Building a recording booth,with a serious lack of knowledge

Hi everyone, I'm really glad that I found this forum by accident. Now to my problem: I'm thinking about building a recording booth, mainly for vocals and acoustic instruments. I spent the last hours just searching through and reading the threads. Now that my brain starts to hurt, I think I should stop reading for now and ask some questions. I want to put the booth on the upper level of our shed, which has a height of a little more than 2 metres from floor to ceiling. Unfortunately I just can use an area of about 2,5 m x 3 m for the booth. My budget is about 600 to 800$, I could even go to 1000$, but that would really hurt. 1. Do the "ideal" room ratios from http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html also work for booths? Or is this completely another thing? 2. Knightfly posted in another thread that you shouldn't build a booth with any two dimensions the same.I wonder if there is some kind of rule or guideline at which angles the walls should stand to each other? 3. I wonder if it's possible to build the booth in a way so that it's a.) expandable (like a component system) b.) also suitable for drum recordings (which makes things quite a bit more complicated, if I understood things right so far) :roll: 4. There's an unbelievable amount of information here and I'm just overwhelmed. I would be grateful if someone can set me on the right track with something like: Hey, you should go there and read this or that. I'm just too much of a rookie to distinguish the things that are important for my plan from the things that don't. So please, any links or general advices? If you need more information or think something like "Thou shouldst not ask stupid questions" or whatever, please comment.

Hi Nick - welcome to the site - you guys amaze me with your command of English ;) Look - for a vox booth you want a room with a short reverbtime as you don't want room colouration added if you want an upfont, close vocal sound. therefore you need to treat the room so ALL frequencies reverbtime are lowered. For the high end - that's easy - egg cartons will do it :):) but to get the lower frequencies down is harder. the hardest frequencies to tame are those below 100hz - yet the human voice doesn't produce those frequencies - hence the LF rolloff switch on most quality mikes. So you'd be best to work on lowering from 100hz - 20khz region. Quality insulation like 703 will absorb well down to 500hz and further so your problem area is 100hz - 500hz. For these frequencies I use slot resonators as they not only absorb the low-mids they also reflect the high end so it's a matter of balancing these two absorbers in your room so your highs aren't wiped out totally (what people refer to as a DEAD room). Your low ceiling will be the closest wall to the singer so in a small room like yours it's best to wipe it out totally with a layer of 703. this leaves your other walls for treatment. the other advantage of slots is that they can be angled to break up the parallel walls in your room - slots on two of the walls will do that and if you have a timber floor you will have a balance between the absorbing surfaces (703) and the reflecting surfaces - timber floor and slots. Check out these slots I designed for a Van in Canada - They are made using veneer plywood and the slots are routed out with a router. the areas behind the slots are divided into separate chambers for each slot width. I hope this helps. cheers john

Hi John, thanks for the good advice. :) Now that I know what to do, the next question is: Where do I get the material ? Does anyone know who sells these 703's in Germany ? I checked for myself on the Owens-Corning homepage, but didn't find anybody, not even a wholesaler. Or is it enough to get fiber glass panels from another company, just with the same thickness as these 703's? Thanks, Nick