voiceover booth, recording booth, room acoustics, voice acting tips, home studio setup, soundproofing, Pro Audio Suite, George the Tech, TriBooth, Austrian Audio
#ProAudioSuite #VoiceOver #HomeStudio #RecordingBooth #TriBooth #AustrianAudio #SourceConnect
00:00:00
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hey, and welcome to the Pro Audio Suite.
00:00:05
Yeah, starring Robert Marshall.
00:00:10
Funky dude with him.
00:00:15
That's ridiculous.
00:00:16
Like my carpeting is starting to shag out.
00:00:19
That's right.
00:00:20
That's right.
00:00:22
You're, you're tough to groove.
00:00:26
Exactly.
00:00:27
My shirt is now puffy with hair.
00:00:30
We need a laugh right now.
00:00:33
Yeah, exactly.
00:00:35
That'll make you smile.
00:00:37
And we should thank our sponsors, Austrian audio,
00:00:40
making passion heard and tribe booth.
00:00:42
Don't forget the code T R I P
00:00:43
a P 200 to get $200 off your
00:00:46
tribe booth.
00:00:47
They're talking about booths.
00:00:49
Um, there's a few bits and pieces of
00:00:50
popped up online.
00:00:51
One in particular I saw this morning, uh,
00:00:54
visually it looked absolutely awful, but according to
00:00:59
Robo, it sounded really good.
00:01:00
Um, so what is the key to a
00:01:03
booth and what makes it work?
00:01:05
Well, according to us, it sounds really good
00:01:07
because the person we're talking about has actually
00:01:09
been on the show, but you know, I
00:01:11
think it's pretty obvious really, isn't it?
00:01:13
Zero reflections and as little noise as you
00:01:17
can possibly let into a recording.
00:01:20
And a good spot in the house.
00:01:22
That's going to give you the best possibility
00:01:24
of doing that.
00:01:26
You know, like I think today's booth is,
00:01:28
is in the middle of the house.
00:01:29
It's in a walk-in wardrobe.
00:01:30
So it's away from open windows and, and
00:01:33
all the rest of it.
00:01:34
And probably the noisest noisiest spot is going
00:01:37
to be whatever comes in through the roof,
00:01:38
through the plasterboard in the ceiling.
00:01:41
Um, or if you may, my wife talking
00:01:43
in the background while I'm recording the podcast
00:01:45
as well, that will do it.
00:01:48
I actually built one.
00:01:50
It was a temporary thing I put together
00:01:52
when we're traveling.
00:01:54
And by all accounts, it should not have
00:01:56
worked.
00:01:57
It should have been awful, but it sounded
00:01:59
really good.
00:02:00
And it was like a, a cupboard in
00:02:02
a, an apartment in Rome.
00:02:04
When Rome is very noisy, but it was
00:02:07
like tucked in the middle of the apartment.
00:02:08
It had a bunch of shelves with a
00:02:11
few blankets and bits and bobs on, I
00:02:14
popped on the shelf, the Porter booth.
00:02:17
Then on to my side, there was like
00:02:19
a clothes rack, which I threw another blanket
00:02:21
over and someone was hanging some stuff off
00:02:25
the back of the door from memory.
00:02:27
Anyway, it sounded amazing.
00:02:29
It was what perfectly looked like shit, but
00:02:31
sounded good.
00:02:33
So two questions about it.
00:02:34
How big was the space and how parallel
00:02:37
were the hard surfaces?
00:02:39
The surfaces were parallel.
00:02:41
The ceiling was probably 12 foot ceiling in
00:02:42
there.
00:02:44
Uh, and then there were shelves where I
00:02:45
sort of put the Porter booth on the
00:02:47
shelf, but there were, there's all sorts of
00:02:48
other bits and pieces in there to my
00:02:50
left was the clothes rack that I put
00:02:52
a blanket over.
00:02:54
Then behind me was the door, which had
00:02:56
stuff hanging off the back of it, but
00:02:57
to the right, there was no treatment at
00:02:59
all.
00:02:59
It was just plasterboard.
00:03:01
And how far back was the door behind
00:03:02
you?
00:03:03
Was it?
00:03:04
Well, it was a rectangle.
