I made one last year: repurposed some industrial shelving to make a metal frame for the booth, moving blankets on sides and top, 4 diy gobos (wood frames, rockwool, mesh, wheels, nothing fancy) that interlock around it and can be used separately. when making something like this, a good idea is to use a little light inside and have an opening for air (I installed a spare USB computer fan that I turn on between takes), it can get pretty hot in those blankets. just large enough to sit with an acoustic or to sing standing up. great video and great idea👍for me this was a very inexpensive project, but makes quite a difference
I built some BBC quadratic diffusers, but the room was too small so they didn't help as much as I'd hoped they would. One thing that did help is very thick foam in certain places. Kinda like the mirror trick, how you can have a helper hold a mirror against a wall and ceiling while you sit in your mixing position, anywhere you can see the speakers in the mirror will give quick reflections, so you can deaden just those spots and get a somewhat decent sound *in that particular spot*? I did the same mirror thing looking at a room mic, then putting a guitar amp where I was looking from. So the mic was listening to the amp the same way our ears listen to the near fields. It doesn't sound like Abbey Roads or something, but it damn sure doesn't sound like a spare bedroom either. Sounds surprisingly okay. Definitely usable. I just stole the idea and applied it to amp / mic instead of ears / monitors
12 acoustic panels, 2'x4' wood frames filled with 4" of mineral wool insulation and wrapped in breathable fabric. Had my small daughter help me with the frames
I have a pop-up shelter that I use for ice fishing that makes a great vocal booth. Drape 2-3 moving blankets over it and it’s even better. They also make quilted insulated pop-up shelters that’s essentially thick thermal moving blankets made out of dual layer 600 denier fabric that I imagine would work very well also. So, if your an ice angler and have a decent shelter, you already have a vocal booth!
This is so cool (no pun intended) Love creative thinking to find a solution. I will look at these online to see what makes them tick for sure Thanks so much for watching and sharing your experiences
Awesome idea thanks for the video! I've been considering something very similar. A few points that may help folks who build this ,what you are referring to in the video as unions are screwed couplings. What you needed are actual screwed unions. Unions are 2 piece fittings that allow you to connect pipe in the middle without loosening the pipe your connecting to, basically a swivel type joint (an image search would explain better). This would allow you to actually make in each piece tight and then make up the unions to connect the pieces. I would use teflon tape on the threads to assist in making in the pieces, this would allow the pieces to make in deeper especially if your just making in by hand. It would also aid in disassembly in case you needed to move it someday by eliminating rust interference in the joint. A pipe wrench or channel lock type pliers would really help to make a more solid structure. When I degrease pipe I just use a few drops of dawn mixed with water in a spray bottle and then wipe with a dry cloth.
Great video.......I built a vocal booth for Linda. I actually made frames out of wood and then hung them off one of the corners of the wall placed installation in the frames and covered them with installation blankets. Lastly I made one more frame coming off the wall, used installation and blankets. I left the top open, to allow a bigger feel and not so dead sound. All for around $150.00....
Something tells me I should have listened to my father more when he wanted to teach me basic wood working skills. But alas here I am fabricated with pipes 🤷🏽♂️🙌🏽. I love the description of the way you build yours. Thanks for watching.
My singer and I built bass traps using 2x4 wood for framing, sound dampening insulation in the core, black fabric from Walmart, and used a staple gun to attach the fabric. Easy peasy! We made quite a few of them, since his basement had no walls and a lot of space to fill.
that is for sure another great way!!! Must have looked great too. I personally have zero carpentry skills and had a good deal of pipe laying around and just went for it. 😂😂
WOW! Way to illustrate the need for some dampening and shaping of the sound... I currently don't have anything BUT my 'studio' space is pretty limited, I have been planning on building a kind of booth or at least a 'screen' of sorts... maybe some ceiling hung canopy of sorts... anything to kill the reflections but also be temporary in nature so the day job can also still function properly!! Thanks for this, the cogs are in motion!! 😌👍
yes depending on the space and how you need to utilize it , hanging options could also work very well. lots of luck building it ,hope it comes out amazing.
For my ‘vocal booth’, I stuck 3M clips on the wall right near the ceiling in the corner of my room. Then I put matching clips on a couple of heavy moving blankets. With the orientation of the blankets and clips, I have them around me 360. Great thing about this method is I can put up or bring down the moving blankets as needed so it isn’t as permanent.
I live in an apartment building and need to cut down the sound of my vocals. Does this type of booth help? Have you ever measured the dB of a vocalist when not in the booth and then with them in the booth? Measured both times from outside the booth.
