vocal booth causing vocals to sound very boxy

[chalz2502]

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

[Southsidemusic]

Hey Buddy

We have two vocal booths which we paid over 15K to build and they are also pretty flat as they should. No reflections at all which makes the sound inside kind of dead air and that is the best since no added noise and "echo/reverberation comes into the mic.

Color should be added later in the mix and the more "real sounding" recording you have the less plugins for noise removal needed.

We do have woodfloors in all 3 of our rooms and also in the two production rooms which offers a bit of color but making rooms like this on floating floors are costly so I would try recording vocals and or guitars in your space and see how it comes out after you put some nice coloring plugins and or external gear.

I doubt anything is wrong with the booth you built and the first time I was inside a real expensive vocal booth i felt like i was in a vacuum chamber

Let us know how you get on.

If the recordings sound too boxy try opening up a small space in the front of the booth and see if that helps. Experiment a little but as I said, it won't sound airy and colorful if you built a small isolated booth.

[albee1952]

One thing I see that raises a red flag is that the room is square. Square rooms are always a bad idea for sound as they will accentuate and cancel the same frequencies twice. For this booth to NOT be boxy sounding, it needs a lot of absorption at all frequencies. How thick is the foam? If its typical 2-3" foam, then it is NOT absorbing below 350-500Hz(or likely higher). Consider that the wavelength of a 1KHz tone is about a foot long, so a few inches of foam doesn't help much.

[Bob Olhsson]

You'll need at least 4" of foam to do anything significant.

Ideally you want flat response reflections. Too much deadening just gives you muddy reflections! This is easier to accomplish in a larger room than a vocal booth.

[chalz2502]

Originally Posted by albee1952

One thing I see that raises a red flag is that the room is square. Square rooms are always a bad idea for sound as they will accentuate and cancel the same frequencies twice. For this booth to NOT be boxy sounding, it needs a lot of absorption at all frequencies. How thick is the foam? If its typical 2-3" foam, then it is NOT absorbing below 350-500Hz(or likely higher). Consider that the wavelength of a 1KHz tone is about a foot long, so a few inches of foam doesn't help much.

So your saying I need thicker foam, 4 inches on up?


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[albee1952]

Originally Posted by chalz2502

So your saying I need thicker foam, 4 inches on up?


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That is worth a try, but the fact that the room is 4' by 4' is bad, and I'm not confident that more foam is going to solve your problem. If its possible, changing one or two walls could yield huge improvements. If you could take 1 wall and skew it so the opposite wall was not parallel, you would cut standing waves in half. You could also try a Reflexion "filter" that goes behind the mic to help block some of the "evil"(and remember, the ceiling and floor are also reflective, and probably parallel too). Now it may be too late for construction, but if your box is dry-walled on all sides(inside), I would strip a side wall to the studs, stuff the stud cavities with rock wool(which you may already have done) and then cover the wall with fabric. This and thicker foam on the other side would probably do better than more foam everywhere. There are many things that can help, but we are all shooting in the dark as we don't know much about the room you have

[Bonehill]

What the others said plus you also ideally need deep air cavities behind the insulation if you want an effective bass trap for those problematic sub-250 Hz waves - now, chances are thats impractical so putting a high pass filter set to 80-100 Hz on your incoming vocal signal before it hits any other processors or effects will help - its still not an ideal solution but its another little thing which helps


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[edwinstar]

yes. in such a small room you have lots of modes in the audible range and need to make it as dead as possible in the full frequency range. if you use a thin layer of foam/woolrock, you only kill the high frequencies, leaving the muddy low mids too pronounced.


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[chalz2502]

Originally Posted by edwinstar

yes. in such a small room you have lots of modes in the audible range and need to make it as dead as possible in the full frequency range. if you use a thin layer of foam/woolrock, you only kill the high frequencies, leaving the muddy low mids too pronounced.


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How sure are u because I'm willing to buy it. The ones I have in there is between 1 and 2 inches thick. I'm gonna buy the 4 inch, or do u recommend something else? It's starting to make sense tho, I just don't wanna spend all that money and it don't work


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[Bob Olhsson]

I'd buy some 4" and see how that works.