To Vocal Booth, or to not Vocal Booth, your thoughts?

[gemini8026]

hey guys.

Ive been in a few forums lately in regards to sound isolation in my new condo. I wanna be able to record vocals but in order to do so, i would need to build a booth as the building itself is concrete, but with loud aggressive vox, it would disturb the neighbours.

When looking into options, it seems that a small 3x3 vocal booth is FROWNED upon by many for doing musical vox!

Whats everyones thoughts on the matter?! Does a small room suck the life out of a vocal?!

My option was to either build a little 3x3 booth, or buy a laptop with firewire and do the vocal takes in my car or anyplace I can find a quiet room thats isolated.

Thoughts, opinions?!? Id LOVE to hear andy's take but he likely wont read this!

 

[Seth Munson]

my say is,

what would the advantage of not having one be? even if its shitty and small.

its better to have that option even if you dont always use it for your vocal takes.

just my .02

 

[lolzgreg]

Building a room with identical dimensions (3x3) is a bad idea. You never want two walls the same length.

What is your budget? There are professional booths available if yuo have the money. If you want to build it, it wouldnt be TOO difficult, aside from ventilation.

 

[gemini8026]

I just want to cut down on ambiant noise so that my neighbours dont here. I could even drape 4 sound deadening blankets over a frame and sing in that. I just want to be able to record vocals in my condo without disturbing others. Im building some basic bass traps and such to control the music, but when I sing, I am fairly loud. I wanted to contain that by building some sort of booth.

However, Ive been told this isnt a good idea........... So Im kinda torn as to what to do.

 

[amarshism]

kill the room

in my experience, if you dont have a nice treated 'musical' room, its better just to kill it as much as possible and add your 'room' sound later with nice use of verb and delay

 

[Joematthews]

You guys are confusing isolation with treatment. Hanging up Duvets, sheets or rockwool does NOTHING to the STC (sound transmission) rating of the room.

You wont be able to record descent vocals in a 3x3 booth, it would be very uncomfortable for the vocalist, there would be no room for proper air flow, and the sound would be terrible, as it would have massive modal build up at 188hz, 376hz etc. These values are too high for first harmonics, right in the "muddy" frequencies where you'd want to avoid build up.

I'm not sure what to suggest though, as long as it isn't a 3x3 box.

Joe

 

[gemini8026]

thanks joe. These answers are what I needed to hear. Im gonna invest in some gear so I can record vocals in another location. I can still do the music in my room, but I dont want my neighbours to kill me