Classic Sounds, New Possibilities: Why Bob Made the “Clearmountain’s Domain” Mixing Plugin

Truly confident practitioners keep no secrets.

Mixers are among this self-assured group of experts who, once they reach a certain level of success, are only too happy to pass their platinum techniques on to their colleagues. They do it through 1-1 mentorship, interviews, live seminars, video tutorials, and—increasingly—with signature plugins.

The latest elite mixer to latch on to this latter practice is Bob Clearmountain. Renowned for his contribution to the modern songbook in equal parts as an engineer, mixer, and producer, his deft touch has been sought out by David Bowie, Chic, Roxy Music, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, INXS, and hundreds of other artists.

A common thread among the hits he mixed for these icons is that these standout productions have stood the test of time. But as Clearmountain’s career progressed and his desire grew to share his methods—a distinctive ability to blend vocals and instruments together seamlessly in one intimate space—he realized it wouldn’t be easy.

In fact, it was looking downright impossible. After all, his out-of-the-box workflow, perfected at his Mix This! facility in LA and at studios around the world, involved a large format SSL console, live reverb chambers, myriad racks of outboard gear, and a massive patch bay to match.

Bob Clearmountain took an unexpected journey inside the box with his new plugin, Clearmountain’s Domain.

The solution: Clearmountain’s Domain, a newly released plugin from Apogee for macOS and Windows. A smart mashup of retro and futurethink, it starts by giving users a direct path to some of the most iconic mix moves that Clearmountain has created: 20+ presets include “Avalon BV”, “Born in the USA Snare,” “Let’s Dance Horns,” “Need You Tonight Guitar Delay,” “Start Me Up KR Guitar” and many more. In each, the master mixer’s complex signal paths have been meticulously recreated to be accessed with one mouse click.

But for mixers who want to dig deeper, that’s just where the fun begins. Total tweakage is available for each preset via an easy to use quartet of “Sidebar Signal Flow” panels, providing control of Pre-Delay/Reverb De-esser, Pre Delay/Reverb EQ, Stereo Delay with Spin Time Compensation, Delay Blur (Saturation), Stereo Unison to Octave Pitch-Shift, Clearmountain Spaces Convolution Reverbs, an FX Mixer, plus a Real Time FX Visualizer that helps pull it all together.

In this interview with SonicScoop, Clearmountain provides more than just a plug for his plugin. It’s a conversation that demonstrates the incredible experience he’s built up over his decades-long career—a unique perspective that’s he’s only too happy to pay forward.

Bob, why is now a good time for you to do a plugin? What made this work for you now, where you are in your career?

This encompasses a whole bunch of stuff that I just do normally, and which is very simple in the analog realm to make. In the SSL I mix in—although of course I use digital delays and digital reverbs—the signal flow is really analog.

My assistant Sergio Ruelas, who sat behind me for about six years, who’s actually quite a good mixer himself and an amazing guitar player, he tried to duplicate (my signal flow) in the box. He mixes in both Logic and Pro Tools and he said, “You know, it’s practically impossible to do this in Logic and might actually be impossible” to do what I do.

And he said, “I tried to do it in Pro Tools, I spent three hours and I finally gave up. I can string all these different effects together, but I just can’t get them all to do what I want them to do—get the levels and everything precise.” It was just hard to do.

So we thought, “Maybe we could do a plugin that just does the whole thing,” so you don’t have to use a bunch of separate plugins, separate apps. So we started talking to Apogee and they were just getting into doing plugins: They’ve done the only actually authorized Pultec. They have the ModComp, which is the best plugin compressor I’ve ever heard for far. So we said, “Wow, we came up with something. I wonder if we could find a way to do this.” And the timing turned out to be right for them.

That was serendipitous.

So we mapped it out, and we spent a couple of years trying to figure out how the different effects would relate to each other. We started working on it and then kept refining it, adding little bits and taking stuff away.

The fact that it wound up taking about two years must’ve validated your initial response to the idea, that this was not something that can be done easily or casually.

