The Abbey Road Echo Chamber 

Wow, man. Chris' voice with the room reverb on gave me CHILLS....sounded so good!

Sounds awesome. Gotta try this. When my wife asks me what happened to all the furniture and the rug in the living room, I'll direct her to this video.

I love the idea of visiting iconic recording studios. I do hope you do a video on HansaStudios in Berlin where Bowie, U2, Depeche Mode, etc recorded.

30 years ago I had the privilege of a guided tour of Abbey Road. Unforgettable and a Mecca for all Beatles fans

I was a staff engineer at Lion Share Recording Studios in Los Angeles in the ‘80s. We were very spoiled! lol. LSRS was a 3 room facility and had 3 live chambers and 6 EMT plates, all patchable to any of the control rooms, plus AMS reverbs, Marshall Time Modulator, Publison, Cooper Time Cubes, you name it.

I had a client that owned a massive all brick warehouse (late 1800's). He let me drag my Marshall's in a few times. I never sounded better.

On the one hand it's sounds so antiquated when the engineer talks about a studio at Abbey Road being an air raid shelter... But when the Beatles started using Abbey Road WW2 had only been over 17 years. Now thats ages to my kids... But to me.. Its no time at all... I've got socks that old.. 😉

Macca getting complaints from the neighbors, in his 70s...😂

I do a live mix for our church's RU-vid stream each week - I have two condensers positioned just to capture the room reverberation sound. The reverb from the room completely opens the mix to a feeling of being inside the room.

Love this channel. Where else can you see a guy demonstrate how great room reverb can be by actually setting it up and trying it in a real-world situation, and showing you the results in real-time? Keep it coming, Rick.

The first studio I trained in - "Little Oak Sound" in Grants Pass, Or, back in 1982 was built from the ground up, so they had the luxury of designing their own chamber. Their chamber was dug under the mix position, with a trap door for access. All the walls were purposefully not parallel, so as to get less cancellations, and additional reflections. Very live!

Thank you for wonderful video! Regards from Kyiv, Ukraine!

I was not expecting to get chills when the vocal kicked in. Damn.

I worked at Sound City back in the 70's and we had one live reverb room and a EMT plate. The live reverb sound great in part becasue Sound City was built in the modern factory type building that was prefab concrete walls, so really hard thick walls. It was funny because the live reverb room was never painted or anything and when you'd go in there you'd see tractor tire prints on the wall where it was driven over when build was being built. Our EMT plate was in the same room no other place to put it. The issue was the live reverb room Keith had experimented a lot with the speaker placement, microphone placement, and which mic was used, so once he had it he did want it messed with. There was another engineer who worked occasionally at Sound City and he would go in and change the mic and once even the speaker placement. Keith would come in for a session bring up the reverb and instantly get ticked someone's been screwing with the reverb. The slightest change in that room he could hear it. Capital Records studios in Hollywood supposedly when building it had four of the huge ceramic sewer pipes buried in parking lot of the studio. I don't know if they are still there or in use I think live reverb has it's own organic sound.

Everyday there is excellent content...you're appreciated beyond words Rick ..👍

I remember doing that with a tape recorder as a teenager in my bedroom in the 1960s. I was thrilled to discover that if I recorded at 3¾ ips, then transferred from one track to the other via speaker and mic to get reverb, but did it at 7½ ips, then play back at 3¾, I could double the reverberation time and make my room sound really cavernous!

I was glued to this video for all 8 minutes and 41 seconds. Thank you!

Really interesting video. The thinking it would take to figure out the way to arrange to items in the room to get the reverb just right is amazing.

Chris was a phenomenal artist. Love this.

My buddy had a studio with a cinder block room off the drum room we used for stands and cables. One day he decided to throw a condenser mic in that room while we cut drums, just leaving the door open. It was like instant zeppelin!

Great video! I'm obsessed with heritage reverbs (Chambers, plates). This was a great demo! I LOVE that you took advantage of the squashed camera mic too!! Well done.

Love the demonstration! So interesting

Rick I got to stand in there too, and I had the SAME cool feeling you had. At night they have crazy pink string lights in that Abbey Road Echo room. JUST GREAT stuff. Subscribed to Beato 2 now.

Great video Rick. So many younger people are learning to love real reverb. Way cool to see a guy like you making it happen again.

