Bathroom as a vocal booth?

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ibleedburgundy

ibleedburgundy

The Anti-Lambo
I am a newbie so go easy on me. I have a townhouse and I record in my basement. My basement is one 14x15 room and a bathroom. The bathroom is the typical size with a toilet facing a large mirror. I like to record my band live and I'm thinking about having my singer stand in the bathroom for better isolation. Also, at the times when we record individially I was thinking I could make this into a vocal booth but there would be no window.

The bathroom has a tile floor.

Is it a good idea for me to turn this room into a vocal booth? If so, what treatments can you recommend?

I tried to search the forums using the words "bathroom" and "vocal booth" but I didn't find anyone else trying to make the conversion. Thanks in advance.
 
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I've often considered using a public bathroom for recording purposes. The reverb in those places sounds so good!

I would probably opt for a public restroom over a private one since those give you more space and generally have fewer sound dampening surfaces (curtains, towels, etc.)
 
...i hear it was popular in the eighties...

take that as you will


but anyways, why don't you try it out and see if you like the sound.
 
Personally, I wouldn't even consider it if I wasn't going to treat the hell of out of that room with absorbtion material. The tiles will give you LOTS of early reflections, and a very short reverb tale. Even though the sound itself may be decent, it's way too prominent to be of any use.
 
Oh, you mean he was serious??? I thought this was a joke. All that mention of tile floors and mirrors, of all things. I thought, he can't be serious. Talk about an acoustic nightmare.
 
It will most likely add a very unpleasant short bright refelction to the vocals.......something that you can't get rid of if you don't like it...........If you want to use the space for isolation, buy some cheap auralex kit and deaden the room..... :)
 
Boy, this is a real dilemma. You could deaden it as much as possible and then it could be usable, but probably not for several hours after a band member uses it:D
 
I thought that " that bathroom sound" was somthing you always wanted to avoid.
 
I could remove the mirror. Cover the tiles with extra carpet that came with the place. Would that help? Would it be any better than recording vocals in the larger room?

If I covered the toilet and tiles, and removed the mirror, I don't see why it would be different from any other 6.5x3x8 room.

I guess I'll give it a shot and see what happens. I have not spent any $$$ on sound treatment. Going to learn first. I've read several articles today.

Thanks
 
It probably won't help enough. What you've got is a highly reverberant room. The only way you can make it sound better is by removing a very large amount of reverberation. Carpet or curtains or things like that highly likely won't do. Use auralex and lots of it.
 
Well, I recorded my band a while back and used a bathroom as a vocal booth, and an iso booth for guitars. What I did was throw all of the blankets, pillows and towels i had into the room. The room was only about 4 x 4, but i had pillows stacked on top of the toilet, on top of the sink, on the floor and blankets tacked to the walls.

This is one of the tracks that was recorded:


All of the guitars and vocals were recorded with the above setup, so you can make up your mind whether or not it sounds good. To me, it wasn't too bad of a result especially considering all vocals were recorded with a behringer B1 mic. And just for the record, the guitars were recorded with a SM57.

I hope this helps.
 
Oh, i forgot to mention.....that the only drawback to the above method, was that the bathroom was pretty much like a oven when our singer was in there. There was no ventalation, so after every take he'd have to open the door to cool off. ;)
 
sean_w_mcgrath said:
Well, I recorded my band a while back and used a bathroom as a vocal booth, and an iso booth for guitars. What I did was throw all of the blankets, pillows and towels i had into the room. The room was only about 4 x 4, but i had pillows stacked on top of the toilet, on top of the sink, on the floor and blankets tacked to the walls.

This is one of the tracks that was recorded:


All of the guitars and vocals were recorded with the above setup, so you can make up your mind whether or not it sounds good. To me, it wasn't too bad of a result especially considering all vocals were recorded with a behringer B1 mic. And just for the record, the guitars were recorded with a SM57.

I hope this helps.
Click to expand...


I knew there would be someone on here who had done this before! I think you're vocals sound pretty good so I'm going to give it a shot. Thank you.
 
record dry then re-amp into the bathroom as a reverb chamber - actually used on some prominent recordings back in the sixties... good way to get the reverb from any room without risking a good vocal take... then mix in the re-amped reverb to taste...
 
gullfo said:
record dry then re-amp into the bathroom as a reverb chamber - actually used on some prominent recordings back in the sixties... good way to get the reverb from any room without risking a good vocal take... then mix in the re-amped reverb to taste...
Click to expand...


BINGO! I do this all the time with my bathroom, I've done it with my garage too, it has a nice verb in it for guitars.

If you justr record in the bathroom directly you're stuck with the amount of room sound. Reamping you can add the room to taste
 
sean_w_mcgrath said:
Well, I recorded my band a while back and used a bathroom as a vocal booth, and an iso booth for guitars. What I did was throw all of the blankets, pillows and towels i had into the room. The room was only about 4 x 4, but i had pillows stacked on top of the toilet, on top of the sink, on the floor and blankets tacked to the walls.

This is one of the tracks that was recorded:


All of the guitars and vocals were recorded with the above setup, so you can make up your mind whether or not it sounds good. To me, it wasn't too bad of a result especially considering all vocals were recorded with a behringer B1 mic. And just for the record, the guitars were recorded with a SM57.

I hope this helps.
Click to expand...
I hope you washed your pillows
 
LemonTree said:
BINGO! I do this all the time with my bathroom, I've done it with my garage too, it has a nice verb in it for guitars.

If you justr record in the bathroom directly you're stuck with the amount of room sound. Reamping you can add the room to taste
Click to expand...

and if you do an impulse of your bathroom, you can just use a convolution effect like SIR or Perfect Space without all the hassle or moisture... :-)
 
It would be pretty convenient.

If you had to relieve yourself, you wouldn't have to get up and go all the way to the bathroom to do so. And you wouldn't necessarily even have to stop singing. You could just whip it out during the guitar solo or something. If you had to go number 2, though, then you might need to re-adjust the height of the microphone.
 
sorry, but what does reamping mean?

and is it possible with a regular digital recorder?

thanks
drew
 
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