Exactly. There was quite a bit to it, but the response has been amazing. The only negative comments so far have been, “Maybe it’s a little pricey,” and my response is, “I’ve got a studio that costs me about a million dollars. This plugin does the same thing and costs $349. Is that really a problem?”

The Inside Stories Behind the Presets

What I loved when I first got to experience Clearmountain’s Domain at your press conference at AES in New York City, was hearing the stories that went into making these sounds come to life. What are some of these presets that you think have particularly interesting stories?

First of all, the trick is figuring it out. Most of the things occurred back in the ‘80’s and so I would have to go back and listen and try to remember what I did! (laughs) The preset called “Avalon BV”, is one example, that’s from the Avalon album [by Roxy Music], specifically the song, “Avalon.”

We used these B67 Studer tape recorders for tape delays, but the main reverb was this 75-foot stairway which no longer actually exists, at The Power Station in New York. And so [to recreate it in the plugin] we had to find something else that was close, and we found a friend of ours had a really beautiful-sounding chamber. It didn’t quite have the depth of that, but I was able to do some EQ on it and made it sound pretty good.

But just remembering what the delay times were was a little tricky. I don’t have the original and I don’t have any of the original multitracks, unfortunately. It would be a lot easier if I had them and I could ideally duplicate the stuff really simply.

What was another preset like that, that you enjoyed recreating?

The delay on [David Bowie’s] “Let’s Dance” is another specific one. Almost the main feature of the song is the delay on the guitar. He said, “Oh, just throw some kind of slap on the guitar.” And it was way too loud—it wasn’t set right at all. It was just a random delay and it just ended up sounding like that.

A lot of what I did was spur of the moment, at the time, so it was hard to figure this stuff out. Another one was a bathroom chamber that I actually wired up for Power Station—it was a ladies room that was in the basement that wasn’t being used. I found this bathroom. I said, “Well we’re just using this for storage.” And I cleaned it out and stuck an old JBL 4311 in there that we had sitting around, and a couple of mikes and made a chamber out of it.

I used that a lot. It’s the main reverb on songs like “Hungry Heart” for Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” and a bunch of other records, a lot of them were hits.

We had to find another bathroom [to make the plugin preset “Start Me Up Verb”] because they’re rebuilding that whole place. So, so we found another bathroom in a movie theater that sounded very similar to that. In fact, it sounded a little bit nicer. So we did an impulse response to that—we went out and caught our own impulse responses all over town, basically any place we could find and we’re still working, we’re still adding more to it.

How about “Born In the USA Snare”? That’s quite an iconic sound.

That’s a good one. That was like a gated plate. Originally it was a plate reverb with a thing called a Kepex [gate] which was popular back in those days, where instead of a long reverb dying out gradually, it stays open. So it’s full blast for half a second or something like that, and then shuts off abruptly. Then you add a little compression and a little EQ to it, and it’s pretty much duplicated.

Iconic presets are on tap to get started within the plugin.

And It doesn’t hurt to have (drummer) Max Weinberg behind that, right? On that tip, how would you characterize Max Weinberg, as a drummer? What were you looking to capture in his performance, whenever you recorded or mixed him?

Well, as far as capturing performances, it comes down to as good and as powerful as something like that with Springsteen, you want the drums to sound as powerful as possible. Which is kind of the opposite of what you do with say, a jazz drummer, which is a lot more subtlety.

The Power Station “Studio A” was a big sort of a dome ceiling and fairly live, and we had mics that I would aim at the roof, and just capture the sound bouncing off the ceiling, that kind of made it sound bigger. And then the gated snare, Bruce loved that. The bigger I could make the drum sound, the more he liked it.

He wasn’t afraid of it overpowering his vocals.

No, he just sang harder!

Hit Intuition

Another highly influential studio sound that’s represented in Clearmountain’s Domain is “Need You Tonight Guitar Delay.” That references INXS’ smash single, which was that band’s only song to actually hit #1 in the US [in 1987]. What can you tell me about that preset?

