Leroy Clampitt: Soothing Strings

New Zealand-born producer, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Leroy Clampitt — otherwise known as Big Taste or Taste Nasa — got his first big break co-writing for Justin Bieber during his initial one-year visa in the US. Here he tells Headliner about his process when using oeksound’s soothe2 on strings and vocals, and some of the exciting new pop artists he’s been in the studio with recently.

Clampitt believes the situation he finds himself in has been a long time coming. Having already gone through the motions of taking on any project he possibly could, he’s now finding it easier to narrowly focus his energy on the things he really loves.

Originally from Pirongia, New Zealand, Clampitt started out writing songs for and playing in bands, teaching guitar and writing jingles.

“It’s like a different world over there,” he begins. “A band that I work with just played a 50,000 seat concert a week ago, which is quite hard to fathom!”

Clampitt has co-written and produced songs for artists including Justin Bieber, Madison Beer, Sage The Gemini, Adam Lambert, Lennon Stella and many more. It was towards the end of his first one-year visa in the US that he ended up landing a small record deal with an indie label in L.A., followed by a publishing deal songwriting for other artists after he’d built up some chops.

“While I was waiting in New Zealand for that second visa to come through, the opportunity to work on a song for Bieber came up,” he recalls. “Me and my friend James spent an afternoon in Auckland City just working on that brief, which was ‘just make it cool’. And so we just did what we felt like doing, sent it off, and then we had a single on the Bieber album. It was definitely a very good stepping stone.

“The last couple of records I’ve done with Madison, and with this one that just came out with Ashe [an emerging US-based singer-songwriter], I knew I wanted to go really big on string arrangements, because it’s a real passion of mine. I do a lot of work on my Mellotron; it’s one of my main little arranging devices, and I love the sound of that thing.”

Clampitt has had his studio in L.A. fornearly three years, and he’s grateful that he’s able to work out of such a nicely-sized room:

“I have a baby grand piano in here and a full drum kit, and just everything I could possibly need to make good records without any excuses,” he adds.

Cleaning Up

The conversation turns to oeksound’s soothe2 plugin, which Clampitt explains he uses in pretty broad strokes, mostly with presets across his vocal and string busses.

“It’s been especially helpful during the pandemic when I haven’t been able to get a cellist, for example, into my studio, which is a nice-sounding room,” he shares. “So they’re usually recording in their studio apartments or whatever, which can sound good, but when you’re layering up 17 of those, there can be some little harsh frequencies and I don’t necessarily have the attention span to go in and finesse each part. But being able to put something like soothe on on top of everything to just clean it up a bit is very handy, and gives me a lot of opportunity to experiment.”

Clampitt is not afraid to admit that he’s a big preset guy:

“The sick thing about soothe is, whatever instrument you chuck it on, there’s a preset for it and it’s a great starting point,” he affirms. “I’m just trying to get the song sounding amazing with the fewest steps possible.

“With the album I just did with Ashe, the whole record is full of strings. Usually before I run it through the tape, I have all the strings going to separate buses, and take a bit of a blanket approach. But because we wrote a lot of this record in isolation from each other, with her recording remotely on a lesser quality mic, I was able to use soothe to notch out some of those harsh frequencies on the backing vocal bus really quickly, and it was super helpful.”

As much as he’s a producer, Clampitt really considers himself more of a songwriter - the songwriting element often being the part of the process he cares most about:

“I’m just trying to do what needs to be done for people to be able to hear the lyrics and the melody,” he concludes. “I really make my best music when I’m making an artist happy.”

Insta: @leroyclampitt