“A $100 mic in a good room, will sound better than a $10,000 mic in a bad one”

I’m not sure who it was that said it first, but it’s true! No matter how much you shelled out on your microphone, recording an audiobook under a highway overpass is going to make it hard to listen to. So here are some tips, tricks, and ideas to help make sure your room will ‘sound good’ for voice over recordings. I’m going to break down the general thought process I used when I set up my home studio in my Brooklyn apartment, and how I find and set up the ‘best’ place to record when I’m traveling, as well as a couple other things to think about to give you a good starting point.

A “Well Treated” Room

In voice over, we’re concerned with sound. Sort of an obvious point, but I find helpful to remind myself of that every now and again. As voice performers, the sound of our voice, our breath, and the silence in between are all we have. It’s our canvas, brushes, paints, and colors all in one. Everything we have to express ourselves and do our work. I personally find that both limiting and liberating.

However, this also means that, to the best of our ability, we want to make sure our microphones are hearing our voices and only our voices. Anything and everything else detracts from our performance and our product.

How do we do that? We want to record in a “well treated room.”

And what does that mean?

Well if you’ve ever seen or been inside a professional vocal booth you may understand this intuitively, but a well treated room minimizes the amount of sound reflecting inside the booth, as well as the amount of sound going either in or out of the booth. More specifically, the reasons a professional vocal booth is “well treated” or “sounds good”—are the two things that are going to help us out:

• Acoustic Treatment -or- Sound Absorption

• Acoustic Isolation -or- Sound Proofing

I’ll break those down in more detail in a moment, but, in a “teach a man to fish” kind of way, I find it helpful to talk a bit about how sound itself works—in order to understand how to make the best and most efficient use of Acoustic Treatment and Isolation in your home studio.

How Sound Works

Sound most simply is vibration.

For example, a guitar string gets plucked, it vibrates. The string then vibrates the air around it, causing waves of vibrations (i.e. “sound waves”) to move through the air, into the room, and eventually reaching our ears. Ta-da! Music.

As the sound vibrates through the air, it is interacting with the world in two ways:

• reflecting off of things (For an extreme example, imagine singing in a concrete tunnel. All of the echoes are reflections of your sound.)

• and/or being absorbed into things. (If you’ve ever screamed into a pillow, that baby absorbed your sound.)

Visualizing sound reflections:

Imagine you’re holding a harmless little rubber ball that’s particularly bouncy. Then look around the space you’re in right now, and imagine tossing the ball at each and every thing in the room in turn. The walls, the furniture, the plants, the blankets and cushions, the cat—everything. (For the sake of the exercise, let’s say the ball doesn’t knock over, injure, or break anything.) How would the ball behave? If thrown at a wall, it’d bounce off and maybe hit a chair, then a lamp, etc. If thrown at a pillow or a cushion, it’d likely just end its journey there.

Visualizing sound absorption:

Do the same visualization, but this time the ball is made out of metal. (Still harmless, and still won’t break anything.) When the ball makes contact with objects, how much sound does it make? Some objects will be louder than others (i.e. the wood flooring will be louder than the couch), and some may resonate to a degree (i.e. metal furniture may “ping” while upholstered furniture will “thud”).

How does this help with your home booth?

Let’s circle back now to Acoustic Treatment and Isolation.

Acoustic Treatment

Both of the above visualizations will help you determine whether or not you’re in a “well treated space.” In your booth or recording space, ideally the rubber ball will hardly bounce off of anything (if at all), and the metal ball be mostly silent as you toss it around—meaning that you have very few acoustic reflections and good sound absorption.

This is why a lot of professional voice over talent record in their closets! (I certainly did until I built myself a booth.) The clothes already hanging in your closet will absorb sound just as well if not better than the black egg crate acoustic foam you see glued to the walls of many VO booths. You can also use a number of different objects and/or products to help treat any space really so that it’s ready for your brilliant recordings.

Some Example Solutions:

• Moving Blankets —

  • the quintessential low budget booth option. Moving Blankets are densely padded and significantly dampen reflections. Many of my colleagues in NYC use PVC pipe frames and drape these blankets over them. Here’s a video breaking this idea down further.

• Pillow Forts —

  • My go-to travel solution. Bring out your inner child and build yourself a little pillow fort out of cushions, comforters, and pillows and you’ve got a brilliant cozy little cave that’ll sound great. Additionally, if you’ve got an old comforter or pillows lying around the house, repurposing them permanently in your home booth is a great idea too. (Remember the rubber and metal ball ideas.)

• Acoustic Absorption Products —

  • You’ve seen them in the background of countless YouTube videos or Twitch streams. That black “egg crate” foam or sound panels. These can be nice options if you’re setting up your space more permanently. Because I wanted easy setup/takedown, I personally use Audimute’s Sound Sheets and Isolé in my booth to fantastic effect.

• Insulation —

  • Yeah, like from Home Depot. Fiberglass, rockwool, and denim insulations are some of the best things you can get for sound absorption. The walls of my booth are lined with 3-inches of the stuff. BUT it’s really important to consider safety with this. It’s a major safety first situation, so do your research before taking the leap into DIY land.

**One quick note! Usually an ideal vocal booth is relatively small, with most being a little under 4’x4’. All that is to say that when you’re scoping out a spot to record, a larger space simply allows sound more space to dance around which can be harder to control for a voice talent. So if you have to record in a larger room, try to set up facing a corner if you can, and make sure that you have a barrier behind you and above you (i.e. a moving blanket, etc.). This will help to contain the sound, making it not only sound better, but likely easier to record.

Acoustic Isolation -or- Sound Proofing

“In space…no one can hear you scream…”

This is the practice of keeping sound from getting into or escaping from your booth. This is hard to pull off, and here’s why: Because sound moves through the air, quite literally anywhere in your booth that isn’t sealed airtight is going to let sound in/out. Furthermore, sound will vibrate through objects and walls unless they are totally isolated from vibrations (i.e. suspended in the vacuum of space, or as close to it as we can get).

In other words…a perfectly sound proof booth is basically impossible for most average humans.

But here are some things we can do to improve our isolation as best we can:

• Choose a recording space that is naturally insulated from noise.

  • For example, say you have two closets in your home that might be good for recording. Closet A has one wall between it and the outside, while closet B has two walls. Well then, Closet B is more insulated from noise by one whole wall. (At least from noise originating outside your home.)

  • Take into account the daily traffic around your booth. If Closet B is right next to a high traffic area like the kitchen or bathroom, maybe the other option is “better” after all?

• Build or purchase a booth.

  • More established voice performers might consider this for some extra peace of mind. Essentially you’re building a room within a room, offering you one more barrier of isolation, and oftentimes the walls of these booths deaden sound more effectively than ‘regular’ walls in homes.

• Accept your fate.

  • Maybe not what you want to hear, but again, you can only do so much with respect to sound isolation—at least without committing a significant amount of time and resources to a solution. People understand that! For example, once during a live recording session, a neighbor of mine decided that was the perfect time to use a power drill. I was of course mortified and immediately super stressed out, but the client I was recording with was incredibly understanding and it ended up not being a big issue. Do what you can, and leave it at that.

Hopefully this gives some helpful insight and/or guidance into how to set yourself up in a “well treated space” and to get great sounding recordings out of your setup.

If any questions come up for you about this or anything else, drop me a line and I’ll do what I can to help out!