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Choosing The Best Room For Your Studio

July 27, 2022 by Adil Aliev

 

Your home recording studio might not have the same priority in the eyes of your family as it does in yours, so the choice of location is usually limited to what is not being used by other family members. Where most people do not go, where nobody can hear you, and hopefully you cannot hear anybody. Still, when deciding about your studio location, there are some things to keep in mind. In any case, it might be good to understand why some rooms are better than others. And if your career eventually demands a proper studio construction, you will know what to look for. 

 

Dimensions. 

There are some “rules of thumb” to consider when choosing a room for a recording studio. Not all rooms sound the same.  The size and volume of the room makes a big difference; the shapes, furniture, and building construction all have a major effect on how the room will sound. The worst possible room dimensions result in a perfect cube where width and length and the height of the room are the same.  Such configuration will result in exact same Modes and standing sound waves from all sides.If you have a choice – avoid cubical rooms for your recording space, have effect on how the room will sound. In reality, the choice is limited to a spare bedroom, basement, or closet, unless you park your car outside and take over the garage. You can also choose to make an all-in one studio or you can separate your office to form an Isolation room. (A room Mode creates resonance in a particular frequency and longer reverb decay time.  As a result there will be a lot of places where the sound waves boost one another and where they cancel each other, creating dips and peaks. The goal of acoustic room treatment is to minimize the dips and peaks in room response, as well as even out the reverberation decay of the various frequencies). Square rooms where width equals length, but is not equal to height, are better than the cube rooms, but they will present the similar challenge of modes for two dimensions: width and length. Similarly bad sounding rooms are the rooms where room dimensions are multiple of each other. For example a room that is 8 ft wide x 16 feet long and by 8 feet tall, because all dimensions are divisible by 8 and will have the same modes. So what is the “Good dimension” then?  For a long time the Golden Mean was the ratio of 0.618, which some feel is an ideal for spacing the modes in the room. For example a room that is 16 ft long by 10 ft wide x 9 ft high – the modes of the room will be distributed nicely. In general, for recording studios, the larger the room the better.  Keep that in mind when you are thinking of dividing the existing room by building a wall.

For the voice over actor, finding the room that is the quietest is more important than the room that is acoustically better.  The reason is that it is much more difficult and much more expensive to soundproof your room, and then still have to treat it with sound absorption blankets, than acoustically treat a room that is already quiet, to remove reverberations and standing waves. Producer’s choice acoustic blankets for sound absorption from VocalBoothToGo.co.uk proved to be a good solution for that.   Even in the prefabricated vocal booths hanging the acoustic blankets on the inside will get you a good sounding recording space. So the obvious choice is – pick the space that is farthest from the street noise and from family traffic and activities. Room shape also has an effect on the sound. In theory there should be no parallel walls in a room, so no standing waves can be formed. But in practice everything is built rectangular, plus it is much more difficult to calculate the correct modes in a room where surfaces are not parallel and if not built properly this can make the room sound worse, not better. So if the Golden Mean is a guide, then rectangular rooms are the best.  Ideally a rectangular room will have dimensions that have ratios with favorable modal distribution (and not multiples of each other). 

The angled walls, air duct covers, alcoves, niches in the wall – all of these can cause resonance and reflections. But whatever your room is, there are lots of effective products that can treat your room to deal with acoustic problems. Besides the acoustic properties of the room itself, there is an issue of the external noise coming into your studio.  In the home recording studio settings there are two concerns – blocking the outside noise from coming into your studio and isolation of the rest of the house from the sounds that you will be making. Lucky for voice over actors, they do not need to be concerned with a larger studio, like for band recording or control room.  Book narration can be done in a very small room.  Especially for voice over you do not want to have any “room tone” in your recording.  For singing or playing, some room tone may be appropriate.  Voice over is designed to go OVER an existing sound track, so there is no place for room tone in voice over. The room must be as dead as it can be. What the producer wants to hear is pure voice with even and true frequency distribution.  If necessary the sound engineer will add a “tone“ to it. 

Once the location is selected – do you want to have a one big room that is both an office and a recording studio, or do you want to have an office and then a sound booth for recording?One big room for both recording studio and office is convenient, but is more challenging in terms of soundproofing and acoustic treatment.  Plus, there are usually lots of devices that create noise, such as air conditioning, computer fan, phones, chairs, even electricity humming through the wires can be picked up by highly sensitive microphones. Many people choose a closet for their vocal booth. The clothes in the closet help with sound absorption and, if the closet is large enough, it can comfortably fit the actor, the microphone and the laptop.  So it seems to make sense to do it that way.   And it works for many voice over actors, especially the beginners.  The problem is that closets are not built to be sound proof, plus the clothes in the closet are not in the same place all the time and may not even be the same clothes all the time, so in the long run  your recordings will not be consistent.  This can be a problem for professional voice actors whose accounts might need pick up line or revisions and redo down the line, because their sensitive mic will pick up one sound one day and a different sound another day. 

