Add a vocal booth to my existing Studio?

[hugo_inside]

Hi again,

After many years without saying anything here, now I'm back to ask you about the posibility of buiding a small vocal booth in my recording studio to isolate vocals from other instruments while recording.

Here it is the plan that John made for me many years ago:



I was thinking of doing it in the lower right corner of the recording room using some kind of diamond shape and using a glass door with 3 leaves of glass (4x16x4 mm). What do you think about it?

Here you can see the recording studio in a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CC6glHqxy8

[hugo_inside]

No ideas?

[Soundman2020]

I was thinking of doing it in the lower right corner of the recording room using some kind of diamond shape

I guess you could do that, but it would make a small room even smaller, and would drastically alter the acoustics of your live room Do you really need that iso booth?

The vocal booth would have to be tiny, so it would have to be very dead inside. It probably wouldn't sound good.

If you really, truly need it so desperately, then it probably could be done, but at the expense of completely changing the sound and feel of your existing room. Is there no other place in the building where you could create a better vocal booth, without damaging the existing studio?

and using a glass door with 3 leaves of glass (4x16x4 mm). What do you think about it?

A 3-leaf is never a good idea, if it can be avoided. 2-leaf will give you better isolation in the same space for lower cost and with less materials. But I'm not sure you have enough space to fit in a proper 2-leaf wall, so there wouldn't be much point to two-leaf glass in a single leaf door... I would probably go with a "superdoor" style door with a single thick pane of laminated glass of the same surface density as the rest of the door.

- Stuart -

[hugo_inside]

And what about buying a portable one to use it when it's needed?

[ABitAnalog]

It seems that I pm'd Hugo instead of replying to the post as intended. I plead: very late, iPhone, and children.

So, here we go again with some editing so my thoughts (hopefully) make more sense.

And what about buying a portable one to use it when it's needed?

A portable booth may be something to try, but I think that it depends on what it meant by a booth. To me, booth in this sense means something bigger than many of the commercial items. I have built a diy, Real Traps style set of 2'x2' panels with 2" rockwool in oak frames which helped deal with some reflections off of a window and the walls in general in a small room. This SOS article provides some actual data for a number of commercial options: Sound On Sound - Vocal Booths. I have a hard time thinking that these "booths" are a cure-all but YMMV. Though I have never tried anything other than my diy one, I never really thought, intuitively, that they would do much and certainly not at the low end, which may or may not matter in your particular case. I have often wondered whether creating a (partial) enclosure with a number of 2'x8'x4" batts of rockwool suitably framed and possibly not even covered to reduce mid and higher reflections would not be a reasonable solution, cost and space wise, in an otherwise treated live room.

Compared to the cost and time of construction of an additional room that may change in unknown ways your live room, it may be worth a test run with something that is "nondestructive." Others with better experience may tell me I am all wet here. But for the cost of a few batts of rockwool and something to frame them it may be worth testing yourself before any destructive remodeling.