00:03:06
So it was probably a meter wide and
00:03:11
probably depth would be two and a half
00:03:13
meters, I guess.
00:03:15
So pretty good depth.
00:03:16
The, the width wasn't awesome, but the depth
00:03:19
was pretty good because I, I think that
00:03:22
a lot of what makes booths, like the
00:03:25
first thing is it's got to be dead.
00:03:27
And then once it's like, you know, not,
00:03:29
not considering how loud or noise isolated it
00:03:33
is, but just the sound of the booth
00:03:34
itself.
00:03:34
The first thing is you got to deaden
00:03:36
everything and people don't realize what it takes
00:03:39
to do that properly.
00:03:40
It takes thick, like, you know, not, not
00:03:43
really thin absorption because a lot of the
00:03:45
thin absorption lets all those low frequencies through.
00:03:48
So it's got to have some thicker absorption.
00:03:50
And the smaller the booth, the thicker the
00:03:52
treatment you need.
00:03:53
So it's, it works against you.
00:03:55
So as it gets smaller, it gets smaller.
00:03:58
Yeah.
00:03:58
You lose more space basically.
00:04:01
But if the booth is big, the sound
00:04:04
becomes much more neutral because the nodes don't
00:04:07
get as intertwined and as amplified as well,
00:04:12
especially in the, in those lower frequencies that
00:04:14
really get up into the voice range.
00:04:17
So a booth that has a good volume
00:04:20
of air and is dead, I think will
00:04:23
sound better than any small booth.
00:04:26
And then if you can't have a good
00:04:28
volume of air, the next thing that can
00:04:30
help is non-parallel surfaces can kind of
00:04:34
fake a bigger volume, you know, it can
00:04:37
create more, what's the word oblique reflections I
00:04:41
think is, is that the word George?
00:04:43
So yeah, it's size matters.
00:04:46
Yeah.
00:04:46
Well, I mean, having angled walls and stuff,
00:04:49
the thing that's a difficult about the angle
00:04:52
wall thing is it's not predictable.
00:04:55
So you may end up getting really lucky
00:04:57
or really unlucky.
00:04:59
And then if it doesn't sound great, it
00:05:02
can bounce it right back in the mic
00:05:03
and with the wrong angle, right?
00:05:05
Yeah, that's right.
00:05:06
And sometimes they, so they create more, they're
00:05:09
harder to model.
00:05:10
Meaning like you, it's harder to take like
00:05:14
a pentagonal floor plan or something with more
00:05:16
sides and shove that into, you know, a
00:05:19
computer and say, tell me what frequencies I
00:05:22
have to worry about.
00:05:23
It's, it's much harder.
00:05:24
So then it just becomes a lot more,
00:05:26
exponentially gets more complex.
00:05:28
Yeah.
00:05:28
So, I mean, I mean, a lot of
00:05:30
people have a very haphazard way of treating
00:05:32
their booths anyway.
00:05:33
It's a lot of trial and error to
00:05:35
begin with.
00:05:35
That's, you know, when you see product booths,
00:05:38
like the one we're talking about and so
00:05:40
many other home booths is they didn't map
00:05:42
out the room then by blankets, mattresses, and
00:05:46
foam.
00:05:47
They just sort of eventually get to a
00:05:50
point where it sounds good.
00:05:52
It's almost never a, well, I bought all
00:05:54
this stuff and stuck it up.
00:05:55
And Oh, wow.
00:05:56
It sounds good.
00:05:56
It usually takes time and adding and tweaking.
00:06:00
So when you have a non-square or
00:06:02
non-rectangular floor plan, that just is harder
00:06:05
to do.
00:06:05
Um, but yeah, it's, it's not hard if
00:06:08
the room is larger because larger rooms.
00:06:10
Yeah.
00:06:10
As Robert was saying, they don't build up
00:06:13
such standing waves.
00:06:15
These are called room modes.
00:06:17
Those are the things that make you sound
00:06:19
like you are in a box or in
00:06:21
a tube.
00:06:22
If those big spaces don't have them, they
00:06:24
really only have reverb, which is that long
00:06:28
tail.
00:06:28
And then if you deaden all the walls
00:06:30
up, you don't have the reverb.
00:06:31
You don't have the long.
