Bob Clearmountain and the sound of modern music

Bob Clearmountain (born January 15, 1953) is an American recording engineer, mixer and record producer.

He has worked with many major acts, including Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Toto, Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams, with whom he has a very long association.

He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards and won a Latin Grammy Award in 2007 for Best Male Pop Vocal Album for his work with engineering Ricky Martin's MTV Unplugged.

He has also won an Emmy and he has won seven TEC Awards for Best Recording Engineer, two others for Best Broadcast Engineer, one special Les Paul Award and a Monitor Award for the Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge pay-per-view show. He is married to Apogee Electronics CEO, Betty Bennett.

Biography

As a teenager, Clearmountain had many friends who were musicians or aspirants. He loved music, and played bass guitar in a bar band, but this kind of career was quite unstable so he tried to go somewhere else.

Always more interested in the technical side, Clearmountain had a makeshift studio at home equipped with a two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, some microphones and a talkback.

He also loved to make tape recordings of the band's concerts.

Clearmountain was immediately attracted when he entered a professional recording studio for the first time.

His band had been making a demo recording at Mediasound Studios on 57th Street in New York.

Determined to make a career in the technical side of the music business, he visited frequently and pestered the studio for a job. He was eventually hired as a gofer.

Clearmountain claims that after making about two deliveries, he found staff at the office had been looking for him – they had apparently been expecting him to be working on a recording session, as an assistant engineer. The star-struck new assistant engineer found that his first session was with Duke Ellington.

As also reported, in a NAMM interview, his first recording session was with Cool and The Gang. He was involved in the recording because the Chief Engineer (Tony Bon Jovi, cousin of the more famous John) was unavailable.

He set everything up as he learned from previous sessions done as an assistant and the results were good!

He was, then, hired as Chief Engineer at the Power Station (now Avatar Studios) as they were opening in around 1977, and had a say in designing the recording studios and choosing the equipment as a rock music studio.

Clearmountain also played bass on the Dead Boys' first album, Young, Loud and Snotty, before Jeff Magnum rejoined the group.

On September 3rd, 2022, Clearmountain recorded and mixed the live broadcast of the Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins Tribute concert from Wembley Stadium. On September 27th, he recorded the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert at the Los Angeles Forum.

Clearmountain has worked with many of the biggest names in music, having, for example, mixed Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., The Rolling Stones' Tattoo You, and having produced or mixed extensively for Bryan Adams since 1981.

He cites works he is most proud of are Aimee Mann's first solo album, Whatever; albums by Australian band Crowded House, Play by Squeeze and Avalon by Roxy Music (1982).

He also mixed David Bowie's 1983 album Let's Dance.

Apart from these albums, Bob's credits are huge as can be found in his Discography web page.

Bob’s Studio

While actually Bob works in more than one studio we are about to describe here what he calls the Mix This! Studio.

The studio is located in the basement of Bob’s home in Southern California where he lives with his wife, Betty Bennett.

She is, as stated before, the founder and CEO of Apogee Electronics in Santa Monica.

This explains why the other Bob’s music facility is located in the Apogee Studios.

The Mix This! Studio is built around a 72 input SSL SL4072 G+ console with 'Ultimation' moving fader automation.

The outboard list is huge. The most interesting pieces of equipment are reported below. Refer to the website for the full list.

Digital effects processors

• 2 x Digital effects processor - Yamaha SPX 990
• 2 x Digital effects processor - Eventide H3500
• 2 x Digital effects processor - Lexicon PCM 70
• 1 x Digital effects processor - Eventide DSP 4000

Equalizers

• 3 x Equalizer - Pultec EQP 1A3
• 2 x Equalizer - Pultec (reissue) EQP 1A3

Compressors/Limiters

• 1 x Compressor/limiter - Neve 33609
• 4 x Compressor - Empirical Labs Distressor
• 3 x Limiter - Urei 1178
• 4 x Compressor/Limiter - Urei LA-3A
• 1 x Compressor - SSL FX G384
• 1 x Stereo Compressor - Chandler TG-1

The monitoring is mainly delegated to Dynaudio:

Control Room

• 7 x Speakers - Dynaudio BM-15A Used for both stereo and Dolby Atmos
• 1 x Sub Woofer - Dynaudio S-12
• 2 x Speakers - Yamaha MSP7

Ceiling

• 4 x Speakers - Sony SSCSE

Given the tight relationship with the brand, the A/D and D/A converters are mainly provided by Apogee. Those devices also help in handling the Dolby Atmos output connections to connect all the gear and the 7.1.4 listening system.

Bob Clearmountain and Dolby Atmos

Bob is one of the early adopters and one of the most experienced Dolby Atmos audio Engineers.

He has updated his studio to support Dolby Atmos. The studio configuration is described in the following diagram:

The stereo mix is done with two Yamaha MSP7. For the Atmos monitoring there are seven Dynaudio BM15A for the floor level monitoring, helped out by a Dynaudio subwoofer.

The overhead speakers are four Sony SS-CSE.

All those monitors are controlled by an Apogee Symphony I/O MkII that gets the signals from the SSL console where a custom rack with 16 analog compressors helps to control dynamics.

All the A/D and D/A converters are by Apogee.

More, first hand, information can be found in the following video by Warren Huart:

Bob uses to think in stereo first while mixing. The immersive part of the mix is worked out once the stereo mix is solid. Watch this video (by Apogee) to get all the details:

Further details on this topic can be found in the YouTube Apogee channel.

Clearmountain’s plugins

Given the tight collaboration with Apogee, it was quite natural for them to jointly develop two sets of plugins to reflect, in the bot, the approach that Clearmountain uses for mixing.

The results are Clearmountain’s Domain and Clearmountain’s Space.

The Domain set reproduces the hardware effect chains that Bob has been developing during his career. The hardware in the studio has been configured and patched after Bob's needs and the Domain reflects what he effectively uses in the studio.

He also has clear ideas about reverberation developed after years of experience in many production facilities.

His favorite rooms and echo chambers are emulated in Spaces.

The Apogee plugins can run on both iOS and Windows and require a AAX Native, AU, VST or VST 3 Compatible Host.

See the following video for more information:

Wrap up

It is now clear that a great part of modern music has passed under the powerful hands of Bob Clearmountains.

During the years of his activities he has had the chance to work with very many world famous artists.

Doing so, the mutual influence (artists vs engineer and vice versa) has been the key to define the sound of rock and pop music in the last decades and for the days to come.

Watch the following video (by Warren Huart at Produce Like a Pro) to listen, directly from Bob, about his outstanding career and experience.

Sources

The information and data reported in this post have been collected from following sources:

Wikipedia
Sound on Sound Magazine
NAMM
Mix This! Studio
Apogee Electronics YouTube Channel
Produce Like a Pro YouTube Channel