Motown Attic Reverb Chamber

Motown records hitsville usa complex is rumored to have used a hole in the ceiling as a jerry rigged echo chamber.

Motown attic reverb chamber. What makes motown sound like motown. 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. The echo chamber before the age of synthesizers and computer aided recording motown engineers created special sound effects by ingenious means. 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.

True to his commitment to quality berry gordy jr. Another studio used the bathroom. Also the motown house in detroit had an attic that was used as the reverb chamber. Would not slap a motown label on every song his producers offered.

They d put a speaker and a mic in the chosen space to get the sound of the send bouncing around. 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. 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. 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. 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. Motown used the attic. 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.

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.