A Room of No Fixed Height

I have always been intrigued by the idea of a natural echo chamber since I first heard a long echo in a tall stairwell. While I’ve had the pleasure of working at Blackbird Studio a few times over the years, I sadly never got a chance to use the famous “moving ceiling” chamber in Studio A; as such, I was intrigued by the new BB Chamber A plugin.

After playing around with the plugin for a few minutes, I quickly realized there must be more than impulse responses, convolution and circuit modeling here based simply on the configurable moving ceiling alone.

[See interview with KIT Plugin CEO Matt Kleinman below for more tech details]

BB Chamber A

The plugin GUI offers a photorealistic window into the Chamber, along with a blue graph representing the height of the movable ceiling. In the Chamber, you can see the current microphone and speaker selection. As a bonus, when you choose ceiling-mounted microphones, they move up and down in the picture when adjusting the ceiling height control, just as they would in real life.

Additional touches include a collection of I/O meters and nicely “well-worn” knobs for the integrated channel strip with a preamp and EQ modeled on the original controls from the Neve console in Studio A, plus a single knob compressor.

Options and Choices

Many options are presented for tweaking your sound, but they all represent John McBride’s (Blackbird Studio founder) approach to Chamber A. This includes the aforementioned mic preamp and EQ, which are modeled on the channels on John’s desk used for the chamber returns.

The fun part comes when you start choosing your microphones from an (AEA) R88 stereo ribbon mic, an (AKG) C24 stereo condenser or a spaced pair of (AKG) C414 condenser mics. Next, you get to pick their location (floor stand or ceiling mount), and, of course, you also control the ceiling height. This is like a combined size and decay control, and while it doesn’t cover an extreme range, I found it very useful in practice—especially when you consider most chambers are wholly fixed in size.

Inputs, Filters, EQ and Compression

The channel strip starts with an input slider. Boosting the input can affect (in a good way) the saturation and compression while the corresponding output slider is ‘clean’ gain. I enjoyed driving the input hotter because it interacts with the saturation and compression in both subtle and extreme ways.

There are two sets of high and low-pass filters—one pre and one post processing. You choose which one is visible in the UI, but all four can be turned on simultaneously. The pre filters are handy for their affect on saturation. Speaking of saturation, it is only one control, but it’s quite nice.

The single knob compression was most impressive, and I believe I liked it because it is an amalgamation of many of my all-time favorites, according to CEO Matt Kleinman. It also features a “hidden” ducking mode (press the duck), which can be handy for vocals or leads as it moves the reverb out of the way momentarily.

Finally, the four-band “Neve” EQ pairs quite well sonically with the chamber and has more than enough power for most applications.

At the Source

Finally, you have the Source controls that determine the type of speaker/amp used in the chamber. There is also the option for Direct, which simply removes any ‘color’ that would come from either speaker configuration.

Final controls include a pre-delay of up to 100ms that covers typical applications. Of course, you can insert a delay in front of this plugin and add as much pre-delay as you like if 100ms isn’t enough. Finally, there is a mix (balance/blend) control for the wet/dry effect if using the plugin as an insert.

“Chamber Music”

In real life and in the plugin, the sound field of the Blackbird Chamber may be a bit more sonically narrow than other chambers due to its more vertical orientation. Overall, I find that it imparts what could be considered a more vintage vibe. But with any decent stereo widener in line, you can easily get a wider-sounding chamber if need be.

The chamber sounded great on most sources I tried it on, and when used on drums, it gets a little splashy, almost a spring reverb quality (but not quite), which I do not object to in any way.

Wrap Up

The KIT Plugins BB Chamber A not only models a unique reverb chamber, but this plugin presents a new approach to capturing acoustic spaces and is poised to be an instant classic.

Price: $149

More From: kitplugins.com

Interview with Matthew Kleinman, KIT Plugins CEO

By Giles Reaves

How would you describe the tech used with Blackbird Chambers A? I’m guessing you’re not using simple convolution here because you have the continuously moving ceiling, which could not come from a simple IR or convolution process.

The best way to describe it is we replaced the convolution engine with an artificially intelligent engine. We feed data similar to what you use in a convolution engine, such as sound recordings and impulse responses. But we also feed it things like room geometry. That was less important for this particular project, but some of the other spaces we’re working on for the future will have more of the room geometry aspect to them.

So, we feed the AI all that data. Then, it processes and normalizes that data into numbers we can understand and better manipulate than just an audio file, all with increased accuracy. That’s how we get an active moving ceiling.

Under the hood in the plugin, there are no audio files or impulse responses; it’s basically an unfathomably complicated algorithmic reverb because it is just using math, but it is way more complex than any algorithmic reverb can be—if that makes sense.

Why did you choose to use AI?

It is a fact that if we go at this type of design procedurally, we are predisposed to our knowledge. I’ve been an audio engineer for so long that there are things I would never even dream of trying to do to create a reverb, but AI doesn’t know not to do them.

So, with enough power, AI can achieve it in a way that we would think is either wrong or even impossible. I’ve found that many times when you look under the hood and see what AI is doing, you say, “How does that even work?” But the AI found a different path!

Is it safe to say you plan to add more features to this plugin in updates over time?

In the short term, we are working on a few new features that will be in a Studio D plugin (spoiler), and we’ll roll those back into Studio A. It will be a free upgrade, of course. There will just be a few little changes to make it feel more usable and a few more features.

Thanks, Matthew; it’s a great plugin! I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with next.

Thanks Giles. We are always listening to our audience. We get emails from people asking for features, and if we agree and get enough of them, we strive to cater to our audience. If they want to see something, it’s in our interest to try and give them what they want.

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