RIP Brian Wilson. This has been a very bad week for music legends. And it's only Wednesday.

Bob did you ever work with Sly?

I stand corrected as to the sanctioning of UA's IRs.

But I still wonder if a more extensive library could be built (different mics, different positioning, etc.)

...Before its too late.

Well, this is not a strong argument in favor of the uniqueness of the chamber, then, IMO. It seems to say that, in an alternate timeline, some other slightly different chamber could have wormed its way into our consciousness with equal ease.

OK not "easily" obtained. And no doubt the builders knew what they were doing and they did a good job. Which is to say they did a good job considering they were stuck using that basement, that attic, that stairwell.

I think I will add to my Lottery list the idea of establishing a "chamber farm". Somewhere out in the country, away from ambient sounds with buildings designed and constructed for the express purpose of being reverb chambers. Some could be laser-modeled after existing "famous" chambers, others could be designed by professional acousticians using sophisticated CAD systems or whatever.


I could have a fully-automated system that would take your credit card, play your sounds into the chamber, record it and send it back to you. No humans would be needed, maybe a night watchman to make sure nobody steals the mics. It would be kind of spooky walking around at night hearing all these building reverberate with different kinds of sounds and music.

True. And in fact other reverb types have also become part of our DNA. Halls, rooms, etc.

Someone did this, though it was more of an effect than a usable space. It was a large silo. I sent them a few mixes and it was fun to get them back knowing what it had just gone through, but by no means practical, just a gag.

I think there may also be companies that will feed your tracks through certain prestigious gear. I know that these services did exist but can't say if they still do. I liked the idea. Plugins are getting so good, and inexpensive, that it's becoming a moot point.

We used to do this, in a sense, 20-25 years ago. When we needed to remix or edit a track but weren't at the main studio, we'd screen share with the computer that was connected to the Lex 960L (most commonly), send it the dry track, route it out to the verb and record the wet signal, then bring that back to the other location. This would be much easier to do today with all the streaming plugins.

yes I referenced that earlier, it is what gave me the idea. A silo or natural gas tank is, as you say a gag because it's so extreme and not really appropriate for a lot of material. OTOH, its very unusualness is probably what inspired someone to go to the trouble.

I have my kitchen wired up for a chamber at my house. It's kind of cool but I doubt the world will be signing up to have me reamp their tracks through my kitchen when they all have their own kitchen.

But a selection of "recreations" of famous chambers (assuming the famous chambers are lost forever) and also some newfangled 'high-tech' chambers with interesting or unusual properties, might be more useful.

My economic model would be those Disklavier places where you send them a MIDI file and they send you back an acoustic piano track with a selection of mics. I don't know for a fact that those places are automated, but except for tuning the piano, they certainly could be.

I've wondered about that too always assuming that there's an assistant engineer type manually handling the recordings, cuz automating could be even trickier. We're living in interesting times that these are even options.

No although I met him a few times. While I worked for Quicksilver Messinger Service, I worked with Greg Errico who had been Sly's incredible drummer.

Errico played briefly with Weather Report, and Zawinul said Greg played Boogie Woogie Waltz better than any drummer the band ever had.

Wow I loved Nicky Hopkins! My favorite piano style. Session Man by the Kinks was such a great tune lol!….

From what I recall, one of those "silo" guys in Denmark or wherever was fully automated.

I worked on something where we sent some MIDI piano parts out to a Disklavier guy and we got back 3 pairs of mics in different standard configurations to choose from. I know they had humans doing it, as they also used the studio and the piano for their own music and so on.

But if 'remote' was your only business, you could theoretically have set and forget mic setups and levels and so on. If there was assistant engineer guy, he would no doubt be following a set of formulaic instructions anyway. Then the software just has to send the MIDI to the piano, upload the files and email the client the link.

Taking the money by credit card would probably be harder to program, but there are already services that do that for you,

I'm happy to see you're still lurking around these internet parts, Bob! Your post archive is a treasure trove of information.

A gift that keeps on giving lol! The kids haven’t chased him off…. I do hope to get a chance to send him a project someday….
Bucket list…