Well, that was a big record for me as well. I didn’t record it. It was recorded in Sydney, Australia, and we mixed it at AIR Studios in London. I just thought it was a fantastic record.

That particular song did really well, and it just had a very distinctive (hums the guitar line), it had just a little delay on it. We were going through [my catalog] and we’re trying to figure out, “OK, what were some songs that really stood out that people would know?” and that was the delay there. It’s fairly normal—I spruced it up a little bit with a Harmonizer and I think it’s doing like a ping pong effect in the stereo. Basically it’s the same delay, but maybe a little fancier.

That brings to mind, another question I have for you, Bob: Looking back it, it’s easy to see that all these songs that are referred to here were iconic moments in music and music production, but do you have a sense of that when it’s happening? At the time, do you say to yourself “This is something special” or are you just focused on doing your job? Or is it somewhere in between? In other words, do you have an inkling when you’re working on a hit, and what’s that like at that time?

Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. There was a song by a band called Del Amitri in the ‘90’s, and there was a song on this record [1995’s Twisted] that I mixed called, “Roll to Me.” I thought it was just a throwaway, and it turned out to be a single and it was a pretty big hit [peaking at #10 in the US].

So that’s one of the ones that’s “Who knew?” The way I mixed it, I did an old-fashioned ‘60’s thing where I think the rhythm section was on the left and the vocals were on the right, or something crazy like that and ended up being a hit.

And then Chic “Good Times.” That was massive. I mean it was just a huge hit (cowritten/produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers from their 1979 album Risqué). But I remember at the time when they played the basic track [in the studio at the Power Station] there were no vocals or anything.

I remember them coming into the control room during a playback and, being a bass player, I turned to [Chic bassist and co-founder] Bernard Edwards and I said, “Dude, where did you come up with that bass line? That’s amazing.” And he looks at me and goes, “Really? You think that’s good? Do you like it?” I go, “Do I like it? Are you kidding?” Like he didn’t even know! (laughs) He is so humble.

I go, “This is massive. That’s so great.” And that sounded like this has to be a hit record. How could it not be? And I hadn’t even heard the lyric.

What’s another song like that, which was an obvious hit to you at the time, that’s also part of the plugin?

“Run to You,” by Bryan Adams, I thought that was a great song (from the Bob Clearmountain-produced 1984 album Reckless, peaking at #6 in the U.S.). We always had sort of a little repeat on his voice for most of his record, he really liked hearing that and it works well in his voice. It would usually be like an eighth note triplet or a quarter note, or just an eighth, but usually a triplet worked really well for some reason.

And on “Run to You” was a guitar solo. That was fun because he and his songwriting partner, Jim Vallance, had done a demo and they had got this incredible, really cool sound on the guitar solo on the demo. And so I just basically had to duplicate it! (laughs) I think I ended up beating it for sure—I just kept adding delays and all kinds of stuff to it, like a triplet.

Vocal Focus

Bob, I’m curious what your advice might be to young mixers who are reading this, speaking about delays on vocals, which I think is something that a lot of them really want to get right. When do you use delay on a vocal?

Well, it’s such a matter of taste, really, and a matter of the feel and the vibe of the song. There’s a lot of songs that shouldn’t have any delay or any reverb, even. But a lot of times I’ll keep the verse fairly dry and, or maybe just send them ambience, and then add a delay in the chorus.

The delay and reverb input window reveal the settings for “Live Fogerty.”

It’s got to work for the song and for the section of the song and for the lyric and for the melody. And I’ll try lots of different, like an eighth note and a dotted eighth or triplet, you know what I mean? You just go through the options. It’s nice to have some kind of time relationship to what the tempo and the rhythm of the song is, and the rhythm of whatever you’re putting the delay on, whatever the particular instrument or voice. That’s important.

