Create your Own Echo chamber!

Our own surroundings sometimes get overlooked when we are making music in our bedroom. Because we don't have a professional studio, we don't think that our other rooms could be of use to us.

Well guess what, there just might be a few places you can use in your home for getting a distinctive sound in your tracks.

Take reverb for instance. I’ve written a fair amount about reverb – see my Top Ten Reverb Tricks here - and I’ve experimented with loads of digital reverb processors.

But sometimes you get lost in all the digitalness(not a word I think) and you never become aware of your surroundings.

Are you housing an echo chamber?

echo well Do you guys live in a weird sounding loft in Manhattan?

Do you have a really echo-y(and unsafe) elevator shaft you think could sound cool on a recording?

Does your voice sound amazing in the shower because of the tiles?

Is there a specific place in your house that sounds really good?

USE IT!

The old echo chambers of yesteryear were just that, natural reverb chambers. Sure, they were calibrated and built to reverberated perfection, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stumble upon a cool sounding room somewhere.

I read an article about this producer/engineer in TapeOp #69. Christina Files told us in this article that she used the elevator shaft in their loft for natural reverb. That prompted me to wonder how many of our day to day surroundings we can use to our audio advantage.

A friend of mine recorded a band in a house that had a long stairwell. After listening to how cool the stairwell sounded he decided to use it as an echo chamber. There are definitely possibilities when it comes to using your surroundings.

create your echo chamber

Recording natural reverb is easy, we just need a few long cables and a little routing techniques and we're good to go.

Buy some long cables.

Position your microphone where your preferred room sounds the best.

Position your monitors in the same room.

You can even try putting each monitor in an adjacent room for experimentation.
Experiment. Think of the room as an instrument.
Position the microphones correctly, just like any other recording.

Say you want to add your shower reverb to your vocal track. Then you just have to send your vocal track to your monitors that you've positioned in your bathroom. Hit record on your vocal mic that you've put up there and record the sound of your bathroom.

Voila! Instant shower 'verb!

Fun & Experimentation

It’s not only to get great sounding or weird sounding echo-y tracks, it’s also for fun and experimentation. Maybe you can’t use it the way you want to, but maybe it adds to the production.

I'm sure if you take a walk around your apartment, or think about your friend's places, there might be a hidden echo chamber of sorts lurking somewhere.

Once in a while, forget about the need for a perfectly treated and acoustically sealed studios and look around your environment. Resources and creativity are found in the most unusual places. Maybe this time you'll find it in your bathroom.

When done with your echo chamber work, check back to the mixing page

For more recording tips, check out the recording page

If you want to EQ those vocals you added reverb to, check out these tips