[v64]

Happens all the time. Most common one for me is when you're making a patch on a synth and by chance dial in those frequencies that align with formants (similar to the Robot Rock effect the post mentions).

Yesterday I was working on a bass drum beat, and after adding some synths playing on top of it, I started to hear the bass drum echo. So, my first thought was I had accidentally enabled some kind of reverb or echo effect on it while I was setting up the synths. After confirming I hadn't and isolated the track to ensure the bass drum was sounding as intended, I chalked it up to some weird illusion between the synths and drum that was making it sound like an echo. I know it's not there in reality, but I can't unhear it.

In this case, I went back and added a little echo to the drum to make the effect intentional, which turned out to sound good, but sometimes I'll try to make the illusion reality and it doesn't have the same effect.

[metamet]

I always wonder if it's some odd thing going on in the DAW.

Would you be willing to export that track as two tracks--one with drums and one with synth? Then listen to them solo, then run them together (with WAV files instead of instrumentation)? Would be neat to have that illusion confirmed rather than it being a DAW artifact.

[v64]

My setup's DAWless (this was two synths and a drum machine plugged directly into a mixer that was outputting to speakers) and I didn't end up making any records of this session, so I can't provide WAVs, but I can rule out DAW artifacts :)

[mergejoin]

would you mind sending a mp3 of that effect? just curious :)

[v64]

unfortunately as I said in an adjacent comment, I didn't end up making any recordings of this session, but will keep it in mind if I can make it happen again in the next couple of days!