There is a trick to changing your waterfall’s tune and volume. It has a lot to do with how far the waterfalls and the surface that breaks its descent. The amount of water falling does indeed have much to do with how loud the roar will become. This can easily be discovered in nature. The sound of Niagara Falls can be heard long before you have been able to see any portion of it. It is like standing next to the speakers at an outdoor rock concert when compared to a small mountain creek where it tumbles over a cliff somewhere amidst forested slopes.

You can create several types of sounds simply by changing what the water in waterfalls is falling onto. Water that cascades to fall directly into a pool of water is the loudest, most pronounced sound from waterfalls. When the pool of water it hits is shallow, the sound is much softer. So, the deeper your pond, the louder the music your waterfalls make. This is something that must always be considered when building a pond. You can have a deep pond without being deafened by your waterfalls. Pond depth can be shallow at the spot the waterfalls cascades into it and drop of gently or sharply to the desired depth from there.

The music of waterfalls is even softer when a stream or water cascade is broken by outcroppings of rock, or stepped boulders. The shaping and contours of the rock edges for each level in decent will also change the sound of the moving water. This principle is made much of in the rills found on manorial estates throughout Europe. In the days that these water channels carried fresh water to the manor house, the art of building a waterway that provided music along with moisture was developed into a skill of coaxing different notes from the steps by different carvings in the limestone slabs that created the drops.

The distance between the levels of your waterfalls is a very important factor. For a soft, subtle sound, a 3 inch to a 4 inch drop is used. The longer the increase, the more significantly the level of sound is created. Generally for waterfalls to accompany building a pond in your yard, a drop of 18 inches to 20 inches is about as loud as you will want your watery music to go. So when traversing more of a decline than about a foot and a half, there needs to be more than one step to break the waterfalls if you are going to be able to enjoy the music and not be irritated by the noise it makes.

To get a personal idea of exactly how the sounds of waterfalls can change, get out a household cleaning bucket and a piece of plywood or some other prop to serve as a prototype for rocks that would break the water’s fall. With your garden hose and these two household items, you can experiment with different depths of water in a pond or pool and how they change the sound of the waterfalls. With someone’s assistance you can add your outcropping breaks into the experiment. This will allow you to get a good understanding of how the most delightful sound must be constructed when building a pond in your yard.

Determining the size of your pond must also be part of designing the waterfalls. When building a pond to include the waterfalls feature, the size of the pond must have a surface at least one and a half times the square footage of your waterfalls and stream.

If this rule isn’t followed, your waterfalls will cause the pond to overflow and flood your yard. For example, a waterfalls and stream that is 20 feet long and 3 feet wide means you must be building a pond that is no smaller than 90 square feet. Square footage is calculated by multiplying the length by the width of any area. A 90 sq. ft. surface area pond is the size of a small room in a house at 9 feet by 10 feet. If your yard will not allow you to have the waterfall sound you desire with the adequate sized pond, don’t despair! This is the perfect reason to have pondless waterfalls instead.