Well, regarding mic-placement/angle/distance, our favorite bespectacled gent with the magnificent-mustache at VOBS - Voice Over Body Shop (big fan!) has stated things which disagree with "mic placement not mattering that much", as has George. I tested what Dan & George said myself using an NTG 5 (like George uses), an AKG c214, a Lewitt 540 and a Neumann tlm 103. In all cases a slight angle (20º or so) plus having the mic diaphragm closer to what Dan does helped immensely, unless going for the vaunted "voice of God" ala proximity-effect.
I can't thank you enough for the always helpful and engaging information. The commitment you have to strengthening the VO community is a continued inspiration.
Don't treat your vocal booth only in the vocal spectrum. Treat your vocal booth so sounds from outside- or feet-sound are dempend as well and can be recorded without a low-cut filter. This will make the recording sound so much more natural. Diffusion can be very nice in the form of Binary panels. I just spent two weeks adjusting a conference room from 1 by 2 meters and every time we found that during the recording the binary panels sound the best. If you place only absorption the room wil sound dead in the mid and high frequency. Placing the binary panels made it sound more natural.
Thanks for focusing on acoustic treatment! This is so incredibly important to get right for the best results in a voiceover recording. Great to see the numbers and charts, nice and NERDY! He's got a great sounding room, I venture to guess he has a very large ceiling cloud above him to get such a dry sound in that large, somewhat sparsely decorated room. There are definitely frequencies clearly audible in some male voices below 80hz, and small booths can really resonate badly even lower than that. Let me know if you ever want to talk about tuning smaller voiceover booths specifically.
I just ordered a Chines eIsolation Booth to use as a VO Workspace. It's an insulated box that 1m x 1m (3' x3' interior) and 2.3m high. It's going into a Balcony space that leaves a 1"-2" all around it and some 3' ceiling space above. It has a glass door and a glass side opposite. It's meant to be a Karaoke Cube, Phone Booth, Quiet Room for Study or work, etc. Clearly I'll need to pad the glass wall. I bought it because where I live is under constant home renovation stress, all year round, and circumstances dictate that I cannot relocate. Be that as it may, with a small, cube shaped "closet" to work in, To what extent would facing the mic into one corner and putting thick absorption in the same corner, be of benefit to controlling room reflections? Similarly, given the insulated room, and the close air gap around it, to what extent would additional insulation (of what type of material) between the box and the walls/windows be effective? Fascinating discussion. Right now, I'm thinking I've just wasted all my dough. 😔
I was hoping you guys would have spoken to the issue of which microphones are best suited for poorly treated rooms or rooms that don't have adequate acoustic treatment seeing as it's not quite as easy to experiment with a new mic every time you're not happy with the acoustics.
Badly treated rooms are not good for VO at all. But if you must use one then a shotgun mic would pick up the least of the reflections back into the mic as they have a very narrow field. The worst mic in a bad room is a hyper sensitive condenser mic like a Neumann tlm 103 or U 47. They will pick up and exaggerate all defects.
Since I'm just starting out in VO work and setting up my first temporary sound booth with plans to build a more permanent one when we renovate my office, this was fascinating because I'll have the opportunity to build a true recording studio in my home in a few months. A lot of technical jargon that was above my head right now, but enough layman's info for me to get a really good idea of how to build it. What was cool was to find that for my temporary space I intuitively, or logically, understood exactly where to treat the most based on how I'm setting it up. This was very interesting, I really learned a lot about acoustics. 🙏🧡🎤💜
I had what I thought was an unusual noise problem in my 4x6 WhisperRoom. It was a pesky 120hz noise that the mics were picking up. Using an app on my android phone, called "Spectroid", I walked around the house exploring to find the source of the 120hz noise. Living in Texas we have several Hunter ceiling fans. Some of these fans were the source of the noise. Apparently all of their fans have start capacitors that mitigate noise while running, but are subject to failure after they have been around for awhile. Turning off the fans solves the problem. When time allows, I will replace the capacitors and verify that they are silent once again.
