I found myself in a little predicament; the quality of my audio recordings was not reaching the standard I wanted and it all came down to sound bouncing and vibrations from components on my desk and around my office.
It didn’t seem feasible or logistically possible to remove all clutter from around my room. I had considered doing this and placing some acoustic foam panels on the walls, but I didn’t want to detract from the primary use of the space being a working office.
What I needed was a vocal booth, like this one here you can purchase from VocalBooth.com. After researching I realised that although this is a fantastic product, it wasn’t the most realistic solution. I needed to find a less expensive, local solution that could hide away in a corner unobtrusively or fold up in a cupboard…
I spun in my chair to look at the built in cupboard directly opposite my desk full of junk, off-season clothes and who knows what else. After a quick measure up, I concluded although it will be slightly squashy, it will do the job brilliantly.
The next few hours consisted of finding a new home for the contents of the cupboard. I then removed the wire shelving and only the brackets that would rattle or move.
Before I committed to making somewhat major changes I wanted to test the space first. I headed off to a local foam retail seller and bought an off-cut piece. It actually only cost me $3 so definitely worth it for the experiment. As I am not concerned with sound proofing the booth, I simply needed enough foam to make the cupboard sound dead and not reverberate any sound.
I cut it into 3 even size pieces and setup the microphone. Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos of this process but to explain I placed one behind the microphone, and the other 2 on the left and right.
The result was definitely promising and the audio quality had improved, so I decided to commit to the whole project and set it up correctly.
The shelving that was installed used quite a few little clips and brackets so I had to do a little repair work on the walls – definitely not one of my listed skills. I then grabbed some paint we had left over from recently painting some feature walls around the house, and brightened the cupboard up a bit. Painting is definitely not my favourite thing to do… very far from it.
Adam Purcell: new media junky, podcaster, content creator, designer, entrepreneur, dreamer, and most importantly a husband and a father. Founder of Hungry Dog Media, plus many other projects. 