Concrete Reverberations: An Engineer on Recording Inside a Grain Silo
The story reaches back to a conversation about reverb times in a Brunswick share house, the kind of place where a touring bassist might end up crashing for a week between shows at The Tote and a slot at Howler. From there, the engineer eventually found himself standing inside a decommissioned grain silo somewhere on the Victorian wheat belt, holding a pair of ribbon microphones and listening to a single snare drum linger for almost eight seconds.
This is not a thought experiment. Across regional Australia, concrete grain silos stand as quiet monuments to the country’s agricultural backbone, and over the last few years a small number of engineers and artists have started treating them as recording spaces. The engineer at the centre of this project, who prefers to keep the exact location vague, spent an afternoon talking through how the room shaped the music, what it asked of the band, and why it produced results a polished inner-city studio could not have matched.
How a Regional Silo Became a Studio
The pitch came from a friend managing a property near the New South Wales–Victoria border, somewhere off the Henty Highway. The structure had been emptied of grain years earlier but the concrete cylinder remained, vertical and intact, roughly eighteen metres across and nearly thirty tall. The engineer agreed to spend three days there with a four-piece, capturing material that had been sketched in rehearsal rooms in Newtown and Fitzroy but never fully realised.
What made the location workable was a combination of practicality and stubbornness. The team hired a generator, ran long XLR cables down a borrowed staircase, and slept in swags on the concrete apron outside. They were careful not to romanticise the place. The silo had bats, dust, and a faint smell of old grain that lingered between takes, and anything that did not need to be there stayed in the van.
The band arrived slightly sceptical and left genuinely altered. Playing in that volume of air changes posture, breath support, and the way musicians react to one another. It is closer to a cathedral than a club, and it forces a kind of honesty that small rooms tend to smooth over.
The Acoustics of Cylindrical Concrete
The acoustic behaviour of a tall concrete cylinder is not subtle. Sound radiates outwards, hits the curved walls, and focuses back toward the centre, producing dense clusters of reflections that arrive in unpredictable groupings. A standard recording room is built to scatter and absorb. A silo does the opposite, and that is precisely what drew the engineer to it.
| Space | Geometry | Reverb Character | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional studio | Soft, rectangular, treated | Controlled, balanced | Commercial release, overdubs |
| Rehearsal room | Variable, often live | Boomy, uneven | Pre-production |
| Grain silo | Tall concrete cylinder | Long, dense, focused | Acoustic capture, experimentation |
| Church or hall | High ceilings, hard surfaces | Long, smooth decay | Strings, choir, ambient |
Reverb tails in the silo ranged from roughly four to twelve seconds depending on the weather. A single handclap produced a wash of return that felt almost orchestral. By contrast, the rehearsal room where the band normally works in Brunswick has a muddy, short decay of around 0.8 seconds, which is fine for writing songs but unflattering to anything that relies on harmonic shimmer.
For the engineer, the silo offered something he could not dial in with a convolution plugin. Real spaces retain memory. They record every noise, including the soft thump of someone shifting weight, the click of a guitar strap, and the breath before a verse. Those sounds become part of the performance, even when they sit far below the main signal.
Microphones, Baffles, and the Sound of Air
Capturing the room required a rethink of standard technique. Close mics still mattered, especially on the drum kit, but the engineer supplemented them with a stereo array hung roughly four metres above the floor, pointed straight up to catch the descending ceiling reflections. A second pair sat near the walls, recording the lateral bloom that gave the silo its characteristic density.
He also used portable acoustic baffles borrowed from a friend who works in film post-production. These sat behind the louder instruments to keep the initial transient from washing the rest of the kit into mud. Without them, the cymbals would have smeared every other element. With them, the band could play at conversational volume and still feel the room respond.
The weather played its own role. A dry day meant more high-end shimmer; a damp morning pulled the top down and added weight to the lower mids. The engineer scheduled the most delicate passages for late afternoon, when the temperature inside had stabilised and the wind off the paddocks had settled.
What the Tapes Revealed About the Room
Once the sessions were wrapped and the gear packed, the engineer took the recordings back to his workshop in Collingwood and began editing. He had expected to rely heavily on the close mics and treat the room mics as flavour. In practice, the opposite happened. The room mics carried the performances, and the close mics filled in the details.
Tracks that had felt tentative in the silo came alive once the engineer trimmed the front of each take and let the natural reverb ride. Some passages needed almost no processing at all, which is rare for any record made outside a purpose-built room. The engineer likens the experience to working with a temperamental but brilliant musician. You do not flatten their personality, you simply listen harder and trust what they give you.
The resulting release sits comfortably beside the kind of work collected in EP reviews elsewhere on this site, but the recording context gives it a presence that studio work rarely matches. Drums sound like they were played inside a bell. Vocals arrive with a halo of air that shifts with every phrase.
Why Unusual Spaces Matter for Independent Music
For Australian independent artists, access to unusual spaces is partly a matter of geography. The country is vast, sparsely populated, and dotted with buildings that exist because of older industries rather than the music business. Cement works, butter factories, shearers’ quarters, observatory domes, and disused wheat bins all have acoustic personalities that no digital reverb can imitate.
The engineer argues that this resource is being underused. Touring routes already pass through towns with empty industrial architecture. A small group of musicians with a generator, a few stands, and a willingness to work around bats and dust can return with a record that captures something a city studio cannot manufacture. Local councils are starting to recognise this. Grants under the Regional Arts Fund and various state programs now occasionally support projects that treat disused infrastructure as creative infrastructure.
This approach also aligns with a broader shift in how independent releases are presented. Listeners increasingly want to know where a record was made, who was in the room, and what the air tasted like. The same instinct shows up in work such as this Ballet Mecano review, where conventional pop structures are taken apart and rebuilt from the inside. A recorded-in-a-silo credit carries narrative weight, but only if the room genuinely shapes the music. The engineer’s discipline matters. The space is the instrument, and treating it that way separates a memorable record from a gimmick.
Practical lessons from the silo sessions
- Plan for weather and temperature, since they shift the room’s behaviour across a single day.
- Use baffles to control early reflections from loud sources like drums or amplified guitar.
- Hang room microphones high to catch ceiling reflections before they scatter.
- Trust the natural decay instead of reaching for artificial reverb plugins.
- Sleep nearby if possible, so the band can stay loose between takes.
The engineer is already planning the next project, possibly a string quartet inside an empty water tower somewhere past Ballarat. He is not precious about the idea of silos becoming a trend. If anything, he would rather see a different unusual space used by a different group of musicians each time, so the Australian independent catalogue keeps accumulating records that could only have come from one specific patch of ground. The silo worked because it was uncompromising, and because the band chose to meet it on its own terms rather than fight it. The room will always be the third member of any band that records this way, and the engineer plans to keep listening to what it has to say.