I am not an Audio Guy, nor am i a "Creator", but i am interested in physics and i just love how you guys nerd up over this topic. Thanks so much. Its just so interesting to listen to :)
This was so helpful! You just saved me a couple hundred dollars. I am nearly down with sound absorption for my home studio. I will not by any diffusers do to the small size of the room. Do I need to treat the entire ceiling for sound absorption? Love your channel so much info.
Yep, that covers pretty much everything you need to work through. The other things I found really helpful when trying to understand acoustics were AMROC room mode calculator, & REQ wizard (both free) + a measurement mic. With those & a basic understanding of waterfalls & RT60 spec's from YT videos I pretty much nailed my night time/part time booth. "Day time noise levels" however = :-( Meaning I had to raise & de-couple the laminate flooring + isolate the booth from the floor with additional layers.
Gods, talking about daytime noise levels and low frequency intrusiveness? If it isn't the car-obsessed folk around here with their deep rumbly engines coming-and-going that I can hear from several blocks away, it's the thirteen-odd species of native Aussie birds that use my backyard as their local hangout spot to gossip and taunt me from just outside my room ahahaha Who needs sleep, eh? Night time VO recording FTW!
@@Laneth For sure, Night time for the win + it's cooler 😫 This years challenges have included recent military aircraft movements, motorway resurfacing/widening, & a new neighbour with a barking dog & a hot tub! There's always a new challenge. 👍
One thing I noticed for sound isolation is something in my apratment. It has two sets of double pane glass. These windows are extremely heavy and relatively air tight. I hear more noise from my neighbors than from outside.
Outstanding interview with Jesco. You asked a lot of the same questions I would have asked if I were able to interview him. With respect to sound absorption panels, I fully understand the depth aspect, but I wonder how many panels I would actually need for a 10' x 7' x 8' space. Covering every square inch of wall and ceiling isn't practical.
The air gap info lets me save massively on absorption material making DIY panels. Can just use a deeper frame and get better results for almost no cost.
Using well shielded Mogami XLR cables and moving all audio equipment away from anything electric will also give you a lower noise floor from having less interference in your signal.
This video cleared up A LOT of my misconceptions. I actually thought base traps did something different, and now I know its just the thickness, and its a lot easier to get thickness in corners. Air gap is also going to save me a lot of money.
So good! I'm a fan of Jesco just because I like to geek out about sound, however I'm always wondering "yeah... but how do I apply that to VO?" So glad that Mike had this conversation!
Haven't watched the full video but have a question in case it's not discussed. Does my positioning in the room if I am simply doing dialogue in a reasonably treated room (standard at home, spare room treatment) matter? I've seen things like "4 feet off wall you're facing center room" & "talk into the long part of the room" Is there a version of positioning in a room I should strive for to get better sound or does it not really matter?
Nice to see both of you together. Been watching both of your channels for a long time now 😁 Mike your interviewing skill is top notch. You obviously know how to organize your questions that lead to a comprehensive lecture on room treatment. Jetsco on the otherhand is as always very informative and readily underatandable. I learned a lot!
Great discussion! I have a question that I wish you'd gone into though. Would it help or hinder to have a booth where the walls weren't parallel? I guess that would avoid some of the problems with standing waves but perhaps at the cost of something else. Any input on this from anyone would be appreciated.
Great discussion. This is exactly why every time I decide to treat my 6x6 closet, I give up. It is just not practical to add 16 in. of padding. The best solution in my opinion is to invest in a microphone that has low proximity effect, turn down the gain and get up as close to the mic as possible. I'd have liked to see some discussion on this approach and then maybe add a little less padding.
The sentiment to just get started on your home studio really resonated (ha) with me. I started up converting my closest into an audio booth about 2 years ago and am just finally getting to a place where I'm really happy with it. I loved the process and learned so much from just trial and error. This video encapsulated a lot of the things I learned myself and shed so much light on things I didn't quite realize as well. Bravo!
Thanks to both of you for this vid, it was not only informative but also rather entertaining. I'm just about to start my booth build and this has just confirmed so many ideas of mine. One thing I'm thinking about is the treatment of the room that it's built into, nobody seems to mention that, so my idea is to absorb as much "outside" noise as possible before it hit's my booth.
