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  #11  
Old 04-17-2017, 09:01 PM
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edwinstar edwinstar is offline
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

i'd recommend that as well. if your interested in a good read:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/02405...PRL&ref=plSrch


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  #12  
Old 04-18-2017, 12:17 AM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Maybe it's just me, but I hate voc.booths and only ever use them when the whole band needs to be tracked together. Kind of a "studio live" thing.

I love hard surfaces as they tend to accentuate the very beginning of a phrase. I'd rather record vocs that sound alive before you even consider which mic you are going to use.

Maybe that's just me I use voc.booths as guitar amp booths mostly...
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  #13  
Old 04-18-2017, 12:48 AM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

understandable. this superdry sound may need some altiverb after recording...


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  #14  
Old 04-18-2017, 04:55 AM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Hi,

Most home setups that I go troubleshoot have some sort of booth set up.
I have only seen one done well in 20 years.
The first thing we usually do is get the customer to rip out the vocal booth.
It's like an above poster said:
If you didn't put a lot of design and money into a booth, it's just going to mess you up and needlessly make your room smaller.
We always have better results in an untreated basement with a mic screen than in a little booth.
(Obviously, you're better off treating the basement...just saying...)
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  #15  
Old 04-18-2017, 06:05 AM
chalz2502 chalz2502 is offline
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

i dont have a basement and i already built the booth so im trying to find a solution that would help me fix the problem, not start over the process. all i asked was it a way to deaden the booth more then it is because im still getting a low mud frequency. just by reading a few comments im told to try 4 inch foam, and im gonna take that in consideration. thanks for all the suggestions though, yall really helped me out allot and now im starting to understand more then what i thought i knew.
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  #16  
Old 04-18-2017, 10:38 AM
Bookerv12 Bookerv12 is offline
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Understood.

You may be better off getting a 4" rock wool or fiberglass product though.
Pre-made panels?
The foam is a tricky beast.
Always the first thing we tear out.
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  #17  
Old 04-18-2017, 12:00 PM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Quote:
Originally Posted by JFreak View Post
Maybe it's just me, but I hate voc.booths and only ever use them when the whole band needs to be tracked together. Kind of a "studio live" thing.

I love hard surfaces as they tend to accentuate the very beginning of a phrase. I'd rather record vocs that sound alive before you even consider which mic you are going to use.

Maybe that's just me I use voc.booths as guitar amp booths mostly...
It's not just you. Now that it's trivial to record every microphone, even a control room is far less necessary and a great sounding studio makes for a great sounding mix environment.
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  #18  
Old 04-18-2017, 05:57 PM
simon.a.billington simon.a.billington is offline
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

It's true that fixing your recording environment should be your number one priority. There are tools to help you correct bad recordings to a certain extent if it can't be avoided, or re-recorded under better conditions.

Zynaptic do a great tool that helps in these situations, Unfilter. The trouble is, like iZotope, their tech is so damn expensive. Probably because they know they have us by the metaphorical "balls"!!

Otherwise I'd suggest a combination of subtractive eq, then dynamic eq and finally multiband compression if needed. A little bit of each.

Set the subtractive eq up to take out as much as you can without making things sound thin. It might be also wise to consider a Linear Phase eq in this context. You may also be looking for harmonic series of frequencies to notch out, as often is the nature of many resonances. So find your main problematic frequency, take a little out there, then try again an octave up, and an octave above that. Only remove frequencies if you think it will help, don't do it unnecessarily.

Dehum filters such as the one here, or the one from iZotope can actually be exploited to serve this purpose as they allow you to more easily to notch out harmonic frequency series. Works great at deringing snares too by the way.

If this isn't enough then consider a dynamic eq, like the one from Brainworks, or the one's found in C6 by Waves. Again find the key frequencies that are giving you the most grief and have it dynamically remove more frequencies at the most loudest, or most annoying parts.

So the subtractive eq should be enough to tame the frequencies during more softer to average passages and the dynamic eq should help to tame them during more louder parts.

And if that is not enough still, then you can use a multiband compressor to crush down on the most loudest parts. This is why I like the C6 because I can use it for both dynamic eq and as a multiband compressor. It's only downside is it only have two bands of dynamic eq.

Between all of this you should be ablate beat your sound into submission, but its a lot of work. However, you can save some of that work by saving custom presets. Be aware though, these tools make it so easy to really screw up a sound even further too. ALWAYS check against the original so you don't take things too far. It takes time to develop an ear for this kind of surgery, so be patient with yourself.

At the end of they, to save you the extra agony and prevent countless hours wasting time trying to right some wrongs, it will be definitely worth investigating ways to improve your recording environment. That really should come first.
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  #19  
Old 04-18-2017, 09:12 PM
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

Quote:
Originally Posted by chalz2502 View Post
dont know if im off topic but i need help understanding something. im pretty sure most engineers would know the answer to this. for the past 10 or 15 years i been teaching my self how to record vocals. almost every music gear i dreamed of having i invested over the years to get them. the only problem i ran into was not having a vocal booth to deaden the vocals. so a few months ago i went on this site called dawbox.com. its a site that offers blueprints of there designs to build a professional vocal booth. i bought the blue print and spent over a thousand dollars on material and labor to get it built. after it was built i was amazed how it turned out to look exactly the same as the creators said it would look. the only problem is once i went inside and gave it a sound test it didnt sound exactly how i expected it to sound. it isolated a bunch of noise from the outside and gave me a dead sound but it sounded muffled and boxy. im not sure if a professional vocal booth is suppose to sound like that. considering paying hundreds of dollars to get that thing built, i wasnt pleased and felt like if im gonna be sweeping away frequency out of vocals every time i record i shouldnt of wasted my money on this vocal booth. these people are very successful and i havent heard any bad reviews. the vocal booth i built is 4x4x7. i have accoutic foam in every single crack on the inside, i just dont understand. any professional engineers out there that know all the right answers to this type of situation please comment. help me understand the science a little bit more. what am i missing, and what dont i know that i thought i knew
Sounds like a bad design and also you did not create any elements that could be in more dead than live in the room itself.

I would recommend contacting a friend of mine who actually might be able to help you. He is a legendary engineer and also has designed a ton of studios. He is quite a helpful guy and you could reach out to him if you like via email and tell him what happened. Also I would have used a layer of sound board and then Sheet Rock and then finish with Owen Corning 704 or 703 I think that is the name. The frequencies of this item is much better than silly foam. Plus it's not that expensive. You might try just using a SE electronics Reflection filter and test and see if that fixes your problems. https://www.seelectronics.com/rf-space/
try reaching out to Chris Huston http://www.chrishuston.com
He has done several rooms for me and is amazing. Greg
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  #20  
Old 04-18-2017, 09:17 PM
KingTor KingTor is offline
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Default Re: vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

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
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