Words from the WellRandom Thoughts on Christ, the Church and Technology

I am no professional VO artist, let me get that out in the beginning, but I do have the occasional need to record VO for video projects. I live in an apartment so I have no control over when my neighbors decide to slam a door, stomp on the floor or do anything else that makes noise! In the past I had closed myself in a closet and hoped for the best. This worked, sort of. The clothes in the closet acted as some sound dampening but it still left the audio sounding a bit hollow.

I also have need to record decent audio at my day job. We have professors record lectures using Camtasia to capture audio and their Powerpoint. We have been doing this by giving them a decent USB headset mic. To be honest, I have never liked this setup. The overall quality was never very good and you could hear background noises and every mouse click when they advanced to the next slide.

With these needs in mind I began to look for an inexpensive solution and this is what I found-The New & Improved Voice Over “Porta-Booth” ®.

Now I could have gone ahead and bought one of the premade ones, but I am cheap and like to do somethings myself. So I decided that for not much more than the premade booth, I could get a booth and a microphone! So that is exactly what I did.

I began by locating the materials that I would need. You can spend valuable time searching the web for them or you can use these links. I would prefer that you use these links since I will get a little Affiliate love from Amazon and Sam Ash if you buy the materials with these links!

The first thing you need are the cubes. These come in a set of two, you can either make two booths or use the extra cube for storage.

Then you need the Mic. I choose a Blue Snowball. It is a USB mic that has gotten a ton of good reviews. Blue is a well known mic manufacturer and it looks cool!

The most difficult thing to locate was the acoustical foam. I wanted the Auralex Studiofoam Pyrimids because that is what Harlan said works best. These are usually only sold in boxes of 12. I only needed 1. I found them at SamAsh.

If you don’t want to pay that much for the Pyrimid panels, there are alternatives. You could buy this:

If you buy the wedge panel, you will cut it into 4 12″ squares. I have not tried this but I think that it would work, probably not as tight as the pyrimids though. I will cover how to cut the pyrimid foam in a moment.

Once you have all of your materials it is simple to put this thing together.

1. Unpack your cube.
2. Expand your cube, be sure to fold the flap into place.
3. Cut your 2′x4′ sheet of foam into 2-12″ squares and 1-26″x14″ sheet. Do this carefully with a serrated knife, like a bread knife. You will want to saw through the foam gently so that you don’t tear it and make a mess. You will have some left over. I am going to cut two smaller squares and place them under my monitors in my edit suite to isolate them from the table that they are sitting on. I hope this will take some of the “boominess” out of them.
4. Take the long sheet of foam and fold it in half, turn your cube so that the opening is up and place the foam against the bottom. Carefully making sure that it is in there tight. Then unfold it, making sure that it is straight against one side of the cube.
5. Then you are going to place the other two squares against the other two sides of the the cube.
6. Then turn your cube so that the “side” without foam becomes the bottom.

You have done the hard part. All that’s left is to place your mic inside, towards the back and start recording.

One thing that I noticed after I got this put together was an annoying little gap at the top. I was able to fix this using a small piece of velcro.

Here are some step by step photos.