Inside Track: Bruce Springsteen Letter To You Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Bob Clearmountain
Photo: Danny Clinch
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. Mixing legend Bob Clearmountain was at the controls.
“A note to your readers: you figure it out! That’s how I learned. Nobody told me what delays or reverbs to use. 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. 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. Asking me exactly how I did something is pointless. It really is. I know it is your job to report on this stuff, but dude, it doesn’t work this way.