Thanks for the tip, I really want to get a whisper room.
Though I am a bit confused... what makes a sound treated closet bad and a recording booth good? The advice I got recently was to try to open up my recording space (move from a smaller closed closet to a larger open closet with a quilt hung behind the open door). Would a recording booth not have that same coffin-y effect my old small closet had?
Thanks!
In a perfect world, a good-sized, well-treated, isolated room is the ideal. Not so live that it sounds boomy or echoey, not so dead that it sounds like you're in a tiny foam-filled box.
The challenge is that for most of us, creating the kind of isolation that allows us to keep recording without picking up traffic noise, plumbing sounds, leaf blowers, etc. on the scale of a full room is not possible due to renting and/or because the cost of making a fully mass-isolated decoupled and treated recording space is prohibitive.
Recording booths like a Whisper Room, StudioBricks or something similar are a compromise that allows some degree of isolation at a slightly more affordable price point than full construction. However, because they are usually smaller spaces they also need careful treatment with bass traps, etc. to keep from sounding like a small box or coffin.
If you don't need isolation from outside noise, you can create a pretty good sounding environment with a booth made from a PVC frame and acoustic blankets within your bigger room that doesn't sound like you're trapped in a little foamy box. However, if you need to be sure that your work session (especially if you're being directed live) isn't interrupted by the neighbor's gardener or construction or laundry, you need the isolation that an actual booth provides (and even a single-walled Whisper Room doesn't eliminate all outside sounds, it just diminishes them to a more workable level; a double-walled booth might be needed if your area is loud).
Technology has made actual recording easy and accessible to everyone, but the limitations of one's home recording space is the single biggest problem that I hear in their recordings, and there are no cheap, one-size-fits-all solutions that I'm aware of. There's a lot of random advice that I see on various websites and groups, but there's a reason that every professional home studio designer and engineer that I know is overwhelmed with demand for their services right now. There are lots of ways to waste money on trial and error solutions, but there are times when it makes sense to invest in help from the pros, and I feel like the specific knowledge needed to do this right isn't in the skillset of most performers, so it's money well spent and aggravation and wasted time avoided.
I completely understand the desire to want to have everything in place right away, the DIY ethic, and the lure of the work; but I'm also very familiar with wasting money, shooting yourself in the foot by committing to work that you're not professionally prepared to take on, and making a less-than-stellar impression based on inadequate equipment and/or information. It's hard to be patient, but some things are worth the time that they require. Just my two cents, your mileage may vary, yada yada yada. I wish you success in your endeavors.