Interviews with Bob Clearmountain

Electronic Musician just added an old interview with Bob Clearmountain to their web site.

Clearmountain is one of my idols (his work with Radiohead notwithstanding.) And while he’s arguably the most famous mixing engineer on the planet, he doesn’t mind sharing advice with us amateurs on how to mix:

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.

Sound On Sound also has an interview with Clearmountain that discusses many of the artists he’s mixed, and his favorite equipment. But it wouldn’t be Sound On Sound without tips:

With pop music, I tend to focus on the lyric and the lead vocal more than anything else, trying to get a sense of what the song is. That matters more than anything; more than what the drums or guitars are doing, although I know a lot of people tend to start with the drums and the rhythm parts. I tend to start with the vocals, and then I might get into guitars and keyboards. I’ll try to find effective pan settings for everything, thinking of it like a stage.

Tags: interviews, mixing, professional-engineers