Vocal booth construction tips

Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 11:50 am

Hi,
I did actually look through many of the posts in this forum before starting a new topic! I found bits and pieces, but not enough I feel to get me going in the right direction.
I run a small project studio out of a pretty funky space in NYC. It works well for my needs, for the the most part, but sometimes noise can be a problem, with my computer ironically being one of the worst culprits. It's not a huge space, about 700 sq. feet maybe. We are thinking of building some kind of vocal / iso booth, one that would also be large enough to accomodate an acoustic guitar player. It doesn't have to be super, super isolated. I would mainly just like a space to record vocals and acoustic guitar where I can keep out a majority of the external noise, when I don't want any room sound involved. I like recording vocals and guitar out in the room, but not always.
What are variables that I should think about that will help me avoid issues I've read about here like boomy-ness, or a boxy sound? Are there certain "magic dimensions" in the booth size that will keep boxy-ness at bay? What about materials? Should I just foam out the whole thing and keep it as dead as possible, or leave some space open? Should I use that 703 fiberglass as the walls on the inside? The only other criteria, which may be unrealistic, is that I would like to be able to disassemble the booth into moveable components. I'm not married to the space I'm renting now, and if I'm going to spend time and money building building a booth, I'd like to be able to "take it with me when I go"
Any tips or resources would be greatly appreciated! Thanks - Steve

Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 4:19 pm

hey try this link www.digital-synthologie.de/gesangskabine/index.html

Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:39 pm

Thanks for that link. That's one I had stumbled upon in my previous searches. Somewhere else on the web someone referred to a Recording Magazine article from 2000 that talks about building an iso booth, and also certain dimensions that should be avoided. That's the kind of stuff I'm also concerned about. I don't want to spend time and money working on something only to discover that I've ended up with dimensions that are going to emphasis bad frequencies. I'm thinking I should avoid parallel walls. And also, since I need to be able to accomodate acoustic guitar, it needs to be bigger than the one in that link.

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