A Voiceover Artist is a semi cave dwelling creature that occasionally interacts with other physical beings. We spend a lot of time in our studios creating professional, broadcast quality audio and have to strike a balance between having a great audio environment, and a space that promotes creativity.
There’s a lot of debate in Voiceover about the pros and cons of studio booths. I’m personally a big fan of them, especially the higher end models with specifications that allow true isolation and don’t sound like you’re talking inside a biscuit tin.
The lower end ones abuse any ignorance about acoustics, claiming to offer portable solutions.
These are the open fronted portable things that look like high mounted phone booths. They’re acoustically treated inside, but Microphones don’t point that way.
Differences – Voiceover & Music Studios
When I became a Voiceover Artist I already had a music studio in Hampshire, UK, which was pretty fortunate really. It was geared up acoustically for music production for visual media, so there needed to be some radical changes. The focus was more on premium quality audio, with a low noise floor and pristine clarity.
Is VoiceOver and music production closely related ? Not really, both make pretty noises come out of the speakers in the end and we run a constant battle for fair rates for professional services, thats about it.
Music Production Studios
Music production spaces are designed for allowing you to hear the spectrum of a stereo mix. The shape of the room is critical with no evil squareness. Square rooms build up low frequencies in the corners. LF sound needs room to arrive at your ears before reflections build up and if you’re positioned in the wrong place you’ll get an inn-accurate picture.
Accuracy is the name of the game for music producers. They want what they create to translate well from the studio into a car, a phone and a cheap mono speaker in a kitchen. Studios will add ambience and colour which is still there when playing back, so it’s neutralised with acoustic treatment. However they also don’t want a completely dead space that sucks the life out of a performance. Playback is done through speakers, rather than headphones, so you get the breadth and depth.
Voiceover Studios
Broadcast quality audio in Voiceover means recorded in mono with a negligible noise floor. The audio goes straight up the middle and other than that there’s silence, not complete silence as that sounds un-natural. There’s an audible difference between absolute silence and an acceptable (-60dB). Its a shame because if all we had to do was to apply de-noise to every track then we wouldn’t need a studio.
Voiceover artists listen back on headphones, you hear the background clearer and it promotes intimate performance. An audiobook, audioguide or eLearning project is much less forgiving of background noise, even at very low levels than most music productions.
The best headphones are open backed and provide a neutral response to your audio. Normal consumer speakers and headphones push the frequencies at the low and high end to colour the sound. So these are avoided.
Unlike Music studios, you don’t want any of the room turning up in your voice recordings. You also can’t get away with birds chirping, dogs barking, children screaming and computer fans transmitting a constant frequency.
It’s not an anechoic chamber that you’re after, but not far off it. The solution isn’t to plaster your walls with cheap black egg box foam. It looks terrible, absorbs nothing and diffuses even less. Seriously, who wants to spends hours inside a Tigh Fighter, oh and:
’what if there was a fire’ ?
You’ll often see a Music Studio in a railway arch or in an industrial estate, as sound proofing, rather than treatment is expensive. We’re less bothered about what leaks out and more concerned about what comes in. When you’re creating pristine audio, location is pretty important so setting up next to a construction site next door is not optimal.
Thats why many opt for a vocal booth. They’re big, heavy things that take up loads of room, but when you’re in need of a relatively dead space for VoiceOver, they’re fantastic.
Re-fitting My Own Studio For Voiceover
As usual I wanted the best of both Worlds, but my studio is quite small and the addition of one would basically mean an end to music production in that space.
The compromise was simple, lets turn the actual room into a booth in itself. It’s small enough to achieve that and the costs would be around the same for a booth, but I’d have a multi-use environment.
Acoustic Considerations
Some basic facts to remember when you build a studio.
1. Sound reflects in all directions, especially off shiny surfaces.
2. Low frequencies build up in corners due to comb filtering.
3. Your microphone points behind you and picks up the room acoustics that bounce from there, as well as above you.
4. Voiceover studios next to busy roads are bad.
5. Too small a space will sound muddy.
6. Too big a space will be reverberant.
7. You’re going to be in there a lot.
8. Stuff is expensive, so plan well.
First Steps
I stripped back all of the existing sound treatment I had in place, so just bare walls. The studio desk is big, too big for the room but I loved it and needed to find a way to make it work.
Studio Lay Out Considerations
For the music side of things, my rectangular space needed the speakers to be at one of the long ends, with me sat at the 3rd point of the triangle. The Voiceover area needed to be small enough to sound isolate, but big enough to retain life.
There’s a door at the end that opens to the outside and that needed special attention. Unless you triple glaze a window there’s nothing much you can do except get some good acoustic curtains that work.
The Solution
My overall plan was to create a booth like space within a room, but treat the whole room acoustically so that it had a multi function.
After lots of drawings and Youtube videos about how to mount curtain rails and ceiling mounts, the plan was pretty simple. I’ve got a mixture of absorption panels behind me to soak up reflections from my screen and the opposing wall, as well as on the ceiling. In front of me I went with a mixture of diffusion and absorption. To the sides, I curtained off my desk with outrageously expensive acoustic curtains.
The surface of my desk was highly reflective and so that got a furry feel too.
Studio Aesthetics
Aesthetics in a production studio are not the priority, until you consider the amount of time you spend in there. It’s better to work in a pleasant space and the fact that it’s a room in our family home needed to be factored in. I really didn’t want a single piece of black foam anywhere.
My Voiceover Studio Specifications
Acoustic Panels
Front Wall – GIK Absorption and Diffusion Squares
Rear Wall – GIK Absorption Panels
Ceiling – GIK 242 Absorption
Desk – Acoustic Tiles
Room Ends – Acoustic Curtains by Ridphonic / GIK 244 Bass Traps / GIK PIB
Microphone: – AKG C414 – XLS
Interface: – Apollo Twin X / Steinberg UR824
External Controller: – Steinberg CC121
Studio Desk – Zaor
Computer: – Mac 27 inch retina 5K / 4.2 HHz Quad Core Intel / 64 GB RAM
DAW: – Cubase Pro 13
Mixing Software – Izotope Post Production Suite
Headphones: – Sennheiser HD 660S
Lets Connect
James Fowler is a British Voice Artist, living and working in Hampshire, UK. He’s narrated over 50 audiobooks, has a passion for character work and has a strong background in audioguides and eLearning. If you have a project that you’d like to discuss, just get in touch here. He’ll be happy to get back to you quickly. Alternatively, feel free to check out James’ FAQ page.