00:06:33
Well, not only that, but when you're bigger,
00:06:35
when you have a big room, the deadening
00:06:37
of the walls is much simpler because it's
00:06:40
really just covering large amounts of area with
00:06:43
soft material.
00:06:45
It's when the room gets smaller and smaller,
00:06:47
you can't just put blankets or foam on
00:06:50
the walls anymore because you need much thicker,
00:06:52
denser material or really thicker to trap low
00:06:56
frequencies.
00:06:57
So it gets trickier and trickier as a,
00:06:59
as it gets smaller and smaller and ends
00:07:02
up being the panels out to be thicker
00:07:03
and thicker.
00:07:04
One studio I went into this years ago
00:07:07
and it was, they just built a new
00:07:08
studio and they had like a foot in
00:07:12
diameter tubes that stood on their ends and
00:07:14
in the corners.
00:07:15
Yeah.
00:07:15
They're called tube traps.
00:07:17
Were they on their own stand?
00:07:19
They were, they were basically like on their
00:07:20
own mic stand and they're just like around.
00:07:22
Well, they were floor to ceiling basically.
00:07:25
Yeah.
00:07:25
Oh wow.
00:07:26
Those are interesting.
00:07:27
The tube traps are really great products, but
00:07:29
what's interesting about them is that they have
00:07:30
a reflective side and an absorbing side and
00:07:34
part of their trick is to diffuse and
00:07:36
scatter the sound or to absorb it.
00:07:40
And it depends on how you arrange them.
00:07:43
One of the chamber reverbs at Abbey Road
00:07:45
has columns in it for exactly the opposite
00:07:48
reason.
00:07:48
It's got like sort of concrete pillars and
00:07:51
stuff.
00:07:51
So you can mic around them and get
00:07:54
all sorts of different sort of room verby
00:07:56
sounds.
00:07:57
Create bounces.
00:07:58
Yeah.
00:07:58
Create different bounces and stuff.
00:08:00
Create reflections.
00:08:00
For exactly the opposite reason.
00:08:02
But yeah, it's very cool.
00:08:04
Yeah.
00:08:04
I've seen and been in some rooms with
00:08:06
tube traps.
00:08:07
Well, I mean, an interesting type of diffuser
00:08:09
is the curved.
00:08:11
Yeah.
00:08:11
I mean, they work really well too.
00:08:13
Like one diffuser that everyone's really used to
00:08:15
is the one that's like different depths of
00:08:17
squares that are at different depths.
00:08:19
And those are usually referred to basically usually
00:08:22
as quadratic diffusers.
00:08:24
But the other one is just a curved
00:08:26
surface and that has a bunch of different
00:08:28
levels that the sound can bounce off of
00:08:30
and go into different directions and cheap, easy
00:08:33
way to make diffusion.
00:08:34
Yeah.
00:08:35
I've been some great.
00:08:36
It's curved convex, not concave.
00:08:38
Curves have to be convex.
00:08:39
Yeah, that's really important.
00:08:40
So the curves have to be protruding outward
00:08:43
toward you, not inward away from you.
00:08:47
That's those those are much more of a
00:08:49
problem.
00:08:49
So you don't want those curves to focus
00:08:52
sound in a parabolic way, like a dish
00:08:55
antenna for a satellite.
00:08:56
You know, those are designed to focus.
00:08:58
George, have you ever been to the the
00:09:00
museum here in Chicago?
00:09:02
There's the Museum of Science and Industry, and
00:09:04
there's a display that has.
00:09:07
I mean, you're like 50 feet away from
00:09:10
each other, but you're standing in the perfect
00:09:12
focal point of two 50 feet away to
00:09:15
like parabolic disks.
00:09:17
And you can whisper to each other and
00:09:19
there can be 50 people in between you
00:09:21
and you can talk to each other.
00:09:23
It's crazy.
00:09:24
Yeah, it's really cool.
00:09:25
Up the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, you'll
00:09:27
get the same thing.
00:09:28
You got the whispering sort of wall up
00:09:30
there, the whispering dome.
00:09:33
Oh, I love that.
00:09:34
Yeah, yeah, that's really neat.
00:09:35
Even in a I don't know if you've
00:09:36
been to many planetariums.
