Since recently completing my acoustics project, I have considered building an additional ISO-Booth using the DAWBox plans. Partially because I’m looking for another challenge, but mainly because even though I’ve got a noise floor around -67db, there is also a lot of noise leakage during the day.
There are many reasons for a booth and many for not doing one. If you have a decent silent space then you really do not need a booth but you do need to address acoustic issues and there is plenty of killer advice out there to do that with traps, diffusion, mid to high band absorption.
The reason you do need a vocal booth is lame neighbors who complain if they hear anything but a loud TV.
As a voiceover talent, any reflections (outside noise) in your recordings can destroy the content you need to deliver for paid work. So you need a booth to knock down noise from trucks passing, dogs barking, microwaves beeping blah blah blah. Acoustic treatment can’t solve these issues so you need isolation.
I am a firm believer in the best acoustics, pre amps, mics, and also real world studios but also a firm believer in the home studio for demo work, pod casting, hip hop vocals, ect.
In most cases a “vocal booth” really means a tiny, boxy room with about the worse acoustics imaginable….like a closet, for instance. The smaller a space is, the more influential the lower harmonics of a recorded sound become, hence the muddy, boxy closet-booth vibe. So, the smaller a room is, the more you have to treat it to make it usable. If you’re looking at a 4′x6′ room, it’s so small that there’s no way to treat it so that it’s usable without filling it with treatment so that it’s…well, unusable. See the problem? You’re usually better off tracking from a larger open space, provided it’s treated reasonably well. I won’t even start on isolation…
Egg cartons are good for one thing…holding eggs. They don’t work well as acoustic treatment because they absorb along a very narrow bandwidth, and they don’t work well as diffusers because they don’t form a randomly varied shape.
On the cheap you could grab some boom stands and heavy blankets…that’ll give you a good bit of absorption….or you could DIY some panels made from rigid fiberglass (OC703) or mineral wool.
What about the Whisper Room? It’s a good, solid, EXPENSIVE. With a good design and excecution you can build your own booth for much less or even hire a contractor to build one for you. Design is certainly a major factor. I have been in poorly design studio booths you could tell cost the owner 5k in contractor fees and the design was nothing more than studs with sheetrock and acoustic foam with a solid core door.
A good design and instructions can give you a serious base to work from. I’m considering the 6×6 booth at http://www.dawbox.com and am wondering if you have any thoughts or experience with them. Let me know. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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