Wow!!! What a perfect harmony of the 2 most relevant sound people I found on the internet for figuring out a VO booth!!! I started looking into it last weekend! Kismet!!! First time using that work and it not being ironic or intentionally manipulative.
Very helpful -- thank you! I'm in the process of retrofitting a closet into a vocal booth since I discovered that my living room where I track instruments has too high of a noise floor for dialog.
Thank you both - an absolutely fascinating interview. The best tip was about identifying the surfaces nearest to the mic, which would produce troublesome early reflections. Related to that, I often need to record whilst reading a script from a monitor in front of me, which can produce noticeable early reflections. Any suggestions other than putting an acoustic panel over the monitor and printing the script on paper? Thanks again for covering all this!
I have a 10x20 portable building behind my home where I podcast and RU-vid. There is a 1/4 space where I'm going to build a DIY booth. Thank you for this detailed and informative video! I learned so much from you both then the "other guys" on this platform.
I want to confirm what your guest said about putting sound absorption directly behind the microphone. I was aware of all the advice that a cardioid mic didn’t pick up so much from the rear, but I couldn’t help thinking that most of my sound was coming out of my mouth, not the back of my head, and if I could catch it before it started bouncing around I could get ahead of the game. That one bit of “engineering” by itself reduced my reflections by half. I have since added side and rear absorption. NOTE: My microphone is set up about 18 inches from the wall in front of me; my space allows no other options.
Mike, this was a huge wealth of information. I've driven myself crazy trying to find a way to cancel out resonances and reverberations. I've built panels and even a creative diffusor, but I still have reflections coming into my mic from my monitors and huge desk. All of that money and time to cancel the walls and the problem ended up being my workspace! I hear it in your audio as well when I put my headphones on. I have a solution though. A 6 degree angle of your workspace. Give it a shot and see what you think.
This is an excellent video, chock-full of information I wish I had from the start. Thank you Mike and Jesco for taking the time to put this together. Enjoyable and very informative.
I don’t get the fuss? You can easily compress fibrous material. Most manufacturers actually give the absorption coefficient of the material they’re selling. It’s a lot more to do with how the sound enters and exits the acoustic changes. We love adding unnecessary information that really just doesn’t give the end user any more confidence that they can achieve a reliable sounding result? The science is not that complicated? Really? Anyone with a pocket calculator can work out these measurements, maybe let’s focus more on informing the end user of how to do the calculations and thus enable them to understand what their objective is and then figure out what fits what they can afford ? The thing is with room treatment is that you don’t have to do it in one go, you can make incremental changes and improvements in an affordable and diy fashion.
Imagine this layers: Wool Felt 10mm looking TO THE WALL the opposite way we would normally use it >> Natural Rubber 10mm >> Cork 10mm >> Wool Felt Again 10mm >> Hairy Wool Felt >> Heavy Curtain with SDrapery Swag (the S form you know). And all of this would be of 10cms or 15cms if you are generous, and not only sound will not reflect but will not go out and disturb neighbourgs and will not come ine either as rubber is great to reflect low frequency ranges from 25 to 400 hz in a great amount. Yes it wasn't me, was the Artificial Intelligence that told me so ;) :O
Omg,,, you be inhaling mineral wool particles into your lungs like crazy. Serious health hazard. I just about fell into the same mistake as you and started building DIY bass traps with mw until i got a tip from Dennis Folley from accoustic fields against using MW. those fibers are NOT sufficiently contained by using simple fabric and I decided against it and am chosing to go with open cell foam instead. I hope you redo your room man for your health! Go with foam.
Great video guys. When he was showing the clips of insulating the walls, he didn't mention anything about the surface of the walls. The booth he shows didn't have insulation on the surface. Is it drywall? Seems like drywall or another hard surface would just bring the problems back all over again... Any thoughts?
I send you greetings and a hug from Madrid, Spain. I admire you a lot for everything you do online for us. I am a radio moderator and voiceover for news bulletins and I would need some technical advice. I live with rent in a house and I cannot build a studio. The salon where I work is large, approximately 20 m2. I thought of building a box of approximately 3 x 3 x 3 from wood and mineral wool to reduce the echo of the room. Will it be useful to me? I tried to record under a duvet but it is heavy and there is no air under it, I cannot work well. I appreciate and respect an answer. Thank you very much and I wish you much success.
