Bob Clearmountain On Clearmountain’s Domain

Through his wife, Apogee co-founder Betty Bennett, Bob Clearmountain has developed an extremely close relationship with the pro audio brand. Earlier this year, Apogee and Clearmountain teamed up to release Clearmountain’s Domain ($349), a personalized FX signal chain recreated in a simple, powerful plug-in. Read below to find out how Bob landed on the idea of creating the plug-in.
“I do all this stuff in the analog world, which is pretty straightforward really. I’ll usually have a couple of delays coming off an Aux and then come back into the console and then I’ll EQ those and run them into a couple of Harmonizers to kinda thicken them up a bit.

Then there will be a bunch of reverbs that I always have, I usually have like four or five different reverbs just ready to go. I’ll have a really short bright one which is usually like my live chambers here, and then sort of a really short, dark ambient one that’s actually an impulse response of the Apogee studio. Then some Altiverb thing, like a church in Europe or something, and then a really long church. Then I have some [Lexicon] PCM 70s, which do kind of a fun thing.

My former assistant, Sergio Ruelez, tried to do replicate what I was doing in the box in Logic and Pro Tools. He found it really difficult to do. I tried to do it in Pro Tools and I couldn’t.

So we thought, ‘If we could come up with a plug-in. Maybe through Apogee we could do it.’ So we went to Roger [Robindore], and my wife, and said ‘What do you think? Would you want to pursue something like that?’ They said, ‘Well let’s see, let’s talk about it.’

So we mapped it out, and Sergio was great at kind of mapping out how to do it, of course, it really evolved from that point about two years ago. Then the last eight to 10 months, we really got down to it. We found an incredible programmer, the guy that Apogee had been working with on some of the other plugins, and he said “Oh yeah no problem, we could do that.” I explained it to him and I think it was a little more than what he was expecting [Laughs].

It got really complicated, but we did it. We came up with something fantastic. In fact, it went a little farther. It does things that I could never do before, which was great. It has this thing called Blur, which is like a saturation. Stefan, the programmer, came up with this amazing thing and we tried like five different things until he nailed it.”

If you have any questions about Apogee’s Clearmountain’s Domain, we're here to help! Contact one of our Audio Consultants via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.