Motown Attic Reverb Chamber

What makes motown sound like motown.

Motown attic reverb chamber.

Hitsville s attic chamber was crude and not at all designed with acoustical perfection in mind but its ambience had a certain character that came to shape the iconic motown sound. Will kurk and joe shadid take a trip to rax trax recording studios to explore the musical must haves of the beloved moto. Would not slap a motown label on every song his producers offered. The motown sound owes some of its uniqueness to the reverb effect created by pumping tracks through the company s echo chamber in the days before computers and synthesizers.

In our attempt at recreating the motown sound we used the audio ease altiverb reverb plugin universal audio s digital emulation of the emt 140 and a fulltone tube tape echo. A rich piece of motown s history is relived when visitors clap and sing into motown s innovative echo chamber a hole cut in the ceiling and experience early reverb. True to his commitment to quality berry gordy jr. This wasn t a traditional reverb chamber it wasn t controlled from the board adjusted by positioning mics to pick up the desired amount of reverb.

At elliot hall of music on purdue s campus they have a whole bunch of speakers erratically hanging in the space above the back of the stage that used to be for a reverb chamber. The echo chamber before the age of synthesizers and computer aided recording motown engineers created special sound effects by ingenious means. Key to the sound of countless motown hits was the iconic reverb of hitsville s makeshift echo chamber located in the attic of the house. They d put a speaker and a mic in the chosen space to get the sound of the send bouncing around.

The hitsville chamber had a distinctive and strong individuality to its sound quality with flutter echos from the parallel walls and a rather short reverb time. The bottom line is that the resulting chamber which had a smooth natural quality with a somewhat longer reverb time was not as popular as the original chamber in the hitsville attic. Apparently the house wasn t symmetrical so roof and the walls slanted in different ways that just made a great sound. Motown records hitsville usa complex is rumored to have used a hole in the ceiling as a jerry rigged echo chamber.

Another studio used the bathroom.