recording | reverberance by eon sinclair
recording studios reverb shiny surfaces small spaces voices
singing in the rain re-imagining the domestic bathroom as a private music hall and recording space
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As I come to the end of singing the hook to young Michael Rault’s vintage-feeling tune ‘I Wanna Love You’ 1 and step out of the tub, I try to recall the first time I ever sang in the shower. The earliest would no doubt have been when I was a tot, old enough to speak and be in the tub, but a shade young to be there on my own. So while my parents bathed me, they would sing various songs, children’s, traditional, popular, and I would sing with them when the words and melodies were within reach. As children, many of us the world over are carefree enough to sing and shout as it relates to the activity or game of the moment, no matter how public the forum. When entering adolescence however, the idea of singing publicly fades and becomes the explicit domain of only those willing to share their abilities in a wider arena. For the rest of us, the bathroom becomes our intimate music hall, the daily site of our live-and-direct lead vocal performance. The angle of every wall, the placement of the tub, the shape and size of the room, the ceiling height and the backsplash all influence the ways in which a given ear will interpret sound in a bathroom. As one of the smallest rooms in most dwellings, reflective surfaces such as the tiled walls and floors are typically situated close together. The reverberation that results from such surfaces can mimic the reverbs heard in various musical recordings of the early 1950s and ‘60s. This reverb-based sound became a popular tool for producers and recording engineers after its proven early success on songs such as Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. These tunes sparked a revolution in how producers approached recording. Reverb on the vocals was a good thing and, listening to songs from the Golden Era and beyond, the vast majority of successful singles used this technique. 2 The sound was so desirable that engineers and producers continued to experiment with recording sounds in bathrooms, from KISS to Weird Al Yankovich. Essentially, the formative years of the popular music industry were dominated by recordings that used vocal reverb, so it isn’t far-fetched to think that we unconsciously make an association between the reverberant trail-off we create singing in the shower with the familiar reverbs found in songs that mainstream western culture holds as classic. With this in mind, the privacy of a bathroom, the freedom to do things that would take much coaxing on the other side of the door and the personal exercise of singing with bathroom reverb can influence how we think our vocal qualities and abilities sound — most shower singers feel that their voices are a lot better with a backscratcher as a microphone in a private bath than using a Neumann U-57 in studio or onstage.
Michael Rault, ‘I Want To Love You’
Elvis Presley,‘Heartbreak Hotel’ Elvis Presley recording:
from www.virginmedia.com/music/pic- tures/toptens/defining-moments-rock.php
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