Homemade vocal booths

Mattresses! sleep and work.
I know a dude who had bottles filled at different levels as sound proofing, no joke. Egg cartons dont do anything. How you acoustically treat a room depends alot on what your doing.....
Triffusors are the shit. I also personally like a "bright" sounding room.

i have a closet in my studio room in my house that i stapled sound absorbing foam on the walls. it really deadens the sound and i get good results. i dont use the auralex foam, i used some foam that i got from work for free, but you can get it here

http://www.mcmaster.com/#sound-absorbing-foam/=wco0r

its cheaper than auralex and it works great.

not really a booth but this is the area i record in




pull back this curtain-





and heres the mic (just an sm 58) with some foam shit behind it-




works for me.

Obviously when recording someone else i have to monitor through headphones, and when recording i gotta have the room quiet, but its cool

How does the SM58 go for vocals?
Ive been trying to avoid getting a dynamic mic for vocals and just get a condenser.

i like it man. I screw the top part off and use a regular pop filter. Ive been using sm58 and sm57 for years. For me i like it because its durable, i dont need to wait for a preamp to warm up before i record, and i use it to MC weddings and parties i DJ. Its just convenient for me.


i was spoiled for about a year and my friend let me use his AKG 414. That mic was dope but it was so expensive i was always scared i was gonna break it. Plus waiting for the tube in the preamp to warm up was a **** sometimes. Sounded so good though

AKG 414...thats tight, love the warmness of condensers. I like what you did with the 58 thats sick, and you cant go wrong with the 57 its a mad amp mic.

I know a lot of dudes seem skeptical about the SE Reflextion Filter, but I use it as other engineers I know vouch for it as well and it does an excellent job.


I got two studios. My main studio is ran with my cousin and we have a nice size Whisper Booth:





So at my personal studio which is only open to myself and not the public, I wanted to get something for a booth but I did not want to get into building a booth when I already have a Whisper Booth. So I was informed about SE Reflextion Filter and so I looked into it and was sold. I bought one for $300 and took it to the lab, compared my recordings with the Reflextion Filter to the Whisper Booth and was highly impressed with the sound.


Sound for Sound, the Relfextion Filter does the job that I get with the Whisper Booth!


Now, I also have my personal studio treated acoustically, nothing major like the main studio. I keep the mic stand in a corner and have a thick rug under the mic stand to adsorb any floor reflections from recording vocals as I have none carpet flooring. When I first was treating my personal lab I grabed the KRK Ergo:




And must say if you aint got money to treat your studio real heavy but need to control the frequency's then invest in the KRK Ergo, it helps calculate and adjust what your room sounds like so when it comes to your mixing your getting a more tighter sound, that is no deceiving your ears.

I probably take the cake for one of the most ghetto home booths, but **** it, it works. Room has to be quite though and I have to monitor through headhpones. I also have thick carpet under the mic stand that isn't pictured.

DJ Hellfire wrote:I probably take the cake for one of the most ghetto home booths, but **** it, it works. Room has to be quite though and I have to monitor through headhpones. I also have thick carpet under the mic stand that isn't pictured.

My man is taking a vocal shower! Now imagine a fine chick coming out of that curtain during a session!


But yo, that looks dope.

Thanks! Only cost $100 to make too. I think I should put some foam on the ceiling above the mic.

deck daddy wrote:A good one on acoustics: http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html

"Many studio owners and audiophiles install acoustic foam all over their walls, mistakenly believing that is sufficient. After all, if you clap your hands in a room treated with foam (or fiberglass, blankets, or egg crates), you won't hear any reverb or echoes. But thin treatments do nothing to control low frequency reverb or reflections, and hand claps won't reveal that."

EGG CRATES AS ACOUSTIC TREATMENT IS A MYTH! Google "egg crate acoustic myth" and read.

Great article, thanks

I doubt that your shower booth does anything significant to improve the sound,
it would have been a better idea just to use foam tiles around the corner
especially since you have the reflection filter too

if you want a dope sounding vocal booth thats still hella cheap, do something similar to hellfires old one, although i wouldent put it in a corner.

build a box, maybe 5 by 4 or something out of pvc pipe, then hang packing blankets/duvets/comforters on all the corners and drape some over the top, the heavier the blankets the better the sound youll get.

the reason you dont want it in the corner is because you have a higher chance of getting a wash of reflections coming back into the mic after they bounce off that wall.

so if you put it in the middle of the room, it still gives your sound waves air to "breath" while not having to worry so much about them bouncing back at you and making your recordings sound like shit.

the heavier the blankets the better, in theory you can do this and it will kill all the flutter echo in your room, and youll have a nice vocal sound, ive been meaning to make one of these for a couple years, it would probably work best if you had a few acoustic absorbtion panels on the walls of your room though.

i also had a booth in a closet at one point, i used hideaway couch matress on one side, lots of clothes behind me, 2 couch cusions also and i deadened every other wall with pillows and blankets. it was a sliding glass closet like the other dude posted, but mine was tiny, like 2.5 feet by 9 or 10 feet.

i found later that if i opened one of the doors and hung 2 or 3 layers of blankets i got alot better sound than i did when the door was closed and i was boxed in there, because of the same principal stated above.

check these out

http://www.acoustimac.com/acoustic-insu ... el-frames/

if you cant build your own frames, they sell them here for 10 to 13 dollars.
if your thinking about using insulation, use rigid fiberglass. roxoul or oc 703 or oc 705. you can get 6 sheets for about 60 bucks. they also sell it on that site, i dont kno about shipping to canada though.

DJ Hellfire wrote:I probably take the cake for one of the most ghetto home booths, but **** it, it works. Room has to be quite though and I have to monitor through headhpones. I also have thick carpet under the mic stand that isn't pictured.

Wow! This thread is OLD! Lol! Anyway, if you listen to my Live & Learn album, 90% of the vocals were tracked in this set up! Shit work amazingly.



Here's my new homemade booth, although not exactly low budget.