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I've never used a bathroom or staircase for a reverb chamber but plan on it.

Is this the basic process?
Place a mono full range speaker on a stand in a bathroom and mic the feed?
What choice of mic is best? (omni or?)

Any suggestions or tips, placement, mic, location?

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Comments

MadMax Mon, 11/03/2014 - 19:38

I track the bathroom a couple of different ways....

Directly;
Set up musician in tracking room, mic accordingly
Set up stereo Blumlein in one of 4 previously mapped spots
Close control room door, open doors from tracking room all the way to the bathroom (3 doors including bathroom door)

Distance from furthest wall in the tracking room to the furthest wall in the bathroom; 30+56+30=~116 feet
At ~1 ft per millisecond, that works out to ~116mS delay with a natural RT60 of ~2.5 seconds

Indirectly;
As a reverb chamber
Set up stereo Blumlein in one of 4 previously mapped spots
Put a mono speaker in the closed bathroom, aimed to hit as many walls as possible before getting to the microphone.

Bathroom dimensions: 7x15x8
With the RT60 @ ~2.5 seconds, it's a got a bit of a sweet little slapback...

anonymous Tue, 11/04/2014 - 02:06

If memory serves correct, I think Led Zep used this same type of principle with Bonzo's drums on When The Levey Breaks. Not that they used a bathroom echo, but they did use an alternate space in which to grab a sound that was bigger... I'm thinking it was an elevator shaft, or staircase, or something similar.

I might be wrong on the Zep thing... but I know that engineers have used the technique of taking existing tracks and then sending the signal(s) to alternate / natural spaces for reverb/echo, and then miking the space, many times throughout history.