SO....I have a vocal booth that is 8' x 8' and 7' high. I used to have egg carton bed foam on the walls and truthfully.....it worked awesome for how cheap it was. The walls are drywalled except for the first three feet from the floor up where there is wood then a ledge where the drywall starts. The ceiling is drop style with accoustic panels and behind them, roxul noise insulation. The room is carpeted with the type of carpet you would find in an office, underneath the carpet there is underpad. I have since upgraded some gear And I figure if im doing that I should make the room a little better. My question is.......What do you recomend? Of course cheaper is better however I dont want to sacrifice the quality of my recordings to save $50.00. I am using a Blueberry mic, Peavey Tmp-1 with upgraded tubes and Cubase 5 if that matters. Thank you in advance for all the help.
vocal booth accoustic treatment
- Thread starter MAYHEM1
- Start date
Re-tox_stl
New member
Im no acoustics expert (fitz and some other guys will be here soon enough), but from what I have read and experienced, OC703 or Roxul panels all over the room.
Sky Blue Lou
Well-known member
If it worked awesome why do you want to mess with it? So much of the science of acoustics is like black voodoo with the interrelationships. It's physics and geometry and materials and psychology. If you're getting good tracks tip yer cap to the powers that be and spend yer money on a preamp.
lou
+++++ True that Sky
RICK FITZPATRICK
New member
This reminds me of..."where angels fear to tread"...type statements.
Ok MAYHEM1, at the risk of invoking the angels laughter, well, here goes. Subjective statements of how a room sounds are exactly that. Subjective statements. What you need to understand is the term TRANSLATION. The whole point of a control room is to evaluate the sonic TRUTH of your recordings, and there are a ton of variables that must be solved in order to PROVE your monitors/room is not lying to you. The proof of the pudding is how well your recordings TRANSLATE to a variety of other systems/rooms.
First off, your statement doesn't DEFINE which room you are referring to...ie...when you say it sounds AWESOME, does that mean the BOOTH sounds awesome when you are IN IT, or does it sound AWESOME in your monitoring space when you listen to the LIVE DIRECT sound from the mic's over your monitors, or does it mean when you listen to the PLAYBACK from your recording device over monitors, or does it mean it sounds awesome over headphones..either in the BOOTH or the monitoring space..or does it mean it sounds awesome when you play back your recoding in a car, or other room on a playback system..
See what I mean?Furthermore, WHAT sounds awesome? The music? The bass? The vocals? The guitar? The RT-60?
Furthermore, do you mic the musicians in spaces other than the booth? If so, how do you evaluate the sound in those spaces?
There is more to defining what you are hearing than AWESOME. Awesome at what frequency? Before or after EQ? And where in the room? Is AWESOME yours or someone else' evaluation? And if it IS awesome...then what is the problem?
Ok, here is the deal as far as I'm concerned. Before you can effectively evaluate what you are hearing in the booth, you need to understand that recording engineers first line of defense is TRUST that what they hear in the control room, is for all intents and purposes. pretty much what you will hear on EVERY other system/room. This is called the PRINT. It is a sonic signature of what decisions the engineer has made, and are made by trusting the room in which he monitors is NOT lying to him. If it lies during tracking, then it lies AGAIN when mixing. You can NOT make good sonic decisions if you are not hearing the truth. SO....
So, I'm asking you to tell us more about your monitoring environment before I delve into your booth improvements. BTW, a SQUARE room is the 3rd worst possible recording environment. A cube is even worse, and your room height is very close to the L/W dimensions. The worst is if everything is concrete.
So please tell us more. It may turn out your MONITORING space is the area of improvement concern vs the booth. Of course, my non-expert disclaimer is in full force here.
fitZ
Fitz, if I might borrow your disclaimer here for a moment...
If you take a fluffy comforter/ blanket, double it over and "round" one of the corners of the space above waist level it can be a temporary free alternative until you can properly treat the space with panels. *insert disclaimer here* You may find however, that it deadens the vocals too well, but it sure beats that drywall bounce.
If you take a fluffy comforter/ blanket, double it over and "round" one of the corners of the space above waist level it can be a temporary free alternative until you can properly treat the space with panels. *insert disclaimer here* You may find however, that it deadens the vocals too well, but it sure beats that drywall bounce.
RICK FITZPATRICK
New member
Hey, no problem. Just be sure to put it back after your done.
Thanks you for the feedback thus far. Fitz, your detailed response sheds light on other factors I may not have spent alot of time thinking about however you read incorrectly. I said the foam "worked" awesome, not that anything sounded (although I was happy with my recordings for the most part) awesome. What I mean by worked awesome was that by recording in the room with nothing on the walls, then applying the foam and recording again, there was a definite audible diffrence. I am no expert in this area but to put it in simple terms, it did not sound like I was recording in a drywalled untreated room after I put foam on the walls. The quality of the recording (I am talking about vocal recordings btw) was audibly better both before and after e.q, compression e.t.c. However, this was using an audio buddy pre and a marshall mxl 1006 condenser, And again I was happy with the results for the money i spent. That being said, when I tested out my Blueberry with the peavey I noticed the end result to be .....muddy. This from my reaserch is usually atrributed to low end resonance. The vocal recordings sound smooth creamy in the top end, crisp in the mids but ruined with muddyness, and I hope that what I think is muddy, is actually muddy. Since my post I have had some time at work to pretend I am working and actually read some of the posts on this topic and it appears the best solution is to buy 2 " rigid fibreglass insulation with 3 lbs density in 2' x 4' lengths, frame it and cover with fabric. Now another question I have is, Is there overkill with this stuff?? Or can I plaster my walls with panels covering most of the space.
Sky Blue Lou
Well-known member
Well theoretically there may be but the key word is "may". I don't know. I doubt you would wind up with an anechoic chamber if you covered 100% of the surface (including the floor) but of course you won't. There is very likely a point of diminishing returns where more doesn't improve the situation appreciably but I have no idea where that point might be. Good theoretical subject for the experts and I've never seen it addressed that way.
In the real world of home studios if you cover the basics and maybe sneak up on some additions you will fairly quickly get to good enough or good as it will get. Without the space and budget to alter the geometry of the basic space there must be a limit to what can be achieved - I just can't say what it is.
lou