![]() ![]() They include records by the Rolling Stones, Hall & Oates, Paul McCartney, the Who, David Bowie, Chic, Bryan Adams, Roxy Music, Bruce Springsteen, INXS, Toto, Bon Jovi, Simple Minds, Sheryl Crow, Crowded House, Bryan Ferry, and many more.īob Clearmountain in the control room at his Mix This! studio.Ĭlearly, Clearmountain’s biggest achievements were, and continue to be, in the rock arena. The unbelievable amount of classic records Clearmountain has worked on over the decades says it all. ![]() It was one of the main reasons he managed to become, in the early ’80s, the world’s first star mixer. They all sound like the same person, with the soul sucked out.” Star Mixerīob Clearmountain inarguably knows a thing or two about mixing records that have soul and life, and about enhancing these qualities rather than stifling them. Today, the vocalists in country music in particular sound like machines. Some things may not be perfect, and that’s fine, because you don’t want to completely suck the life out of a voice. It’s a manual pitch shifter, and I use it the same way I used the Eventide H3000. I don’t use Melodyne or Auto‑Tune but tune vocals using the Waves SoundShifter plug‑in. It was more tedious and we couldn’t be as precise, but it worked. We used to do that on tape: we’d fly stuff out to half‑inch tape, and then back in, and we’d use our ears to get them in time. It’s easy, for example, to align several bass drums in Pro Tools. I thought it was a hysterical thing to say! It’s not a visual medium! A few years ago at an AES trade show someone demonstrated some edits in Logic, and then said, ‘Let’s hear what that looks like.’ I started laughing immediately. But most of all, it forces me to trust my ears, rather than my eyes. But when I’m mixing at my SSL, it’s so much fun, it feels like I’m having a day off! I love the process of mixing on a desk, and the sound also is a big part of that, of course. Working with little pop‑up menus and windows and so on is just not enjoyable to me. I don’t understand how people can do that and remain sane. “Mixing in the box is like torture to me. It shows in many of his working methods, for example the fact that he still mixes on a console, at a time when the vast majority of his colleagues have gone in the box. With any piece of gear, play with it and listen and learn all the things it can do.”įor the legendary Bob Clearmountain, listening is everything, and he prides himself in doing almost everything by ear, and being creative. So if you’re sitting behind a computer, just try stuff. “When I started at Media Sound in the ’70s in New York we mostly did jingles, and a lot of the time I was not watching somebody else, but I had to work out what to do myself. “I learned by doing things,” Bob Clearmountain continues. I know it is your job to report on this stuff, but dude, it doesn’t work this way. Asking me exactly how I did something is pointless. The great part of mixing is figuring out for yourself what works for you, and for the music and the song and the lyrics, and what doesn’t. I would listen to records, and I’d try to work out what they had done, and then I’d try to recreate that, and come up with my own thing. Nobody told me what delays or reverbs to use. “A note to your readers: you figure it out! That’s how I learned. Mixing legend Bob Clearmountain was at the controls. Bruce Springsteen’s latest album was an international hit last year, but the console it was mixed on was made a quarter of a century ago.
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