In this article Julian highlights a video in which Bob Clearmountain shared his methods and approach when remixing recordings of The Band from 1968. The simple approach belies the cutting edge technology used to separate the material on the multitrack.

We’ve always been huge fans of Bob Clearmountain’s attitude to audio. As one of the original Big Name mix engineers his credits speak for themselves but it’s the simplicity with which he seems to approach audio which always grabs my attention. He has the same straightforward, no fuss attitude to mixing as Paul McCartney seems to have to songwriting. One of ‘why all the fuss, it’s as simple as this’.

In his Mix This home studio (unlike my home studio, his has a large format G+ SSL in it…) I couldn’t help noticing that he had some inexpensive little Sony speakers covering the height channels of his Dynaudio equipped Atmos monitoring. Having spent as long as I have thinking about different speaker calibration solutions and the role speaker density and matching plays in creating convincing immersion in Atmos systems, part of me fussed that ‘you can’t do that!’. And then I thought “You’re Bob Clearmountain, you can do whatever you want!”.

Simple, Apart From When It’s Not…

We featured a post on the blog where Bob complained about people using the term Stems incorrectly to refer to multitrack files. It clearly hit a chord as this was a conspicuously popular post on the blog. So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I watched this video of Bob explaining his experience of remixing The Band in Atmos. His approach was one of straightforward simplicity, a reflection of The Band’s approach to recording the material in the first place. But it also explains the use of cutting edge de-mixing techniques to access the individual parts from a four track tape.

I recently wrote an article Are We Over-engineering Our Audio Productions? It was well received but I did wonder whether some people who commented on it focussed on the quantising and pitch correction which might immediately come to mind when thinking about technology and modern records. I did mean that, but I was also commenting on the fact that simpler solutions can be more appropriate as they are less invasive. They don’t interfere with or influence the music. This was very much the approach that The Band insisted on way back in 1968, in response to engineers trying to exploit the (then) new possibilities presented by increased mixer channels and four tape tracks, the musicians insisted on staying close to each other and maintaining line of sight, playing the way they always had done and as a result feeling comfortable and playing their best.

Bob wanted to represent this immersion within the band’s performance, in the same way as they would have been immersed in each other’s performances at the time, performing all together as an ensemble. As he says right at the beginning of the video “To me mixing is about the music, it’s not about special effects” and rather than using Atmos to impress on the listener just what a great format Atmos is, he uses it to make the music better. Flashy Atmos mixes have their place, but as Steve Genewick once said, when mixing in Atmos you’re '“not making a Demo Tape of Dolby Atmos”!

However, faced with a four track multitrack there’s not a lot of scope for taking advantage of the increased size of an immersive soundfield. This is where things get interesting. Bob Clearmountain is lucky enough to have a friend who knows Peter Jackson and through this connection Bob was encouraged to use the de-mixing technology developed for the Get Back Beatles project.

Changing Perspectives On Atmos

Many people we’ve spoken to who were initially sceptical about Dolby Atmos for music have changed their position in the years it's been available. There are questions about the business decisions around adopting an Atmos workflow, and there are certainly technical questions which aren’t yet resolved but with every new technology there is always a period where, as an industry, mixers become accustomed not just to what it can do and how to use it but the deeper questions around what to use it for? We’re well past that stage and this kind of respectful use of Atmos on well-loved legacy catalogue is great to see.

If you mix in Atmos, what legacy recording would you like to mix?