Who Screamed on the Studio Version of 'Careful with That Axe, Eugene' and How Was the Echo Done?

The blood-curdling scream on the studio recording came from Roger Waters. He later said he locked himself in the vocal booth and just let it rip — no effects on the raw take, just pure lung power. The eerie echo wasn’t a reverb plugin; it was old-school tape delay courtesy of the Binson Echorec, the same machine that shaped Gilmour’s guitar sound on Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon.

They ran Waters’ dry vocal through the Echorec’s multi-head playback system, which bounced the signal across three playback heads at different intervals. The result was a cascading, swirling repeat that sounds almost like the scream is chasing its own tail. Live, Waters recreated the scream himself, but the studio version’s particular ghostly decay came from the Binson’s wonky tape loops — a happy accident of mechanical flutter that no digital emulation quite nails.