Go To Your Room! A Voice Actor’s Quest for Quiet

After many hours spent crouching amidst clothing in a closet, hoping the upstairs neighbor doesn’t start strutting in their clunky shoes, almost every voice actor dreams of finally having a VO-specific booth. A voiceover booth can be both a blessing and a curse. It might seem like a perfect solution to soundproof glory.The fact is, however, a dedicated voiceover booth doesn’t necessarily fix anything – it just changes the equation.

One of the main reasons for this is that every commercially made booth needs tuning. This can be a shock. After spending good money to obtain a much-touted-brand dedicated booth, simply sticking a microphone inside usually results in pretty abysmal sounding results. You hear reflections. You get rumble.

“Boxy” and “Echoey” are often the first result.

Prefab VO booths are not sound PROOF

Further, while a standalone booth will reduce noise in the recording space, most models are not actually “sound proof”. In some cases, they may actually amplify environmental sounds which were not a problem beforehand. A square space with parallel walls will often act as a resonant chamber – essentially a large subwoofer. That means it can intensify a low frequency sound source.

This is not to say you can’t make things sound good. I just want to prepare you for the strong possibility that your old, cramped closet, or that blanket fort setup may sound better than your new booth – at first.

Tuning the Voiceover Booth – “Iterative Fixes” are key

Remember all those tiny little adjustments you made with your “ugly” setup? Depending upon how long you’ve been using it, the sound quality could be benefitting from years of tiny, incremental fixes: a little extra padding here, a slight nudging of the mic there, isolating your microphone from vibrations, and finding the sweet spot where you need to stand.

You just need to be mentally prepared for that iterative set of fixes while you dial in the sound for your new space. Give yourself a little time and know that you’ll be able to continue to improve the quality of the sound.

Finding a used VocalBooth helped me significantly. Although I had been auditioning, recording, and editing from my home setup, the actual recording “studio” was simple and impermanent. Everything had to be broken down and stowed when not in use.

Why bother with a VO recording booth?

One main benefit of the new-to-me booth became apparent quickly. Jumping behind the mic to fix an error on previous work was no longer fraught with concerns over whether the audio “matched” those previous recordings. The biggest variable in the quality of the audio – the space in which I was recording – remained the same from day to day. That reduced the variables in that equation.

While the initial sound of that booth was not all that great, the sound was consistent. The flaws of a simple, lightly damped space created clear signatures in the audio. I’d known they would appear, but it was interesting to hear how much the confines of a small, lightly padded room influenced the overall sound. That began the wonderfully iterative process of recording, listening, adjusting, and improving the sound. Which is all part of the practice.

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