And unless you’re doing something unusual, for most songs it shouldn’t rub against it. You should almost not even notice it. It should feel like part of the record, and not something that was added. It sounds like it belongs there.

I’ll have to go back and listen to “Run To You”, for example, but I can’t remember ever listening and saying, “Wow, I loved the delay on Bryan Adams’ vocal.”

No, it shouldn’t be like that, I don’t think. Let me just add one thing: There is a song by Springsteen called “Tougher Than the Rest” (from the 1987 album Tunnel of Love) which I love. It’s my favorite song on that album and one of my favorite Springsteen songs.

I just came up with this, it’s like a triplet, I think, I came up with this long delay in his voice, which is unusual for him because normally he’ll just get a little slap, a short slap or just a reverb or something. But it somewhat transformed that particular song because it took it to another level, I thought.

That must be very satisfying when that happens. Once you’ve set something like that up and you hear it, how do you know that you’ve nailed it? You just feel the “ping?”

Yeah, because it makes you smile and you just feel like, “Whoa, oh that’s, it just feels right.” You know what I mean? It’s not even a sound thing. It’s a feel thing, and plus the fact of course if the artist and the producer go, “Dude, that sounds great!” then that really helps.

Outside Inspiration

Bob, what can you think of that that’s a sound out there that you’re not responsible for, but you wish you were? What’s a sound that another mixer is responsible for that you wish you did that you could be putting on Clearmountain’s Domain? In other words I’m saying, “Who do you want to give props to, or inspired you?”

There’s a couple of drum sounds that really inspired me. First of all, Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks” [from their 1974 untitled album A.K.A. Led Zeppelin IV, engineered by Andy Johns and assisted by Ian Stewart, ultimately mixed by Jimmy Page], is always such a classic to me. That really inspired me a lot.

Hendrix used to do amazing things, like “If 6 Was 9”, and a lot of the stuff that he did on Axis: Bold As Love has the most incredible tape flanging on it. And Hendrix and Eddie Kramer, or whoever it was that was mixing, that was making those records, they were very creative. I thought when it came to effects.

Also the Phil Collins drum sound was always a big one that Hugh Padgham came up with, was actually a talkback mic. There was this little mic that was mounted in the studio, at The Townhouse in London. They had what they call a spy mic, a button on the SSL, just so they could hear what people are saying, it was a permanently installed mic.

I guess Phil was warming up one day, playing drums and he hit the thing and he says, “Wow, what’s that? That’s a drum sound.” And so you had the tech wire that mic up to a patch so he could actually record it. That’s something that I thought was very clever. There’s been a lot of things that have inspired me, I could go on and on.

Customizing Clearmountain

That prospect of getting inspired to try new things brings me back to Clearmountatin’s Domain. One important thing that we haven’t covered in this conversation is these presets are by no means locked in stone. You can pop these classic sounds open, and then it’s up to the user to either leave them as they are or take them in a totally new direction. Is that right?

That’s exactly right. In fact, I didn’t even want to have presets—I was kind of talked into that. But then I thought it was a good idea because the preset is a starting point. Instead of having to go in and having this clean slate and trying to figure out what to do with this thing, it gets you started off.

I’ve been using them myself on the stuff that I’ve been mixing lately. It’s so easy to go in and tweak things. We designed it so that it was really obvious what everything does, and there’s nothing mysterious about it.

That takes me to my last question which is: What are you hoping that the users get out of this? Where are the different benefits that you hope to bring to the musical world with Clearmountain’s Domain?

I just hope that when you’re mixing, it’s a way to take it to the next level and to add a certain amount of depth. It addresses a complaint that I’ve heard from people who mix in the box, that it’s harder to get a front-to-back depth. Hopefully this will do that and get a bit more dimension to the mix.

And I’d like it to bring out people’s creativity. Instead of just sitting there and punching through a bunch of different presets until you find something that sounds kind of cool, to then go, “I can make it better. I can make this my own thing.” People should do their own thing. They should be creative and invent stuff. Don’t always do what I do.

— David Weiss

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