The EM Poll

Mixer with the Midas Touch: Bob Clearmountain on the Tools and Techniques of His Trade

May 7, 2007 5:13 PM, By Jeff Casey

           

This article originally appeared in the July 1998 issue of Electronic Musician.

If you take a look at some of the liner notes in your CD collection, I can almost guarantee you’ll come across Bob Clearmountain’s name. With a long and distinguished career as a recording engineer, producer, and mix engineer, Clearmountain has a discography that reads like a rock ’n’ roll encyclopedia: Bryan Adams, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Robbie Robertson, and the Rolling Stones, to name a few.

A seven-time recipient of Mix magazine’s TEC Award and recent Grammy nominee for his work on John Fogerty’s Blue Moon Swamp, Clearmountain has earned the respect of engineers worldwide and secured a place for himself among the elite few who have entries in the audio history books. In addition to session work, he recently entered the world of product development by designing Apogee’s studio management software, Session-Tools. In the midst of his busy schedule, Clearmountain was gracious enough to spend some time with EM, discussing his mixing techniques, his studio, and the music industry in general.

It seems like your name appears on an album every other week. What does your daily schedule look like?
Mixing, mixing, mixing! My mix room, Mix This!, is in my house, so around ten in the morning I wander downstairs and start. The artist and/or producer I’m working with comes over at about eleven; we’ll finish up a mix that was left up overnight, and then they’ll brief me on the next song. Then they’ll either go away or sit out by the pool for a few hours while I get the mix together. When they come back, they’ll tell me either it needs a few minor changes here and there, or it’s simply total garbage, and I’ve missed the point altogether. We usually have dinner about 6:30, then work on the mix until about nine or ten, run copies, and finish it in the morning.

What console and multitrack are you working with these days?
I have a custom-built, 72-input SSL G+ with Total Recall. I use a bunch of multi-tracks: a Sony PCM 3348, a Sony PCM 3324, a Studer A800, and the obligatory Alesis ADAT and Tascam DA-88. I also have a Digidesign Pro Tools 24 system, which I use strictly for editing.

How about your mixdown format?
I’m now mixing 24-bit through an Apogee AD-8000 8-channel A/D—which I helped design—to a Tascam DA-88 and a DA-38 for backup. The AD-8000’s TDIF card bit-splits the 24-bit word, putting the extra 8 bits for each channel on a separate track of the 16-bit TASCAM machine. It sounds pretty amazing! It’ll work the same way with the AES/EBU and ADAT interface cards. I’m also using the AD-8000 as the analog and digital front end for the Pro Tools system. With the Digi-8 card, the AD-8000 plugs directly into the Digidesign I/O. The AD-8000 also makes digital transfers between formats a breeze.

How do you feel about the current craze of computer-based recording?
I’m not the guy to ask; I only use them for editing, not for recording. I don’t actually trust hard disks, although Lisa Loeb’s album Firecracker was recorded in Pro Tools, and I thought the tracks sounded great.

What outboard gear is in your current collection?
As far as the old stuff goes, I have three Pultec EQP-1A3 EQs, three UREI LA-3A compressors, a UREI 1178 limiter, two MXR Flangers and two Phasers, an Ursa Major Space Station, a Roland Space Echo tape-delay box, and an ancient RCA limiter, which sounds awful but looks great.

Other good boxes include three Yamaha SPX990s; a Yamaha D5000 digital delay—the best one going at the moment, in my opinion; a Focusrite Red 3 compressor; three Roland SDE-3000s; an Eventide H3000, two H3500s, and a DSP4000; two Lexicon PCM 70s; a pair of Distressors; a BSS DPR-901 Dynamic Equalizer, which, on a vocal, is like cheating; an old AMS Reverb and DDL; an SSL compressor; and lots of Drawmer gates and dbx 901 de-essers.

My favorite pieces of outboard gear are my two live chambers. Another new thing I’d like to mention are the KRK E7 monitors—absolutely amazing! They’re self-powered and biamped. They’re not "hypey" at all but fun to listen to. Great for mixing—and parties!

How do you approach a mix?
I think of the mix as an environment with the elements appearing in different places, almost like the characters in a play on a stage: some are in the front, some are in the back, the center, the left, etc., and some are more important than others at different times.

For a pop record mix—basically anything with vocals—the most important element is, of course, the lead vocal. My starting point is usually a quick vocal-heavy rough mix to give me an idea of what the song is about.

Do you ever have a preconceived idea of what the mix should sound like?
Never, unless the artist or producer has given me one to work with. Either way, I try to let my ideas develop as I work. It’s really all dependent on the material.

Your mixes are pretty identifiable. What constitutes the signature Bob Clearmountain Mix?
Hopefully, there is no "signature Bob Clearmountain Mix," only that it is enjoyable to listen to. I believe each mix should sound like the artist had mixed it themselves—a true reflection of how they want to sound—possibly with a bit of extra commercial potential thrown in.

How about a brief tutorial on mixing—Clearmountain-style?
I mix at various monitoring levels, through different speaker systems, in a somewhat random order. I also use a bit of overall compression and, of course, make the important things louder and the not-so-important ones quieter. I’ve found a good, generally useful technique is to make sure there’s no unwanted extra low end coming from instruments other than the bass and kick drum. Doing this will almost always make the bass sound better, louder, and clearer.

How do you feel about radio-specific mixes?
Unfortunately, radio seems to have developed a severe case of tunnel vision over the years, categorizing records into specific "formats." In fact, just today I mixed a very nice pop record that happened to contain a steel guitar. We had to mix a special version without the steel guitar because there are a lot of Top 40 stations that won’t go near anything that remotely sounds like a country record, and the steel is a signature of country music. I’ve been asked to remove all guitars from some pop/rock records so they can be played on Adult Contemporary stations.

Let’s talk about automation for a minute. How often do you use it, and how do you approach automating a mix?
I use it for every mix I do. I really believe in it. Whoever invented that "manual mixing" thing was really full of it! If there are a lot of mutes to be done, I’ll do them first and work in Play Cuts Only mode on the computer. If not, I’ll leave the computer off and get a reasonable static mix happening. Once it sounds decent, I’ll start from the top, with the computer in Absolute or Play Cuts Only mode, working on each section of the song—paying attention to all the tracks but mainly dealing with the vocals.

In the next pass, I may work on drums, guitars, or whatever seems to need the most attention. I’ll then keep doing more passes, catching whatever I hear that seems to be out of place, possibly adding a tricky effect or two if it’s called for, until I can listen to the whole thing without rewinding and riding any levels. Then I’ll take a break, go out for a walk or something, come back, listen again, and inevitably ride a few more things or change an EQ.