If you are interested in having a good room to record voices in a professional way, we offer tailor-made solutions, ideal especially for those who do not have large spaces or who do not want to spend excessive amounts of money to treat a larger room. A vocal booth usually has a size of 3-5 sq m. We create vocal booth in various forms in order to better optimize the spaces of your environment. The standard sizes are rectangular, but we can design triangular, hexagonal or booths in the most suitable shapes for your environment. If you consider that useless accessories such as the reflexion filter cost 260 euros, you will have all our support to get a vocal booth like those that are used to record artists from all over the world in the most renowned recording studios at an affordable cost. A vocal booth is also suitable for recording musical instruments such as guitar, bass, etc.
Why design a vocal booth with us?
The voice is the most important tool in a song, so you have to make the most of it. A voice can take on a different character based on the choice of the audio chain (preamp, microphone, compressor, eq, etc.) but what affects the most is precisely the type of acoustic treatment. There are various schools of thought about acoustic treatment, some are mainly based on acoustic diffusion, others only on absorption, others on a mix of the two schools of thought, all of this can be done with different techniques, different materials, thicknesses and densities, as well as a different target of the reverberation decay time, as you can see the variations are many while following the same school of thought. Our acoustic approach is based on that of some of the most famous acoustic engineers who have created rooms in which the voices of many international artists have been filmed. If you have good ears you can see that most Italian voices sound different from the voices recorded in American or British studios, it's just a matter of taste, do you prefer a neutral and crystalline voice or full-bodied and detailed? We like to obtain very characteristic voices where detail and body should not be missing.
If you need to record your voice professionally, it will not be enough to buy thousands of euro microphones such as a neuman u87, u47, Akg C12vr, Brauner or high-end preamps such as those of Focusrite, Avalon, Millennia, Manley, Amek, Neve or SSL, it won't even be enough to use compressors or hardware equalizers !.
Why don't you get professional vocal shots?
We often contact users who have super professional audio chains but who are unable to obtain satisfactory results, some think that there are very sophisticated ways to treat a voice, in reality the sound of a good voice recording is closely related to the room in which you are records.
Is it possible to get good results with portable vocal acoustic filters?
If you don't know, there are commercial voice filters that have the aim of treating the area around the microphone acoustically, among the famous microphone filters we find the Se electronics reflexion filter / space, Haston halo, Primacoustic VoxGuard, Auralex MudGuard and Kaotica Eyeball. Some of these work better, others worse but none of them will allow you to get professional results in a bad room. These filters can only be used for corrective use in rooms that already sound good. The reason why they cannot work is because they are too thin to work on low frequencies, generally they can make small improvements from 1000 hz upwards, moreover to treat a small or medium-sized vocal room you have to treat all the walls of the room not just the area behind the microphone. Based on this, an interesting filter was invented, the Isovox Mobile Vocal Booth V2 that works better than the other filters listed above but still does not allow you to obtain professional vocal shots, it is a compromise to obtain acceptable recordings considering that it costs just under 1000 euros. Isovox makes the sound of voice recordings too dead,
Is it enough to treat a room with DIY acoustic panels?
Many non-professional recording studios resort to DIY, there are those who use egg cartons or those who use pyramid sound-absorbing panels. In both solutions, good results will not be obtained, on the contrary, the pyramidal panels could worsen the microphone recordings as they mainly absorb the medium-high frequencies making the frequency response of the room unbalanced.
Is it enough to buy panels from companies with acoustic certifications?
On the web you can find various acoustic panel manufacturers offering free acoustic advice and absorption certifications, among these we find Vicoustic, Gikacoustics, Primacoustic, Hofa, Auralex, etc. The panels of these companies have been tested in laboratories, so they have graphs showing the sound absorption coefficient, but despite this their panels will not be sufficient to professionally treat a vocal booth or a recording room. for instruments as in the case of a room smaller than 40 square meters it is necessary to cover almost all the surfaces except the floor with large thicknesses of sound-absorbing material and then reintroduce excessively absorbed frequencies. For reasons of space and practicality, there are no acoustic panel manufacturers that make panels of suitable dimensions, so you will need to have acoustic walls created. The panels of these companies can help to improve the frequency response of a room used as a control room as compared to a voice recording room it does not need to cover all the walls, considering that they will only allow good compromises as it does not they will be able to achieve super linear performance within a range of 6 db in the room frequency response.
How to treat a room to record voices?
Each room must be treated differently, based on the size a target decay time is defined (RT30 or RT60), so if for example in a room we decide to obtain a decay time of 200ms, we will introduce the right amount of absorbent materials in so as not to go beyond that threshold. Once this first step is finished the room could sound dead due to the fact that the broadband absorbing materials do not absorb frequencies in a linear way but tend to absorb high frequencies more, so after having made some acoustic measurements we will add some wooden slats. of different widths calculated in order to accurately add the missing frequencies, but be careful, it will not be enough to add some wooden slats at random, avoid DIY, acoustics is science and we have precise criteria for this.
Is it better to treat the whole room or create a vocal booth?
Treating the whole room to get good vocal recordings is very expensive as you will have to buy a lot of rock wool, wood, etc. and this will also cause it to shrink. An interesting solution is the creation of a vocal booth, it is a vocal booth with an area of at least 4 square meters. In the forums there is a lot of wrong information about vocal booths, we often hear that they have a canned sound, this is true but only if they are not treated properly.
What does our vocal booth design service include?
When a client contacts us for the design of a vocal booth we first want to know the size and shape of the room, we will start the work only in case there are the requirements for the design of a professional acoustic treatment, in some cases when the dimensions they are too limited we are forced to refuse the job. When a room has an unsuitable shape such as a square room, we propose to change the dimensions using plasterboard walls. With our vocal booth design service we will follow you very scrupulously for this reason it will not be necessary to create a 3D rendering that we can provide optionally, the most important thing is that a good carpenter and in some cases a plasterer or a handyman bricklayer.
What are the steps for the acoustic treatment of the vocal booth?
From the moment we are asked to design a vocal booth we will proceed with these steps:
1 - Changing the size of the room if not suitable
2 - Calculation to define the target decay time
3 - Creation of sound-absorbing walls using wooden frames filled with rock wool and plastic
4 - First acoustic measurement to define which frequencies are lacking in the decay time
5 - Insertion of wooden staves tuned as helmholtz resonators
6 - Last acoustic measurement with any changes to be made