Is there sound dampening fabric which does a decent job? I have a rectangular walk in closet and I can't really make any permanent modifications to it. Would suspending a fabric curtain work?
Question,,,, at. 33:30 you talk about the order of priority for surface treatment and said the wall behind the mic first then the sidewalls followed by back wall and finally the ceiling. Given a square room where you are in the center,,, Wouldnt the side walls and ceiling be first priority especially with cardiod mic pattern ? The side wall and ceiling reflections should be the earliest since they are first relections and closest to the mic. Back Wall (behind the vocalist) would be longest since its a second reflection. Front wall (behind the mic) is first reflection but must travel to back wall. Side walls and ceiling seems most critical. Ofcourse the sound wave pressure is not a strong exiting the vocalists mouth above and to the sides as much as forward and maybe this is his real point perhaps?
Hi - Well I just added and hour to your RU-vid watch time. Fantastic video covering a very complicated topic. A question I'd like to ask is when you record in your booth, what equipment do you actually have in there? You have a camera, presumably a monitor screen, some kind of audio recorder such as a MixPre that you have your headphones plugged into for monitoring? lighting? I might not be able to copy you due to lack of $$$ but out of interest what do you use? Thank you - Peter
Great Vid !!! I also have a 13 fan powered, dual DDC pump PC for my water cooled setup. They are all at their lowest setting sitting 2 feet from my mic. Want to know how I corrected that using my EV RE20 mic? Mainly using the DBX 286s, along with the 215s and 166xs into my MOTU M4 USB processor to enhance the sound of my voice even better. I have also built my own 48"x16"x3.5" sound panels using 3.5" thick Corning Mineral Wool. I also have a thick (sound absorbing) backdrop curtain. So even with he PC running you can't even hear it. Also, with all the room treatment that I did, it has killed 95% of any sound reflections that I would have incurred otherwise. And, it's still a very functional office. All I can say is the DBX 286s is a big help when it comes to getting rid of most background sound (and of course the sound is "processed"), but if you know how to set the dials correctly to provide that near studio-quality sound. Just my thoughts. Again, GREAT VID - THANKS!!!
Fantastic info. I would only correct one point: in a normal sized room (15-30sm), the wall behind you will make more difference than the wall Infront of you given a cardioid mic. A quick and dirty test is putting a mattress upright behind you, then on the front wall. The comparison is clearly better on the back wall. Cardioid mics reject high frequencies from the back pretty well, and the bass frequencies are omnidirectional anyway.
Hey Mike, I found your doppelganger where I work, not even joking he looks 90% like you and even sounds a lot like you. Unfortunately he didn't want his picture taken but he laughed when I showed him your videos!
This guy grew up with money if he thinks the smallest bedroom you might have is 12'x14'. 7:35 "There are even smaller rooms than that I guess". Yes, yes there are smaller rooms than 168', haha. There are much, much smaller.
I was hoping he was going to talk about the propagation of low frequencies in corners with 90 degree angles. Much like Mike, my booths are in the basement. I had to treat the basement first, including the corners to finally get rid of a thrumbing sound coming from a train yard 2 miles away. Where bass frequencies matter, mass is the best, but eliminating the structural issues first is something that these booth builder companies should know, yet they keep building square booths with parallel walls. Sounds like being a poor craftsman and not being about to make a 90 degree angle is the best way to build a booth these days for voice over. Having a huge room doesn't hurt either. THANKS JESCO & Mike!
I notice Jesco's studio has hardwood floors. Will sound absorption on the walls be enough without rugs or carpet? My studio has tile floors and I'm not sure if I should get a large rug.
You mentioned PC sound. I have two PCs running here, and they need to be on, and when I need it to be the most quiet, they work the hardest and make more sound. I found this video and was shocked by how well it isolated the sound from his CNC router, and it's something I've been thinking about for my PCs, but I of course need airflow as well, so it will have to be different, but also, the sound volume from PCs isn't anywhere near what's in this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sZny3BEHsPA.html
