- Project Studio Solutions -
So why do I need vocal booth anyway?
You’ve just gone out and bought the best gear you can find. You've spent hours researching and labouring over every buying decision, trauling the net and devouring every gear review you can get your hands on just in case you miss something up ahead in the works.
Now you've got a great pre-amp with that classic vibe, a great condenser mic with specs to make the most ardent tech swoon, a digital desk that sounds immaculate and will do everything including make the coffee, plus monitors that promise a killer mix every time with stereo imaging more accurate than a laser guided missile and more grunt than a bulldozer. Thrown in with all this you’ve got a top class sequencer and enough plug-ins to refloat the Titanic.
You’ve laid down your tracks and they sound great. Everything is going to plan, the bass is pumping, the drums are cracking and sizzling and your strings arrangement is slicing its way in and out of the mix. But hold on something’s not quite right...... there’s something wrong with the vocal, it wont sit in the mix. No matter what you do you can't get it to fit. You compress it, you run it through the plug-ins, you even resort to the absolute do-not-do of drastically mangling it with EQ. Still the vocal won't sit in the mix. It sounds like it's sitting on top of the mix and no matter what you do it won’t fit in. It even sounds like its out of tune but autotune plug-ins won’t fix it either. Sound familiar?
The reality is that unless you are tracking in the booth or control room of a professional studio that's been acoustically designed from the ground up it will be almost impossible to get the vocal to sit correctly in the mix.
The reason for this is simple. Most project studios are located in your average home or apartment. If you get up from your chair and go over and knock on the walls around you, they will be made of either wallboard (plasterboard) or even worse, cement board. If you are lucky you may have a real timber lining such as Cedar, this will more than likely be on a feature wall only adding little to the acoustic stability of the room. If the walls are solid brick it will sound sharp, with false enhancements in the upper mids and highs while lacking bass. Recording vocals (or anything for that fact) in rooms such as these will produce less than favourable results. High performance condenser microphones are very sensitive creatures, these types of microphones pick up and record the vocal track perfectly, but they also faithfully reproduce every skewed frequency associated with the source signal as it bounces back and forth around the room going from wall to wall. If the room is symmetrical then the problem will be compounded. Clap your hands in an empty room such as this and you will hear the ring of these frequencies. If compression is used during tracking it will bring up the overall level of the vocal but it will also lift the level of the unwanted frequencies and integrate them into the signal. Ultimately this has a negative effect on the accuracy and quality of the recording.
To get the vocal correct it needs to be recorded in either a professionally built and treated room or in an acoustically treated and isolated area. The vocal booth is an essential tool in the recording process and is more important than most of the equipment in many racks. When fitting out a serious project studio a vocal booth should be one of the highest priorities (up there with a good pre-amp and mic). In fact it’s better to have a good standard pre-amp (such as on a Mackie desk), a reasonable condenser microphone and an acoustically treated area to record in than a $5,000 mic and a $10,000 pre-amp but a poor acoustic space to record in, the former will sit better in the mix on any given day. As a general rule the larger the acoustic space, the harder it is to control.