Motown Attic Reverb Chamber

Would not slap a motown label on every song his producers offered.

Motown attic reverb chamber.

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. True to his commitment to quality berry gordy jr. The echo chamber before the age of synthesizers and computer aided recording motown engineers created special sound effects by ingenious means. 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.

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. In addition to the echo chamber motown also had an emt 140 plate reverb and an echoplex tape delay unit they d use from time to time. 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. 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.

Another studio used the bathroom. Apparently the house wasn t symmetrical so roof and the walls slanted in different ways that just made a great sound. Will kurk and joe shadid take a trip to rax trax recording studios to explore the musical must haves of the beloved moto. What makes motown sound like motown.

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. Also the motown house in detroit had an attic that was used as the reverb chamber. 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 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.