Alex Tumay: In college, I think I went through, like, eight or nine majors total before I dropped out and went back to working in restaurants while I tried to figure it out. I joined a couple of bands in my hometown, and one day when we were just hanging out, a dude pulled up Logic. I just started messing with it, but I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t figure it out at all. So I was like, maybe I should just go to school for this?

I enrolled in Full Sail University the next week. [When I graduated,] I didn’t really know what I was going to do, honestly, so I went into television audio, first at a studio in Atlanta. When that studio closed down, I had a backup of working at this music studio. I ended up working with Ben Allen, the producer for Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon, Deerhunter, Cut Copy. But in the same studio was Cee-Lo and Bangladesh, and I worked under them at the same time. One dude would work from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and the other dude would work from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

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I met Young Thug in early 2013, the first track we did was "Some More." [Metro Boomin] came in and was like, "Alex, he needs to do this song, it's going to be a hit. Please, come record it." He had kicked the engineer out. He needed somebody to be really quick. A lot of engineers are a little confused 'cause you have to have an understanding of timing, because he'll rap the same bar three or four times in a row. It will sound almost identical, but he will be like, "Pick the third and put it in the sixth bar of this verse," and he'll fill in the blanks. And he doesn’t want you to take more than a second to do that. I could keep up with him, and that’s how I came on the tab for Metro.

He came back, like two three weeks later, to do "Danny Glover," and he was like, "Where's Alex?" It maybe took seven minutes to record [that song]. It was only me and Thug in the room, and every line in there is one take. I’ve seen him freestyle entire verses in one take, but generally it'll be anywhere between one and four bars punched. But it's instantaneous, the only thing he's doing is catching his breath. He does a lot of the work for me in that way—instead of me having to pop in a vocal he's like, let me just do this until it's perfect. He has an ear that makes me feel like I'm always trying to catch up.

When him and Rich Homie Quan were [working together a lot,] they would both be in the booth, on the same microphone, handing off the headphones to each other or holding the headphones out and rapping. It's fucking amazing, but also as an engineer who's trying to make them both sound as good as they can, it was like a nightmare: I'm sitting there sweating, trying to get the mics right between takes. Their minds are both racing a mile a minute.