Top 5: Bob Clearmountain

I have two MkIIs and three MkIs. I use two Pro Tools rigs — a multi-track rig and a print rig. The multi-track rig uses three MKIs with a total of 88 D/As and 24 A/Ds. I mainly use the A/Ds for sends from the desk to effects plugins in aux channels in the DAW session. I don’t do a lot of recording on that console but I do use a lot of plugins as outboard gear sent from auxes on the desk. There’s another MkII in the control room which is mainly used as an effects line mixer, among other musical chores. The Symphony I/O is by far the best sounding interface for any DAW on the market. It’s also very stable. 

Not many people know it but Apogee was the first company to figure out why no-one liked the harsher sound of digital gear in the 1980s, and how to go about rectifying this. A friend of my wife’s [Australian audio legend Bruce Jackson (RIP) — ed.] back when she was president of Soundcraft America — worked out that the harshness was caused by anti-aliasing filters which are a necessary part of every A/D converter. He figured out that smoothing the slope to a specific curve — rather than using the sharp brick-wall shaped filter that nearly everyone else used — would totally clean up the sound of the conversion. Then everybody copied it. So Apogee is actually the reason digital became an acceptable recording medium.

The Domain plugin was designed around my effects workflow which is something I have developed over the years. This once consisted of lots of outboard gear and a few channels on the console, but is now conveniently packaged all within the one plugin. 

The Clearmountain Phases is my latest plugin. I’ve always loved the MXR rackmount Phaser and Flanger that we used to use back in the ’70s and ’80s. We used them at The Power Station and Mediasound in New York [where Clearmountain worked in that period]. The Flanger was always used on a Fender Rhodes for the R&B records that I worked on back then. The plugin is a really a precise duplication of the original rack gear but with expanded features as well. It’s capable of true ‘zero crossing’ tape flanging at a push of a button, manual, or auto-sweep. If you ever had to do real tape flanging you would know that it’s a whole operation just to do that. You can also do a chorus type thing with the Phaser or Flanger when using them in stereo mode. You can separate the two oscillators and place them opposite each other, at either 90 or 180 degrees. This results in a beautiful, swirling stereo chorus kind of sound. 

Apogee also makes a Pultec EQP-1A and an MEQ, an Opto Compressor (like the LA-3A), a modern compressor called Mod Comp, a modern graphic EQ called Mod EQ and their ECS Channel Strip, all equally incredible. It’s the same fanatical people making the plugins who design the award-winning converters. They only make a few but I’ve found that they’re better than the competition.