Thanks, cool project. I think you could save a good amount of money and effort if you used PVC pipe. If you use 1 1/2" pipe, you can do pullups on it so strength would not be an issue.
fully agree about the PVC option with the larger pipe for strength. Thanks for the tip and I really need to get back to some pull ups in my life. hope you have a wonderful day
@@static-producelikeapro7845 a piece of plywood to bolt the flanges for more stability,those blankets also come in white. Some deflection is needed, I hear resonances especially during vocal belting by your lovely assistant!
I do a far more "cowboy" version of this using my absorbers, extendable mop poles and horse blankets. Yours is so much better. Whether it's slung together on the fly or purpose built this is a must for home recording. Your method would also be great for building a ceiling absorber for live drums.
That is a such a cool use of available materials!!!! Believe it or not when I was kid I spend a bunch of time around my dad’s friend who was in the rodeo, so I have slung my share of horse blankets!!! probably looks way cooler. Thanks for sharing your experience with us!!
@@static-producelikeapro7845 the recording space ends up smelling like a donkeys balls but they're really thick and get the job done, haha. Also got your Alice Cooper reference. What an album. Hope to see more of you on the channel. Cheers.
That’s awesome 😎 and Thank you. Yes it was lot of fun to just assemble for someone like me having zero carpentry skills. please let us know how it goes.
I am lucky to have exposed beams in my basement studio, so instead of building a frame I used Auralex glued to both sides of cheap screen panels that I then grommeted at the top corners to hang from hooks screwed into the ceiling beams to form a hanging enclosure around a vocal mic. I also screwed hooks along the exterior of the studio space so that I could then hang the panels along the walls to keep them out of the way when not in use. Works very well and relatively inexpensive - and very, very easy to assemble using heavy-duty double-sided foam tape reinforced with Gorilla spray adhesive.
Love this vid and idea. Won't help much for low end and low mids, but does "marvelously well" for taming higher reflections. If space isn't a huge concern, adding several inches of insulation on all sides and on top will help even out some of those other problem areas. But if that's not possible, try to play with placement of the booth inside the room. It's lightweight enough to put on casters and roll around. A decent starting point would be sort of near a corner, roughly 2/5 from the nearest two walls with the singer facing out toward the middle of the room, usually that will have the least standing waves and most even response, but that's not set in stone since every space is different, you gotta play with it and try different things to find the sweet spot.
Yes amazing advice !! I think with a plastic pipe fabrication it would easy to add parts to help with the insulating idea for sure. and casters would be a super smart addition. I did have this booth placed in a corner, and the Vocalist pointing towards the open room. But it would be interesting for sure to have gotten it further away from the wall. thanks again for watching and your feedback.
I just enjoy quality content and am amazed we can watch this stuff for free. This is one of my favorite RU-vid channels. Let's face it, 99% of us are working in sub-optimal spaces just trying to get the best quality result we can. That's not a bad thing, but it does require some flexibility and out of the box thinking. It's just an unfortunate fact of life that a small square-ish room with low ceilings is difficult to get an even response in. Everything is rhe wrong proportions and too close together. It's just acoustics. So we all (well, almost all of us, myself included) gotta make do with what we have available. Ideas like this can help a lot. Thanks.
I can fully relate and appreciate where you are coming from. I also enjoy the quest for the solution to working in space like that. Hope you have a wonderful day.
That's similar to the concept I was thinking off, buying a clothes changing/fitting room(that you see in clothes shops) small square and then replacing the curtains with more acoustic cloth.
We built the desk for my room. Ikea drawer units holding up a jointed pine slab. I installed desk grommets to hide the cable clutter. Rack units for desk legs were outside of the wife-acceptance-limitations. At least I have some drawers so I can hide small purchases like effects pedals and microphones. We wanted to use a hardwood panel for the desktop but the saw at the store wasn't rated for 1-1/4" hardwood. The pine looks really nice stained, and I'm glad we didn't have to fill a bunch of voids. I'm currently wiring up a 4-send/ 4-return stage box. I expect to build some 2RU tall hutches to slide in under the computer screens at some point.
I live in an apartment so I basically do a very janky version of this. I've got the mic on a stand in a reflection shield to cut back on the bounce, I have two kind of heavy duty tripods that are for video lights and stuff and put those to the left and right behind me and drape a cloth blanket of like 2,5x2,5 meters over the triangle. I set this up on top of those rubber tiles that you rest gym equipment on instead of the wooden floor and it cuts back on the room noise significantly. Without it you can hear the walls echo in the recording and with it, its so reduced that you would either have to listen for it very carefully or you don't hear it at all. Works like a charm and costs like 200 euros or something. Best part, it folds up in to such a small package that it hardly takes up any room to store but I would do a bigger blanket than 2,5x2,5 meters because it doesn't actually reach the floor.
thanks for sharing I was doing something very similar prior to constructing this booth so many different ways to get to the same solution hope you have a great day
I really think some of these help with quieter singers and voice overs. I think you hear more resonances the louder a singer gets though. I've built a small vocal booth before. You can tell when you hit those certain frequencies. Plugins like sooth and smooth operator can help sometimes if you get some small build-up. Some high pass eq if you see the low end bump. Just my experience., though.