Having a special sound booth for voice over recording allows you to create the space that is most suitable for your voice over needs and produces consistent recording every time. Going a dedicated sound booth route versus converting large bedroom into a studio, is more economical, because it is much less expensive to soundproof a small 3 x 3 or 4 x 4 booth, rather than a whole 10 x 16 bedroom. Plus you can leave all the humming noise producing devices outside of your booth.   You can build such a booth by yourself or get a prefabricated one.  But then you would still need to acoustically treat the booth so it has absolutely no reflections ( sounds “dead” ) inside.  You can make one yourself out of a thick 5/8 inch plywood, or you can get prefabricated rigidly built sound booths from various sound booth manufacturers.  Mobile soundproof(er) vocal booths from VocalBoothToGo  include the sound proof layer and the inside acoustic treatment.  They also can be folded away if not in use or transported in a regular size car in bags, which is a unique feature that makes it a vocal booth of choice for on location recording, rentals or audiometry.  This is a kind of true mobility that no other vocal booth manufacturer can offer.

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Laura

With a strong background in marketing in the membership sector as well as broadcast and media, Laura heads up our Marketing Team here at VON. Her hands have appeared in Hinterland, a Welsh Noir TV series, uncovering bones as an SA and she’s raved for several hours straight in a feature film also shot in Wales. Laura has a deep appreciation for the talent and creativity of voice acting so working at VON is the perfect place to be.

Emma

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She is an aspiring voiceover artist and PhD student, currently writing her first novel

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In her spare time she is mum to one son and plays for a ladies football team!

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Alan Shires

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Having started in TV and theatre, Alan discovered voiceover in 2016 and quickly fell in love with the industry. Now he is an award-winning voiceover artist as well as a successful performance capture actor and entrepreneur.

Alan is a British voiceover based in Leeds, UK, with a friendly, story-telling voice that is complemented with a hint of a northern English accent. Having delivered motivational talks and having established clients from all around the world, Alan is a big advocate for seeing everyone succeed and unlocking their potential.

Heather Scott

Finance Officer

With over 25 years in accounting Heather has worked as a self-employed contractor in a number of industries including music, publishing, golf, education and baby clothing. She brings her wealth of experience to our team co-ordinating the accounts and admin.

Sara Cristy

Technical Support / Web Development. Actress and Software Engineer

Sara is an Actress for Film, TV, Voiceover and Mocap, and also a Software Engineer with years of experience in both backend and frontend development.

With a background in Software Engineering, at the age of 24, she fully decided to fight her way through the arts as it has been her greatest passion ever since she was a teenager. She moved to London soon after her graduation, studied Strasberg’s Method and began her professional Acting career at the end of 2016, whilst keeping her Software Engineering career too.

Rachael Naylor

Founder and Owner

As well as running The VoiceOver Network, Rachael is a busy voiceover artist, actress, writer, award-winning entrepreneur and a mother of two girls.

Rachael’s love for acting started at a young age when she was inspired by her actor Grandfather and loved seeing him perform in the West End. She trained as an actress at Richmond Drama School and soon after graduating, discovered voiceovers and absolutely loved working in this area of the industry. Rachael has been a voiceover artist for over 20 years and during that time has worked with a huge range of top brands including Virgin Media (yes, she’s their telephone voice), CNN, Nestlé, Olay, Sure, Channel 5, The Travel Channel and many more. In addition, Rachael has worked with Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell in The Martian Chronicles radio drama and voiced three One Direction films.

Her voiceover agent is Excellent Talent. As an actress, Rachael has worked in TV, film and theatre as well as on commercials for brands such as Persil. Her acting agent is Comedy Actors, London. Rachael is co-author of the Amazon best-selling book, ‘Shine: …it’s like glitter for your soul! ’, and contributing author of a second Amazon best-selling book, ‘Believe: … it’s like glitter for your soul! ’.

Rachael is passionate about sharing her knowledge and experience with others in the industry and in 2014, officially established The VoiceOver Network, which aims to bring the industry together. She won the Entrepreneurs Circle’s, ‘Entrepreneur of the Year for London and the South 2014’ award, not only for her work on her voiceover business, but also with The VoiceOver Network. Rachael was also a finalist at the 2014 National Entrepreneur Awards for ‘Best Business Enabler’ for her work with The VoiceOver Network. She finds business and marketing fascinating and enjoys the challenges of running her businesses.

