Need guidance on quality and equipment

[Josh Bass]

A little hijacking...that porta booth box has me wondering how well it works at I occasionally record vocals for songs (non professionally), and doing some voice roles for a friend's project (think old narrative radio shows).

Right now I use a "booth" made of doubled up moving blankets hung on stands, and a blanket on the floor. Lately I've been doing a triangle shape...I only have enough for three "walls" and the floor.

It's terrible room...square (mostly), hard tile floors. No carpet in the entire place. Results are okay to my ears, though you can hear some room. Honestly the voice roles sound very clean to me, but singing excites enough room sound so that it makes it in and washes out the voice a little.

I have not tried the closet, also in same room. Wondering how that would work if I threw those blankets over the exposed surfaces, one over the inside of the door, closed door during takes. Hmmmmmmmm.

[Eric Tomlinson]

I made something v close to porta booth. It did give an incremental improvement, but once I built the under desk space, it actually added its own ‘flavour’. In closet was probably the best, ‘quick’ fix. And I tried to work it, but reading a book is around 8-12 hours recording I find best done in 1-2 hour sessions. Not viable crouched where this was. I guessed if I moved the closet to the other room, the problems would come back.
If it had been short pieces, I would have gone with the closet option.

The final under desk set up is speaking straight at the duvet. It takes me 5-10 minutes to set up. There are samples posted on this thread showing the different configs.

Guys on here were amazing.

[Greg Miller]

Eric, glad to hear you're making good progress.

Unless you use a huge amount of absorption, the low frequencies will penetrate the blankets, bounce off the walls, back through the blankets, and back to your mic. So you can possibly have low frequency standing waves in the room. You want to locate yourself (and mic) to minimize that problem. Consider the floor plan of your room to have an X axis and a Y axis (ignoring the height). Avoid locating yourself at the midpoint of either axis! A better location would be closer to (but not exactly) 1/3 to 1/4 the dimension of the room, and different for the two different axes. In theory you will always have some standing waves but avoiding the dimensional midpoints, and avoiding symmetry, will reduce the worst of them.

This is why the "under desk" setup adds "flavour" to your recordings. Low frequencies are penetrating the blankets, bouncing off the hard panels of the desk, thence back through the blankets to the mic. Depending on the dimensions, this will create peaks and dips in the frequency response. If the desk panels are thin, your voice may even excite some panel resonance which will tend to emphasize those frequencies.

Also remember that you need treatment behind you. The mic is pointed at your head. The mic's most sensitive direction therefore extends past either side of your head to the area behind you. (Whereas the mic's least sensitive direction is 180 degrees away from that, the rear side of the mic's central axis.) It seems to me that portable mini baffles completely ignore this fact.

Look at the photo in post #33. If the talent were in that shot, they would be to the viewer's left of the mic, and would be blocking your view of the laptop. The mic is aimed toward the left edge of the photo, which is actually inside a wide, shallow closet (doors removed) behind the talent. The clothes rod is draped with double-layer thick quilts extending down to the floor; the shelf above the rod is full of pillows and blankets. The area behind the talent, i.e. directly in front of the mic, is as dead as possible.

[Paul Mailath]

I've been following this thread with great interest, some really useful info and great help - rather than hijack the thread I'll start another - I'm also in need of a few critical ears