Tried this speaker / mic reverb setup in the stairwell of a 5-story building one time. The reverb was so good it made everyone feel "tingly"! I've heard that the bg vocals for "Only Living Boy In NY" were recorded with S&G standing inside the reverb tunnel.

Fascinating Rick, keep them coming 👏

I love the band tape on the laptop's cam.

I remember this full interview! Cool, Mr. Rick.

Yes, that’s how we did it in the old day 1974. We placed a speaker in the button floor of a stairwell and a mike on the third floor. A send out and one return. Beautiful. It’s not recommended 4 am a Sunday morning though 😱😜

Rick I just love these videos! More Please!

Incredible!

I did not know about this channel! Subscribed.

Love these insights.

Great choice of a song!!!

Again, thank you Rick with the old school genius... Great pick of the song as well...

Nice demonstration

Awesome content!

07:46 This sound strongly reminds me of my teenage years in the early 70's when local garage bands played at youth facilities around the municipality. I guess that's when I got tinnitus for real.

Interesting video, and the Cornell voice is literally the bomb. Man, I miss his music.

After seeing (and hearing) your homemade echo chamber, I'm instantly reminded of the old Capitol mixes of I Feel Fine and She's a Woman.

When I was in university, I discovered that one of the buildings had a stairwell that was three or four stories tall and all concrete, glass, and steel, that had the most amazing reverb I ever heard. When you banged one of the doors shut, the sound carried on for like 15 seconds minimum. My roommate had a band and I showed this to him. You should have seen his face light up when he realized what I was showing him.

This is wicked cool!

Brilliantly simple

Back in the 70s when I had my home studio, I'd sometimes use the bathroom shower stall as a vocal iso-booth and reverb chamber. Depending on the singer it would sound really good...

Bringin' it all back home.

Very cool rick!

I remember reading an article about how the Beatles played outside in this portico, or garden like area with miniature Roman and Greek like columns everywhere, and that's the perfect reverberations they were wanting for that song. I believe they even did a "music video" of them around this area, again music video wasn't a thing then, but they for sure was mimicking playing and singing walking around this area

I remember doing a very simple mono production with acoustic guitar and vocal and using a dirty smelling bathroom as a reverb chamber.. all done with speaker and mic in oposite ends of the room. It still amazes me how real and warm it sounded.

Cool stuff seeing how the Beatles must have made some of their great music!

Cam mic caught the verb well. Nice geek vid Rick!

Love the RT-3 pedals in the corner. They are really big.

That was fun!

Great, Rick. I did sessions at a studio outside Bloomington, IN during the Seventies that had run cables outside to a small cave that served as a reverb chamber. Between takes I could hear birds tweeting!

Very cool.

So cool...

I have my speakers at the end of our long kitchen that's got a tiled floor, I always wondered why the stuff I listen to sounds best in there....

I used to do this in the early 90s at an apartment complex I lived in on occasions when I had my gear there for a couple days instead of at the practice room or a gig. I would wake up well after everyone else had gone to work, so I would put a Marshall cab on the bottom floor, and a microphone on the top (3rd) floor and record my "reverb" that way. The other cab was in the bathtub in my apartment, usually with some blankets and stuff around to try to tighten up the sound. The neighbors never knew because I would pull in all the gear before about 5pm when they started getting home. Worked great, so we started doing stuff like this wherever we were at the time. There was always a spare room, stairwell or whatever nearby to experiment with. I wish we would have had the tech to capture impulse responses back then.

This is some great stuff......

Exelent recording knowledge. I agree...

This is novel for you, if I'm not mistaken; Love the setting up real-time. Makes a great tutorial for aspiring recording people.

Rick Beato is the Linus Sebastian of music. I love this content!!!

I'd love to watch a "Part 2" of this topic. Once the reverb tracks are recorded, do you just mix them in as individual tracks, or bus them into one?

So cool

Pretty sure Bonzo used to record his tracks in a stairwell somewhere. Sounds great with the natural acoustics 🤘

The cup under the stairs in studio 2 contained the rarest of Beatles guitars, the secret, mad Bartell Fretless

The Beatles used to use the reverb chamber to have an illicit smoke. Once, they were jolted by a Blast from the reverb send from another session...

The basement of one of the venues I mix at has a really reverberant basement, and I've often thought about trying to set it up as a chamber. however it's also a reasonably high traffic area for the bands/crew.... one day i'll do it though, even with some multi tracks just to see!