In her spare time, Rachael loves sport, is a keen snowboarder and scuba diver and likes to run to keep fit.

Leisa Reid Fisicaro

Business Operations Manager, Voiceover Artist

A seasoned broadcast writer, producer and director, Leisa has spent more than seventeen years involved in creating and producing high quality Television and Media programmes for top American broadcasters; PBS, NBC and Discovery Channel. Award-Winning Producer with a FREDDIE, an International Health and Medical Media Award plus several nominations throughout her career.

As a writer / producer she quickly learned the power of ‘voicing’ and in a twist of fate, she was asked to voice a scratch-track and that’s all it took for her to be enchanted by the magical world of voiceover. Leisa has trained with professional voice artists in voicing medical, children’s and lifestyle documentary narration.

As a stage performer, Leisa studied Dance for over twenty years and has travelled throughout America competing and performing professionally.

Lorraine Hodgson

Social Media Manager, Voiceover Artist

Lorraine is a UK based Actor and Voiceover Artist. Her passion for Acting started at an early age when she loved to watch classic black and white movies. She studied at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

After graduating Lorraine worked on the London Fringe, noted for her powerful performance in ‘Glass Hearts’ by the award-winning David Spencer. Television includes the role of Ann McIntyre in Coronation Street, and other wonderful roles in Eastenders, Holby City, Merseybeats, and The Bill. Lorraine is a versatile Actress with the qualities required to play hard-edged raw characters. She has the ability to bring a sense of vulnerability to her roles and a sense of realism to her performances. Many Directors have commented on her naturalistic style and her commitment to her work.

Bernard John Dollison

Graphics and Layout Designer

Bernard is a creative designer who is self-motivated with a strong background in both print to digital media and with over 10 years of experience in the graphic design industry.

Bernard has worked extensively in design agency, print and graphics producing high end business to business and consumer facing designs. Detail oriented and has a comprehensive understanding of Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Adobe Muse, Sketchup and Cinema4d.

Rubie Grace Malata

Virtual Admin Assistant

Rubie has a background in store management with over 5 years managing multiple teams. She is proficient in office administrator duties and provides key support to the team.

Natalie Beran

Assistant Editor, The Buzz Magazine, Accounts Coordinator, Voiceover Artist

Natalie is a voiceover artist, actor, assistant director (TV/Film), theatre producer and radio announcer/producer. She works in commercials, animation, gaming, narration (corporate / audiobooks) and radio drama. Her clients include iHeart Radio, New Zealand Lotto, Blind Foundation, Les Mills, Vista/Veezi, McDonalds and Southern Comfort. Natalie works in a range of accents including New Zealand / Australian, various UK & US and Eastern European and has a great range of animation, character and gaming voices.

Natalie has a radio career spanning over 15 years and has worked as a radio announcer/producer in New Zealand, Sweden, Canada and the USA. She holds a Bachelor of Communication Studies (Radio) from AUT and is a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA New York). She was a finalist in the inaugural SOVAS – Voice Arts Awards for animation and was a recipient of the Shakespeare’s Globe International Actors’ Fellowship.

She has worked in TV and theatre production including producer of the Auckland Outdoor Summer Shakespeare, 2nd Assistant Director for South Pacific Pictures (Shortland Street, The Bad Seed), as well as program manager for The Actors Program. She is a founding member of the International Actors Ensemble, performing as Antipholus of Syracuse in their Mexican tour of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and festival appearances in Auckland, Melbourne and the UK.

Gabriel Porras

Spanish Translator and Proof-Reader for The Buzz Magazine, Voiceover Artist

Gabriel Porras is a world-record-holding presenter and voiceover professional with 25+ years of experience in advertising, news, live broadcasting, corporate, eLearning, gaming and animation roles (BBC, Microsoft, Netflix, Saatchi, Apple, BBM, Sauza, FedEx, McDonald’s, Sunset&Vine among others).

International records for continuous daily radio presence (12+ years, BBC World Service) and weekly TV presence (24+ years, Gillette World Sport; 11+ years, Mobil 1 The Grid) as the main presenter of a series. Main IOC Presenter for the London 2012 Olympics. OVA international award nominations for Animation and Audiobook performances. Advanced studies in Art, Philosophy, Music, Classics, Theology, Islam and Atheism. Loves to cook (Mexican, Mediterranean, Asian Fusion) and travel (40 countries to date).

