Your Comfort Zone; or, Making Your Vocal Booth Perfect
I talk about vocal booths occasionally. Not as often as I’d like, mostly because I keep changing mine to suit my needs.
One thing I tell people who ask me about my studio is that you have certain needs for a vocal booth. These are:
- Having good acoustic treatment and a minimal of noise (Here’s some tips on reducing your Noise Floor by legendary Dan Leonard)
- Having quality equipment
- Having enough light to read copy
- Having the right temperature
That last one sometimes sounds weird. People can’t hear temperature. Or can they?
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Actually, they totally can. If it’s too hot, or too humid, or too cold, you can hear it in someone’s voice. Voice actors are always at our best when we’re rested, hydrated and comfortable, so having a good temperature is imperative. There’s a lot of ways to cool your booth, and doing so silently isn’t as hard as you think. A few things that can lower your temperature is swapping out standard light bulbs for LED’s, or pre-cooling your booth with AC before recording (obviously you don’t want to record with the AC running).
Try to keep your CPU outside of your vocal booth. not only will it reduce noise but it also will reduce heat. Use low-energy output monitors to read your copy, or better yet a tablet. if all else fails, just use paper–it doesn’t give off its own heat (Unless you set it on fire, but in that case you have bigger problems than a warm vocal booth).
How do you folks cool your vocal booths? Any tips and tricks to share?
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