I got this same tour, (I think it was from the same gentleman), in 2008-ish when doing a live recording at Abbey Road. I was there doing monitors for PATD for a "Live from Abbey Road" session. My talkback mic/voice actually made it onto the recording. So. Technically. I was recorded in Abbey Road.. There aren't many places I can walk around in complete awe, to the point where it was hard to focus on my job that day. Love the channel Rick.

Cool to see the real room, I use the Waves Abbey Road plugin for glue in my DAW!

Burden in My Hand is the best Soundgarden song IMO. Those vocals. God status.

Wow!

Can some speak to the differences, if any between the old school way of getting that cool reverb effect and the plug in versions? Has anyone done any videos on this? Love the video btw. I look forward to trying this.

You made me think about adding a little saturation to my 'fake' reverb when I heard the room recording in isolation. On rock it sounds really cool. Why is retro so good!?

Got you both sides Rick.

My first studio in Dallas had an 4X8 3/4" steel plate hanging in a closet in our where house.

I trained as an audio engineer back in the 1990s and never did it for anything other than personal hobby. I didn't want to work in the industry. So all my recordings and endeavours have been messing around at home. I've always been a fan of using stairways for effects. You don't tend to get a roomy or boomy type of sound but it can often add a kind of distance where you can feel the musician or instrument is some distance away. I've yet to try messing around with sticking a speaker in the bathtub to see what I can get out of that. There's lots you can try.

They were still using natural reverb rooms in Nashville 20 years ago. I don’t know if they still are.

I'd like to hear this demo done with the speaker 8 feet towards the center, turned to face the corner to the right of the end door/window, and the mic turned round to one of the corners currently behind it. This would lengthen the time and get rid of the direct signal going straight into the mic. Perhaps you could compare the results between both methods. Another option would be to use a mic with selectable omni, cardioid and bidirectional patterns available.

The world now needs a Rick Beato / Anthony Marinelli collab!

I did this occasionally in ‘89-‘94, our studio had a bathroom with old tiles and concrete floor and ceiling. Still, I’d use two mic’s, in XY, AB or sometimes M/S. Also a tape machine as a pre-delay, and the speaker turned backwards or inside one of the stalls. Did all this crap, and still had a 480, a RMX-16, an H3000 and two stereo-modded EMT plates for reverbs. I was 21, and didn’t know what “spoiled” would mean in the coming retro-future…😅

I use the Waves/Abbey Road echo chamber plugin as my go-to reverb. I cannot recommend it enough. And once you get into EQ-ing the reverb...

what a sound, you could easy do a Led Zep type song. WOW and WOOH. Nice one, Rick and Crew

Don't sweat it Rick, I sub to both channels.

great demo, but maybe you could do a second on eq-ing that room as the highs where distorting badly. obviously standing waves in the 4k - 10k range.

I still saw that on your Chanel.

Kickass

⚓️ RICK!!! 🎶

como me gustan estos videitos ricardo

My 8 track studio was in a house that had a bomb shelter. Perfect reverb chamber.

I was in that room!

Rick, shoulda turned that speaker toward the wall between the windows for a little more depth! This reminds me of every time I set up my guitar rig in a high school gym in the '70s. It sounded really cool until it filled up with sound-absorbing teenagers!

🎸🎵

The only 'problem' is once you record that amount of reverb onto the bed tracks, you can't take it off later. The digital-age producers record everything dry and add the reverb after. It all depends on your taste.

I bought a Keeley Abbey Chamber Verb and would like to know the settings of the pedal to recreate the chamber as realistic as possible. Any thoughts?

great, would love to know why there are tubes, cylinders, if there's some lost acoustic art there

Fun video! Rick, it seems that you didn't pay attention to the Abbey Road echo chamber process. They faced the speaker into the corner. Did you try this, and if so, was the result distasteful?

A large garage works great for this. I've done it at my house, it turned out phenomenal.

I believe The Doors literally used a bathroom to record some parts of LA Woman, and it sounds great, a brilliant record.

nice concert sound imitation

If I knew Paul McCartney was playing drums next door, I'd get out my launch chair, grab a beer and just chill out and listen. However, I'm not a 70 year old pensioner so my idea of a good time is a bit different.