# Ghostly "pre-echo" effect - how do I get this?



## wackychimp (Jul 16, 2009)

I'm looking to make some of my own ghostly sounds & sayings. There's a popular effect that I really like that is almost a "pre-echo" for lack of a better phrase. It's like you hear the echo before you hear the words. Fairly common when doing ghost sounds (maybe even first used in Poltergeist when the little girl is in the TV).

*Anyway, how do I do this?* I have Sony's Sound Forge 9 on my machine at work and have fiddled with is some but can't seem to get it right & there doesn't seem to be a plugin that does it automatically.

Thanks for any help or advice you can provide.


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## wackychimp (Jul 16, 2009)

FYI - you can hear the effect in this clip (right at the beginning) shared by meltdown211:

http://www.4shared.com/audio/NoGJRDjA/dead_kids.html


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## Eyegore (Aug 23, 2008)

I don't know about Sony's Sound forge, but Audacity can do it.

You just simply reverse one of the tracks, and some gverb delay or echo, and the reverse it back.


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## wackychimp (Jul 16, 2009)

EXCELLENT! Worked like a charm.

I'm gonna have fun with this one.  

Thanks so much!


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## jimmy fish (Mar 22, 2010)

This is an awsome and not overused effect. That is how you do it just record a track reverse it, add echo, or reverb, or both and reverse it back, and like magic, there it is. You may have to experiment a little, too much or too little can mess the effect up.

I remeber when I was a teenager and working at a radio station waaaaay back in the late 80s, I read about this effect. But back then, we did not have computers in the recording studio at the station. We did have 2 reel to reels machines, so I would record something on the first reel machine and then take it off and turn the tape backwards and then record it on the second machine with the vloume of the seond machine turned up to provide the echo and then take the tape from the second machine off and put it back on the machine backwards and play it back and you had the effect. The older guys at the station were amased and had never seen that done, lol. It was a lot of work, thank godness for computers! Even though they can be a pain, you don't realize how much easier they make doing radio production.


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## RRguy (Jul 14, 2007)

Eyegore said:


> I don't know about Sony's Sound forge, but Audacity can do it.
> 
> You just simply reverse one of the tracks, and some gverb delay or echo, and the reverse it back.





jimmy fish said:


> This is an awsome and not overused effect. That is how you do it just record a track reverse it, add echo, or reverb, or both and reverse it back, and like magic, there it is. You may have to experiment a little, too much or too little can mess the effect up.
> 
> I remeber when I was a teenager and working at a radio station waaaaay back in the late 80s, I read about this effect. But back then, we did not have computers in the recording studio at the station. We did have 2 reel to reels machines, so I would record something on the first reel machine and then take it off and turn the tape backwards and then record it on the second machine with the vloume of the seond machine turned up to provide the echo and then take the tape from the second machine off and put it back on the machine backwards and play it back and you had the effect. The older guys at the station were amased and had never seen that done, lol. It was a lot of work, thank godness for computers! Even though they can be a pain, you don't realize how much easier they make doing radio production.


If I may butt in, thanks for the info. This could come in handy.


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