00:09:39
It's really cool in a planetarium.
00:09:42
Well, maybe not cool, but sometimes you'll be
00:09:44
able to eavesdrop in on a conversation on
00:09:47
the other side of the planetarium.
00:09:49
I mean, you just hear.
00:09:50
Because it just bounces around the curve of
00:09:52
the outside wall.
00:09:52
Yeah.
00:09:53
And then you'll be you'll hear a voice.
00:09:54
It's the more close to the edge you're
00:09:56
sitting, the better.
00:09:57
So like your way towards the back or
00:09:58
the edge.
00:09:59
It's like crazy.
00:10:00
You'll hear a conversation like almost like they're
00:10:02
sitting next to you and they're all the
00:10:05
way on the other side.
00:10:06
It's pretty trippy.
00:10:08
It's really interesting.
00:10:09
Because like what what the diffuser, what the
00:10:11
convex part diffuses, the concave part focuses.
00:10:15
So make sure your current diffusers, if you're
00:10:18
going that way, are convex.
00:10:20
You guys want to troubleshoot Austin Keyes's studio
00:10:23
on the show?
00:10:24
Sure, we can continue from today.
00:10:28
Let's let's dive in.
00:10:29
Well, he says I can't record as I
00:10:31
want.
00:10:31
I can't record his 416, right?
00:10:32
He's texting me right now.
00:10:34
He can't use his 416, so he doesn't
00:10:37
know what to do.
00:10:38
Oh, my God.
00:10:40
But I left him working.
00:10:43
So Robert graciously took an emergency call for
00:10:47
this client of mine this morning.
00:10:49
Paul was in a meeting and he just
00:10:52
doesn't know the topology of the studio and
00:10:54
has no idea what's there.
00:10:55
And he tried his best, but the client
00:10:57
didn't didn't tell Robert I have a Mackie
00:10:59
mixer in my booth also.
00:11:02
So so to wrap up that conversation, I
00:11:05
would say the best way to wrap that
00:11:07
up would be.
00:11:10
It's not how it looks and how it
00:11:11
sounds, and we are we all know what
00:11:13
it's supposed to sound like.
00:11:14
And if you don't know, let us know,
00:11:16
because we spend our days day in, day
00:11:18
out listening to all of your studios.
00:11:21
And, you know, as long as you're not
00:11:23
appearing on camera for like an animation gig,
00:11:25
because here in the States, definitely like in
00:11:27
a lot of people are doing remotely directed
00:11:30
animation and they're on Zoom calls all the
00:11:32
time.
00:11:32
And you may not want it to look
00:11:34
too bad.
00:11:35
But remember, it only has to look good
00:11:36
in the frame of your Zoom, of your
00:11:38
webcam.
00:11:39
So if the whole place is a mess,
00:11:42
but you have a really pretty, you know,
00:11:45
tapestry on the wall behind you, then you're
00:11:48
good.
00:11:49
Yeah.
00:11:49
Yeah, true.
00:11:50
The illusion, the illusion.
00:11:52
And if not for the for the lowest
00:11:54
fee possible, George, the tech will send you
00:11:56
a background that you can use as a
00:11:58
fake background for a studio in your Zoom
00:12:01
meeting.
00:12:04
Right.
00:12:04
With GTT on it.
00:12:06
Yes.
00:12:07
And the walls.
00:12:09
Every GTT room looks the same, but they
00:12:12
sound different.
00:12:13
And that'd be fun.
00:12:14
Yes, that's right.
00:12:16
Well, that was fun.
00:12:17
Is it over?
00:12:19
The Pro Audio Suite.
00:12:21
With thanks to Triboo and Austrian Audio.
00:12:24
Recorded using Source Connect.
00:12:25
Edited by Andrew Peters.
00:12:27
And Mixed by Robbo.
00:12:28
Got your own audio issues?
00:12:30
Just ask Robbo dot com.
00:12:32
With tech support from George the Tech Whittam.
00:12:34
Don't forget to subscribe to the show and
00:12:36
join in the conversation on our Facebook group.
00:12:38
To leave a comment, suggest a topic or
00:12:40
just say g'day, drop us a note at
00:12:42
our website, theproaudiosuite.com