Making a vocal booth
This would either be one of the best the or worst ideas I would make in quite some time. Having a rather cozy (read: small) house, a vocal booth means a big ass piece of furniture which you cannot move with all your strength. And you are not sure if it will actually work.
Hi, I am Sjaak, one of the guitar players of Obsidian. I do some small melodic vocal parts in the band I would like to develop a bit more. I would probably not win the best neighbor award 2008 if I would scream my lungs out it my house build in 1890. So, I decided to build a vocal booth, big enough to hold me, a guitar, a microphone, and an interface to my computer in the next room.
The plan
First off, I worked out a scaled and detailed plan in Photoshop. This really helped me to decide in what order I should build and to calculate how much stuff I needed to buy.
That's a lot of ...
One thing you have to know when building a vocal booth: It will take a lo' of space. So kiss your girlfriend goodbye.
The outline
I started with laying down a 10 cm wide frame. Note that I placed it well from the walls. I would need the space behind it later on.
Rubber pads
A thing I took lot of attention to was the area in contact with the floor. This would be the area where sound will most likely leak to the neighbors. I did a little experiment with rubber pads between the two wooden frames and the 2 cm thick hardboard floor plate.
The roof?
Already? you probably ask yourself. I did the roof now, because it would be difficult enough to drag along those very heavy plates of hardboard, let alone measuring and sawing the damn things 2 meters in the air.
Wooden cage
A painstaking task when the beams are banana shaped... thanks to Praxis. Make sure to find straight beams, it will spare you a lot of agony. My savior was the staple gun, with which I could easily fix and detach beams to the top frame.
Prefab drywalls
Prefab drywalls are great. You can cut out 1,8 cm thick pieces off wall with a razor blade, not bad. Note that I moved the contraption to a few centimeters from the wall. Do this as quickly as possible, it was already too heavy to move on my own.
Between the two layers of drywall I used 10 cm thick rock wool. Working with this stuff can be a bit itchy. Who says protective gear cannot be fashionable?
The door
This would be the biggest challenge. Making a heavy 10 cm thick custom door that had to fit to the millimeter. The piece the resistance is the little window with six sheets of Plexiglas. Mainly because it took a lot of effort to make and it serves absolutely no purpose other than a slight reduction of claustrophobia.
The inner floor
I didn't want the inner floor to touch the walls. But I also did not want my guitar picks to fall into the space between the floor and the wall. For this I covered the space with a wooden strip. In later images you can see I also put in carpet tiles and an isolation layer under the carpet.
Some fresh air
Of course we also need to breath. I used active ventilation sucking in those nice oxygen molecules from the top. At the bottom other side a hole in the wall to let the air in. A hole in the wall is a bit off par with the whole purpose of making the vocal booth. So I created as much as possible corners as possible.
Out:
In: the air comes in with the cables. The cables you see here still need to go outside to the computer in the other room.
Voilla!
The result: a vocal booth.
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