PMC and Andrew Scheps go reverb crazy in Scotland
PMC is pushing reverb to the limit at Inchindown oil tanks. Located in the Scottish Highlands, the Inchindown oil storage tanks – holders of the world record for the longest reverberation in a man-made structure – had been on Grammy Award winning producer Andrew Scheps’ (Adele, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica) radar for some time. When he learned that a friend was planning to record in the tanks, he immediately volunteered to join the mission, bringing along a pair of PMC6 studio monitors for the ride.
Located north of Inverness and concealed inside a hill on private land, the tanks were commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1938 amid growing concerns about Germany’s armed forces. The resulting six tanks, 237m long by 9m wide by 13m high, have a 32-million-gallon capacity between them. The Guinness World Record was set there in 2012 by Salford University acoustic engineer Professor Trevor Cox, who recorded the reverb from a pistol shot that ended after an astonishing 112 seconds.
“It doesn’t matter how many photos you see, it’s impossible to get the scale and perspective of the place,” says Scheps. “The only access into the nearest tank is down a tube where the oil used to come in and out. You lie on what’s literally a giant pizza peel and get shoved down the tube with your arms above your head because it’s so narrow, and all your gear has to fit through as well.”
For long-term PMC user, Scheps, this meant a stripped-down kit based around a pair of PMC6s for playback, a 7.0.4 immersive array of microphones and a laptop to be used for re-playing music, including tracks from Scheps’ own Tonequake Records label. The compact footprint of the PMC6s wasn’t the only reason Scheps chose this model; they also needed enough power to create an impact in the enormous space. “There are moments in the music when most other speakers that would fit down the tube would struggle to reproduce big, loud, low-end tones,” he explains. “My Dolby Atmos room, Punkerpad UK, is entirely PMC, so the voicing of them makes sense to me – I didn’t have to worry about what it was going to sound like.”
The music included a track that Scheps produced, House in the Woods by Low Roar, a band signed to his label. “It’s very atmospheric and sad, and I played it through the speakers and recorded the reverb on it,” he explains. “It’s hard to describe how insane it is. We played other tracks that some producers and artists had sent me, and we also recorded impulse responses. These frequency sweeps go from 20Hz-20kHz, so you need speakers that can reproduce in that range at a decent volume and keep the frequency responses close to flat.”
Despite the exhilaration of recording in such a unique environment, Scheps doesn’t hold back on the downsides of being in the tanks for seven hours. “Once inside, everything about it is horrible: it’s about 8°C and pitch dark, and there’s 10cm of sludge underfoot – water mixed with oil that’s seeped back out of the concrete. But that’s what makes the reverb so amazing, because all the gaps in the concrete are filled in with oil; it’s almost completely smooth.”
Scheps’ immersive setup in his mix room at home comprises PMC MB3 XBD-A main monitors and PMC wafer2s in a 9.1.4 configuration. And, while he’s full of praise about the unstinting support he gets from the company, he was worried that borrowing a pair of PMC6s to take into the tanks might be a request too far.
“I told PMC’s Phil Millross that they were going to get covered in oil because everything is just so dirty down there, but he told me it would be fine,” he recalls. “I was still terrified about bringing the PMC6s, but we took incredibly good care of them and they were pretty much the only clean thing when we were done.” Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true of the hundreds of metres of cabling needed to reach the speakers and microphones, all of which had to be discarded afterwards.
Scheps is now considering the Inchindown recordings as part of an ongoing project to visit other highly reverberant venues around the world, clearly relishing what was accomplished in Scotland.