Rich O’Donogue

Resident Sound Engineer for The VoiceOver Network, producer, voiceover artist and DJ

Rich’s knowledge of sound stems from a 20 year career as a DJ/Sound Engineer for clubs and bars around the UK and abroad as well as a 1st class honors degree in music production.

From university Rich entered the world of radio production and secured a position as a commercial producer at UTV (now The Wireless Group) in which he won awards both locally and nationally for his production work.

In 2016 Rich made the leap of faith and became freelance offering his services to production companies and voice overs whilst building the reputation of his company ‘io Audio’ from his own studio. Over the last 2 years io Audio has successfully produced showreels for many of the industries leading voices as well as offering studio recording facilities for TV and Radio most notably for Russell Howard’s Travelogue aired on Comedy Central and BBC Radio. As well as producing Rich also lectures at universities on radio production and the subject of how sound creates visualisations in our minds and how this can be used as a tool in radio production. Rich loves the art of directing voice overs, as well as mixing records on a saturday night and chilling with the family.

Dian Perry

Voiceover artist and voice coach

Dian is a US voiceover artist, teacher and voiceover coach based in London. She’s worked as a professional voice actor since early 1998 and a character voice teacher and voiceover coach since 2006.

She has worked on a huge amount of animations and cartoons including The Woodlies, Corneil and Bernie, Nelly Nut Live as well as many more. Video Games include Horizon: Zero Dawn, Pusuit Force and Sacred Underworld.

Dian is one of the top voice coaches in the UK

Randall Ryan

Voiceover casting director and director

Randall Ryan is a voiceover casting director and director.

He is the Co-founder of Hamsterball Studios in Austin, Texas. His video game credits include: Small Town Terrors, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Transformers: Optimus Prime, the Deer Hunter series, World Series of Poker, mobile gaming, children’s games, sports titles, shooters and so much more.

Tom Keegan

Performance capture director, audio director and casting director

Tom Keegan is one of the most in demand performance capture directors, audio directors and casting directors in the world right now.

He is a Director and Casting Director for Performance Capture, Video Games, Voice Over and Films. Games title credits include the Battlefield series, Wolfenstein 1, 2 and 3, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, Dead Rising 3 & 4, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, Call of Duty: Modern Warfair Remastered, The Amazing Spiderman 2 and many more.

Adele Cutting

BAFTA award-winning audio professional

Adele Cutting is a BAFTA award-winning audio professional with 20+ years experience in audio direction, designing sound, music editing, casting and directing actors and covering all things audio across games, TV, installations, mobile and VR.

Adele is the founder of audio production company, Soundcuts Ltd., before Soundcuts, Adele spent 15 years at EA, working her way up the ranks from Junior Sound Designer to Senior Audio Director, working on blockbuster titles such the Harry Potter franchise (on which she wore both Audio and Voice director hats), plus well known cult classics Populous the Beginning and Theme Park World.

Recent titles Adele has worked on include Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (UK and Athens Voice Direction), The Room Old Sins (Sound Design), Pinky Malinky (Music Editing and co-ordination), Astrologaster (Voice Direction) and Elements – a James Bond cinematic installation in the alps.(Sound Design and Music Editing), Planet Zoo (Casting, Direction, Post Pro).

Lori Alan

American actor, writer, producer and coach

Lori Alan is an American actor, writer, producer and coach.

She stars on the Emmy Award winning, SpongeBob: Squarepants as Pearl Krabs, Diane Simmons on Family Guy, Sue Richards, The Invisible Woman, on Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four, and The Boss in the Metal Gear Solid video game trilogy.

She’s proud to be a part of the Academy Award Winning Pixar Family. Voicing characters in Wall-e, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Monster’s University, as Mother’s Sadness in Inside Out, and Bonnie’s Mom in Pixar’s extraordinary, global franchise, Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. Other credits include Minnions, Friends, Dispicable Me 3, Greys Anatomy and Law and Order LA.

Elley-Ray

Voiceover artist, actor, voice director and writer

Elley-Ray has traversed the stages, film sets, television and radio studios for over 40 years delighting audiences world-wide.

Her compassion to share it is unparalleled.

She’s is a Toronto-based voiceover artist, actor, voice director and writer. She has been working in the voiceover industry for over 37 years. She has worked extensively in animations, commercials, corporate, video games, promos, audiobooks and pretty much every area of our industry. Her credits include My Little Pony, Care Bears, Babar the movie, Z Baw (feature film), Cat in the Hat, My Big My Friend, Busy Town, Hotel Transylvania: The Series and many more.

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