The Vocal Cube and Closet Vocal Booth
When I first tried my hand at recording at lines (for requests on freesound.org), I knew nothing about room treatment. The room I do my recording in about the size of a medium bedroom. It’s carpeted (which is good for recording purposes), but has bare walls which happily bounce my voice back towards my microphone. My mic picks up these reflections (echoes) and faithfully sends them to my recording software. Freakin’ annoying because once these reflections are recorded into your voice track, it’s pretty much impossible to remove them in software.
Ambient noise is also another pain in the butt. A furnace, air conditioner, computer fans, street traffic, etc can all hinder your otherwise perfect performance and possibly cost you a role. There are plugins and filters for most recording software to help reduce this, but they can only do so much before they make your voice sound like you’re talking into a glass jar.
Why should you care? Because a nice dry vocal is WAY easier for a director/producer to work with than a vocal that sounds like it’s been recorded in your kitchen with the A/C on. Maybe a director has narrowed their auditions down to you and once other actor. Maybe that other actor’s audition is 5% less impressive than yours, but 15% better recorded. They’ve reduced their ambient noise levels and room reflections and have generally given the impression that they are a little more professional than you.
Like most amateur voice actors, I can’t justify spending a few grand on installing a professional grade vocal booth in my home. But there ARE cheap, DIY ways of improving the quality of your recordings! Here are a couple of vids. One shows how to make your own portable vocal booth and the other shows how one artist turned his closet into a vocal booth using mattress pad foam. Both examples use materials which are relatively inexpensive and easy to find. Feel free to comment and share how you improve the sound in your recording space.
DIY Portable Vocal Booth
DIY Closet Vocal Booth