trax said:
If you have a studio in a 10x10 space, can you have a vocal booth?
Of course it is. Just a matter of being really clever.
My home studio is 13x20', with nasty slanted ceilings on one side. My vocal booth is over the stairwell. Yes, thats right, over the stairwell. Gives me a nice 5'x8' vocal booth actually.
Essentially, the stairwell opening is 3' wide and 8' long, and I created a platform to match the level of the floor of the garage loft, across the stairs. This is hinged with really large hinges, and lag bolts, for safety reasons. On the opposite side of the stairwell is a 2x8, bolted through the stairwell wall, into the wall studs. The floor, when down, rests on this 2x8 and my wife and I and two yamaha digital pianos can stand in the room and jump up and down and its solid as a rock.
I then built a wall around the stair well, starting two feet wider than the width of the stairs, thus giving 5'x8' vocalbooth, and the use of the stairwell below. The additional 2' is where the keyboard stand and the two digital pianos sit, as well as the floor goes when it flips up. And the floor doesn't touch the keyboards, though is close.
Lost 2' of room space, not bad at all
You can make vocal booths out of partitions, and move them around against a corner wall. You can hinge panels on the wall, and fold out when necessary, fold back against the wall when unnecessary. I'm partial to movable panels, because if you want to record a drumkit instead of a skinny vocalist, you can move the panels around.
Also, when recording in my home studio, I always recording everything dry with EQ flat, using headphones. All I do is adjust levels using the meters as my guide, this way there is no feedback through my monitors into the microphones. Then upon the mixing stage, where there are no microphones active, I use the monitors and annoy my wife
