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Old 04-19-2017, 08:23 AM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Quote:
Originally Posted by KingTor View Post
There are a lot of things I could think of to help. Unfortunately, the most significant one I can suggest would involve more cost and construction and that's to build a similar design but with two significant changes:
  1. bigger
  2. not square and with no 90° angles in the corners
  3. one more for extra credit: the floor and ceiling shouldn't be parallel.
If you're getting decent noise isolation but aren't happy with the "boxiness," I'm afraid that is the best approach for vocals. Parallel surfaces create reflections. We build some really quick-n-cheap booths for our second mix stage (and in the process made the corners of the mix stage better for mixing) by just drawing out some random, non-parallel walls with masking tape and telling a contractor to build walls on those lines. They were probably around 20 square feet inside, so a /little/ bigger than your 4x4 booth, but not a lot. I tuned them for commercial VO which is ideally recorded pretty (but not completely) dead, but they actually worked (much to my surprise) for ADR in a pinch, which usually demands a MUCH bigger space. (Still not as good as our current ADR stage which is about 120 square feet, and that's still considered small when clients ask for room dimensions--although they don't say it sounds small when they don't ask and only hear it. But I digress.)

If you're OK with recording totally "dead" vocals (i.e. with no natural room reverb at all), you could try some cheaper options first:
  1. the 4" thick foam option, mentioned by a few on this thread
  2. build bass traps for at least two of the corners
  3. use foam to create non-90° angles in the 4 corners

These are all good and correct ideas. Along the line of better wall quality treatments.
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