Tag Archives: diy sound booth

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I was shooting this for my own journal and didn't think I would actually publish the video, as i'm pretty private about certain things I work on. Then again, I was pretty happy with the results and wanted to share what my treatment was.

Keep in mind that this is not for Sound Isolation. This is not a Sound Booth that will block out all ambient noise. This setup is merely just 'treatment' of a small space to make the vocals sound better (get rid of echo and deflection).

DIY-Voice-Recording-Sound-Booth-Vocal-Room (4 of 5)DIY-Voice-Recording-Sound-Booth-Vocal-Room (1 of 5)

Sorry fellas, I have to warn you that the video (below) even gave me a bit of motion sickness. If you're not interested in building out a room for voice recording, maybe you should just skip this one. At about 3:50 into the video, you'll hear a before and after comparison (turn up your volume).

There are low budget options to sound absorption, but I wasn't very happy with those results (I tried). When it comes to covering the most amount of square footage on the walls, the AudiMute stuff was my best bet.

DIY-Voice-Recording-Sound-Booth-Vocal-Room (5 of 5)DIY-Voice-Recording-Sound-Booth-Vocal-Room (2 of 5)

I tried the heavy moving blankets to absorb sound, but going with the more expensive AudiMute Sound Absorption Sheets was worth the difference (and look much better). You can get a pack of (5) 4x8 sheets for $230 dollars.

Audimute Sound Absorption
find-price-button AudiMute Sound Absorption Sheets

I also tried a variety of cheap foam, but in the end, a box of Auralex foam wedgies solved all the deflection issues. I used about 12 on the ceiling and another 12 to make a Reflexion filter behind the Rode ProCaster microphone. A box of 24 Auralex Wedges will run you $99 bucks. You don't need to cover every square inch with this stuff, just a few will treat a room very well.

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find-price-button Auralex Wedgies Box of 24- 1'x1'x2 Panels

For the floor we just added some thick padding. So for about $330 dollars, I feel we got some really good results in a fairly professional looking voice recording room. Hard to tell from the audio of the point and shoot camera I was shooting on, but through a high quality vocal microphone it's a world of difference.

If you're looking to buy Foam by the piece (not the box), you can find a variety of types on eBay starting around $5.00 dollars (Click Here).

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find-price-button Foam Wedges Pyramids Acoustic Sound Panels

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DIY-portable-sound-booth

Since we're on the topic of Audio capture, one of tips I remember came from an article about mobile Podcasting. This was when the iPod first came out years ago and there was a slew of audio podcasting stations (which I see now replaced with Video castings. So Podcasters who traveled the country often needed to setup a microphone and record themselves, sometimes in a hotel room which wasn't always the best place for clean audio. If you catch some of my random videos shot in the warehouse (even on Zoom H1) you'll hear a bit of reverb from the sound bouncing around on the walls.

So the tip that I was reading was that you don't necessarily need an extremely large sound booth to contain a whole person. That's mainly used to block out ambient noise. If you're in a fairly quiet spot and you want to minimize the reverb on the microphone you can just contain the microphone into it's own little sound booth. Anyways, I forget where that article was but Fred over at Tuperhero.com has a budget way of making a DIY portable sound booth to contain your microphone or portable audio recorder. With this positioned close to your subject and out of camera frame, it could help clean up the audio pickup from all that reverb and minimize some of the ambient noise from the sides and rear of the microphone pickup. [Thanks Fred]

DIY-portable-sound-booth-audio

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