New Music Gear Monday: Apogee Clearmountain’s Spaces

Engineer Bob Clearmountain has always been one of the most clever mixers in the business, so much so that other mixers have tried to dissect exactly what he does on mixes for years. Bob pulled back the curtain on his techniques when he released the Clearmountain’s Domain plugin earlier this year. Now just the reverb part of that plugin is available with the Apogee Clearmountain’s Spaces.

Spaces is rather simple in that it centers around 3 reverbs – the short decay Apogee Studio, the medium decay Mix This! (from Bob’s personal studio), and a much longer decay called Roscoe. What’s interesting here is that the only parameter that you can change is the output level, as the identical input signal is sent to each. The Mix This! verb also has an Input Config parameter that allows for stereo, sum to mono, and cross-channel operation.

There’s an overall Pre-Delay fader that’s basically a delay on the input to the reverbs, but the secret sauce is built around a de-esser (called DS here) and a 3 band EQ. The de-esser, which is used to remove any sibilant information that might trigger the reverbs in an undesirable way, has no parameter controls except for on or off. There’s also the typical Input and Output controls, and all the parameters are gathered around a large vectorscope in the middle.

As you go through Bob’s presets you understand just how important the EQ is to his sounds. It’s a simple EQ with low and hi-cut plus a peaking midrange, but it’s also (along with the relative blend of the 3 reverbs) the the very essence of how he manipulates the sense of space in a mix.

I personally like to tailor the parameters of each reverb in a mix, so I tried Clearmountain’s Spaces as the only reverb on a mix to see how it would work. After setting up 3 aux returns featuring just one of the 3 spaces available (which sounded pretty good, by the way), I found that the real power in the plugin is the ability to combine the reverbs together. You can approximate the decay time that you want this way, and the resultant reverb is a lot thicker than you’d expect too.

The Apogee Clearmountain’s Spaces is available for both Mac and PC for just $49. At that price it’s a steal. You can find out more here, and check out one of the great sounds possible below (there are more examples on the Apogee site).

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