Laramie, WY (November 12, 2025)—Veteran engineer, mixer, producer and musician Jim Roberts and his wife and business partner, Marie, have launched a new studio set on 35 acres with expansive views of the mountains and herds of roaming pronghorn.
The couple’s new private music production facility, Timber Canyon Studios, is in the Laramie Mountains of southeastern Wyoming. The studio’s control room is centered around a Solid State Logic Origin 32-channel analogue mixing console. An SSL UF8 8-fader DAW controller resides in the console’s center section with UF1 DAW controller on a rolling cart. The console sidecar houses SSL’s The Bus+ and Fusion processors plus a 500 series rack with two 611DYN modules.
The couple, who have known each other since high school, 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 in Colorado, they began planning a destination studio that could similarly attract major artists to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The 2,100-square-foot recording studio was designed by renowned acoustician Sam Berkow and incorporates windows throughout the spacious tracking space and control room.
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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 analog 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.”
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At Timber Canyon, he continues, “I wanted to mix analog and do the recall in Pro Tools, and I wanted to have a tracking studio.” Having worked on various SSL analog 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 flavor you want on a board—SSL’s ‘242’ black knob design.”