I made something very similar with plastic pipe and moving blankets. My wife made a square cap for the roof, and I have hooks around the top of the frame to hang the blankets on the grommet holes. I also have a iPad Mini mount for my lines. I am not able to leave it setup unfortunately, but the setup and tear down only takes 10 minutes,.
I built acoustic panels, two 19” racks, an electric guitar, and monitor stands and saved some money by doing so. Using some self made equipment gives me an extra layer of pleasure when working.
I built my vocal booth by starting with a cheap ‘mis-measure’ double-glazed upvc door from a local window company and built a timber floor-to-ceiling frame around that. Plasterboard, acoustic insulation roll and foam panels etc. Probably cost around £500 ($800?) but it works perfectly and has paid for itself many times over.
How much sound leaks out from the booth? Would this be a good solution to keep recording from disturbing others in an apartment setting? Thanks for the awesome video.
I would not rely on it for full sound proofing needs. You can definitely hear what’s happening in there. It just limits reflections. hoping that helps thank you for watching the video
@@Producelikeapro Hey Warren, Mike is an old friend, truly great song writer and has one hell of a voice. I have even had the pleasure back him for a show. We have also shared many of marquise over the years together with Ours and Mike on the shame show.
I basically built the same booth except I used 1inch pvc plastic pipe, much cleaner, I also used the same sound blankets but I bought a grommet punch a installed grommets where I needed them to attach the sides of the blankets to the upright tubing. My total cost was $185 everything included. Totally worth the investment.
Former well guy / plumber here Those pieces you call unions are actually couplings. There are pieces called unions though, and those are great because you can join preassembled sections of pipe together without compromising tightness of joints. Unions would also make it much easier to take down and reassemble if this would be something that someone would like to take down and put together quickly if they have limited space / want to move the booth. Would also make the assembly go quicker too. Would recommend people building this to use unions instead of couplings! Hope this is of help. Anyways love the build! I'm going to have to build this soon!
Amazing and helpful info!!! I just recently learned this from a friend of mine who is a plumber as well while we took the booth down for our move. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!!
I built a pvc version of a booth like this - with the exact same Amazon blankets - a month ago. Do you feel as if there is any additional benefit, or even drawback, from using an additional reflexion filter on the booth? I’m currently using a Troy studio in mine (which is in the booth in an untreated room) and I want to know if that is making the sound tighter or possibly harming the signal from additional resonances or cancellations
No laugths please, I am broke :I have bought a mobile shower tent for camping for 30€. This is my booth. Cannot put too much blankets on it though, otherwise it would fall on top of me while singing. May still be a good take though 🤣
Very nice work. Based on past experience having down something similar in the past: 1, a lighter coloured choice of moving blankets gives more perceived space than black and over all better light as the blankets absorb more than sound. 2 - realize that it is going to getta hella HOT in there. For anyone recording sweaty rock / metal singers, keep this in mind and have a lot of deodorant on hand.
these are all very great points. and duly noted about ventilation. I guess by utilizing a basic grommet making tool the color choices can increase as well. thanks for watching 😎
Great tip about the lighter fabric. I wouldn't have thought of that. Also agree - deodorant is a huge part of a singer's life that I don't think is talked about enough 😆
i built one of these back in 2006 and still use it lol. but i went even more cheap and just used conduit and electrical boxes. a fraction of the price of steel pipe.
My entire space is about the size of three of those booths. I really need to learn how to isolate it better. But something like this won't fit. The ideas, however, are still perfectly sound. (Pun ALWAYS Intended!) I just need to learn how to adapt them to a ver irregular shaped, tiny space. Thank you for sharing this. Rock on, STATIC.
wow those blankets really jumped in price since then. This looks great though, definitely going to put together something similar to get out of the cramped closet I currently record in.
that was a big part of the inspiration our previous studio was all in the same room and as I mentioned in the video one of the major cravings was to give the singer some privacy in their own zone as well as help with reflection and even though yes it could be built a little more permanent with wood frames, the pipe either being PVC or iron is something that could be taken apart rather quickly and moved to a new spot if you need. thanks so much for watching the video 🙌🏽
I would suggest using a reverse threaded coupling for the top piece. That way when you thread left, the right side also threads at the same time. Same thing with the horizontal cross bars. Screw a short “shoulder” piece of pipe into one of the tees (one on both sides) and use the full pice with a reverse coupling to join the cross bars. Otherwise, you’ll never get those areas truly tight. You could also use a fitting called a “union” for the same purpose but they are a little more bulky.
