing Sail Away Sweet Sister, and I had planned to have all the small fragments in the multitrack guitar solo pan across the stereo in a certain way, so it would be fun when you listened on headphones. Most recording engineers start a mix by establishing a sound balance for the backing track - drums, bass, rhythm guitar or piano - and then add in other instruments one by one so you can logically build up the mix. Mack had none of this going on. He worked the whole time listening to everything, and making adjustments with what seemed like random levels. Of course it all made perfect sense to him, but sitting beside him, you had no clue what he was working on at any one time. I asked him if we could hear all the bits of the solo separately and locate them in the stereo space. He looked at me strangely: “Probably not”, he said. I think he tried, reluctantly, to let me hear them separately but, bizarrely, it turned out that you could only hear them all with the whole mix up! So some of them must have got put on to tracks that were dedicated to other instruments…  We never did find all the pieces, and to this day it sounds odd to me, but … actually? It works. Mack's methods were strange but they worked for him. And they sure worked for us in this piece of our history, the glory days of the Munich era.

Brian May; Queen in 3D, 24th of August 2017