When you’re in the mountains you can yell the word “ECHO!” and hear “ECHO Echo echo” come back at you.
When you’re in your closet trying to find a pair of pants you can yell the word “ECHO!” and the only thing you will get back is a confused or concerned look from your spouse!
These are two extremes, but the world around you is a cornucopia of every variation of those extremes beyond even what you can imagine.
As you walk down through your house and out onto your street and into your car you’ve experienced several very different acoustical spaces. When it’s 10 degrees outside and you sit in your car to listen to music, your speakers sound very different than they do when it’s 70 and sunny.
Many of you have sat with an effects processor for your guitar or at a synthesizer twiddling knobs and pushing buttons amazed at the variety of sounds coming into your ears with each change.
The fact of the matter is the sounds you hear every moment of your life are changing drastically from space to space. Don’t believe me? If you have a room with a glass window try this: record your voice in the center of the room with nothing closer than 3 feet to you or the microphone. Now get yourself nice and close to that window with your mic the same distance from you as it was for the first recording. Wow! Sounds awful, right? Maybe it’s just the effect you were looking for.
Some of the most famous sounds in modern recording history were not made inside effects boxes. Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” echo-y drum part was recoded with John Bonham and his drums at one end of the hall and the microphones at the other.
The only rule in recording is: does it sound the way you intended?
Speak along the wall in a square room with no wall hangings. How’s that for a phased delay? Play your guitar in a tight closet with the door closed: a very up close and personal sound.
Listen to the sound in the world around you. There is so much to hear each and every moment!