Yes!!!! I learned about this after when my good friend who is a plumber came by and I was showing him the booth. He said exactly what you said 😂🤷🏽♂️ I am always learning. And that would make assemble smoother for sure.
@@jameslifetimelearner yeah. That’s probably what I would do too. You could probably fill the PVC with something if it felt too light or flimsy. I guess 1” schedule 80 would probably do the trick by itself though.
it wasn’t really designed too much for proofing and you could hear the vocals outside The intention is to limit the reflection that the vocals may experience in the open room as well as give the singer a sense of separation if the studio is just one room. and it does block some subtle background noise out but again it’s purpose was for limiting reflection A more permanent installed constructed booth using insulation and proofing materials would probably get you to what you are describing. thanks so much for watching the video hope you have a wonderful day
How can I drown out the sounds of children screaming? The room is a 6 X 6 foot room in the basement of my house. Would your system work for this issue?
Thanks for the video! I built a pvc version of a booth like this - with the exact same Amazon blankets - a month ago. Do you feel as if there is any additional benefit, or even drawback, from using an additional reflexion filter on the booth? I’m currently using a Troy studio in mine (which is in the booth in an untreated room) and I want to know if that is making the sound tighter or possibly harming the signal from additional resonances or cancellations
for the set up I had I didn’t require any additional material. however I didn’t realize how bad I even needed the booth until I made it and got to hear the comparisons. so my best advice is to experiment tracking with your additional treatment and not. it raises the idea in the spirit of experimentation on how different materials would respond overall. thanks for watching 🙌🏽💜
You wouldn't benefit much from an extra reflexion foam filter, all that does is reduce mid to high frequencies going into a room and bouncing around back into the mic, which, is effectively what this booth is solving and more. And the curve of these filters in close proximity to the mic does have an effect on the sound.
with the wood and skill it would be a great option. Many ways to get a very similar result. Myself I have zero carpentry skills and should have listened to my father more when younger. So I am way handier with pipe fabrication, also I have a few tables and shelves of the same esthetic. Thanks for watching and the feedback 🙌🏽
Cool project. If I ever decide to build a vocal booth, it would be much bigger size than tis one. I like the recordings of quiet stuff, but I also hear some serious limitations for more powerful vocals. The bigger the room - the better.
This is very cool! Possible new video series! If so I’d love to see videos on the drumbrella and kick drum mic robot made by (I think), Eric Valentine.
I've just recently finished building a guitar wall mount for my wall. I'm currently sorting out the studio for recording. You can see it on my channel 🙂🙏
Don't want a permanent structure (i.e. your studio is also your bedroom)? Get a few sets of decent lighting stands, some heavy duty backdrop extensible crossbars, as many moving blankets as you need (hint: buy slightly less heavy blankets for far lower cost and double them, if needed, for more mass; I bought a grommeting kit and grommeted myself), and some curtain hooks. Assemble your booth in less than 15 minutes and tear it down in even less. A variation here (single wheeled center-mount T-stand rather than 2 separate stands with crossbar): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4ZeECB76Pdo.html
Interestingly enough, there's plenty of footage of James Hetfield and Chester Bennington recording in this type of makeshift booths. However, the blanket material doesn't look exactly healthy to me, maybe we should pay attention if there are any materials of oil refining or glass wool or synthetics applied, and opt for certain natural materials instead.
Make sure you have some ventilation, or your singers may pass out. Also, no candles! You may want to put pipe tape on the threads so you can disassemble later.
those are led fake candles, trying to limit the terminology of “that session was lit” to only a metaphor . and yes the ventilation is an important thing to note for sure we were speaking to someone on a previous comment about a simple USB fan. thanks for watching the video and thank you for all your helpful feedback
@@static-producelikeapro7845 Figured what is in there now was powered. More worried about the vocalist who wants the candles or incenses or some other flammable thinks
Yes that will totally work,as we mentioned at some point in the video it can go many ways based of desired price point and just material preferences. If I didn’t have a bunch of pipe already I would have went that route. Thanks for watching the video 😎
please don't use moving blankets, they give off fibers creating nasty coughing and potential health issues. Best to use sound blankets designed for this, worth the extra bit o cash especially for a booth this size
Can truly cut cost in half with plastic pipe and lighter blankets that you put your own grommets or holes in. And the spirit of this is for people with zero carpentry skills like myself. So pipe connected was my option. Many have mentioned to simply hang blankets from the ceiling as a reasonable option. And depending on wood cost and skill a simple frame can also save. If you want please scan some of the other comments, lots of great advice in the many ways to a similar result. Hope you have a wonderful day 😎🙌🏽