Veteran engineer, mixer, producer and musician Jim Roberts and his wife and business partner, Marie, have launched their new music production facility, Timber Canyon Studios, in the Laramie Mountains of southeast Wyoming, centred on a 32-channel Solid State Logic Origin analogue mixing console.
The couple have known each other since high school, and lived and worked in New York for 46 years before relocating their studio to Colorado in 2012. Several years ago, inspired in part by the famed Caribou Ranch, they began planning a destination studio that could similarly attract major artists to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The 2,100sq-ft recording studio, designed by acoustician Sam Berkow, incorporates windows throughout the spacious tracking space and control room that offer expansive views of the mountains and herds of pronghorn that roam the 35-acre property.
Jim Roberts, whose credits include work with Kansas, Steve Walsh, John Entwistle and Leslie West among others, jumped at the chance to replace his SSL Matrix with the new Origin console. ‘I work in the hybrid world, but I come from an analogue world, and it felt very much like an SSL 4000. It was the right time, right price point, right feature set and right kind of routing, with an eye towards the hybrid workflow that I enjoy now.
‘[At Timber Canyon] I wanted to mix analogue and do the recall in Pro Tools, and I wanted to have a tracking studio.’
Having worked on various SSL analogue desks over the years, he says: ‘I still think there’s tremendous value when you’re tracking to be able to put your hands on everything at once, including the headphone mixes and the EQ – and Origin has the EQ flavour you want on a board – SSL’s 242 black knob design.
‘The Origin’s centre section is configurable, so I chose to put a UF8 8-fader DAW controller in the centre section, directly above the analogue stereo group faders. That’s brilliant, because you’re right in the sweet spot and you can control both legs of the journey, analogue and digital. And I’ve got the UF1 DAW controller on a rolling cart, right where I would once have had the tape machine auto locator, off to my right hand. With the integrated UF8 and UF1 directly on hand, I really don’t feel the need for a fully automated console. Then I have The Bus+ and the Fusion in the left sidecar of the console with a 500 series ‘lunch box’ with two 611DYN modules.
‘Taking away all those physical switches that you had on the older SSL consoles, all those points of failure, and using logic and a digital matrix to control the analogue routing is brilliant and is also infinite in terms of how you can group things and bus things,’ he adds. ‘You can change up your workflow. The number of possible permutations far exceeds anything that I currently do, but it’s very reassuring knowing the console will allow me to take my workflow in any direction I like.’
He also appreciates SSL maintaining a ‘vintage feel’ and retaining SSL’s console design legacy with the Origin. ‘The Unity gain button on each channel, on both sets of faders, makes it easier to break out stems from Pro Tools. A quick button push and everything’s at 0dB, and you can do that across 64 faders if you want to. To me, that shows that they’re paying attention to modern workflows,’ he says.
The past three years, building the studio, a home and accommodation for two or three visitors, has been hard work. ‘But this was the ultimate vision, where we had no physical boundaries,’ he says. ‘Sam sent his proposal, and we looked at each other and said, “Let’s make this investment”. Because, A, we want to get it right and, B, it’s going to bring an air of legitimacy to the space.’
Laramie is well located for anyone travelling to the region, Roberts notes, with Denver Airport a two-hour drive away or a short hop from Laramie’s regional airport. ‘We’re just a few miles from the University of Wyoming and its music department, which was another reason why we picked this location. It’s a big music town, with lots of live venues. There’s plenty of music going on nearby, let alone regionally or nationally.’
Meanwhile, following the facility’s soft open in September, Roberts and a group of friends are now producing a third full-length record of the band they put together during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘That was just a little passion project. We’re not going to tour or gig. I also have a second personal project with some friends of mine from around the country. We record cover tunes, and I license them. We put the songs out just for fun; it’s music therapy, which we probably all need.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com