Booths and Sound Isolation: Clubhouse #VOLifeChat with Jean-Francois Donaldson
In this Episode
Whether you are recording for podcasts or voiceovers, sound quality is everything. Jean-Francois Donaldson @thedeepvoiceguy is a voice actor, demo producer and booth builder, so he knows a little something about booths and sound isolation for VO. We had a chat on Clubhouse about it and discussed:
How Jean-Francois got started with VO 3:34
Booth building 9:00
Soundproofing and the ideal places to set up a booth in your home 16:07
Prerequisites for your recording environment
Materials you can use for sound isolation when recording in a closet
Registering as a production studio 31:03
Q&A 38:00
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Jean-Francois Donaldson interview
Note: This was my first time recording a Clubhouse room. I didn't catch the first few minutes of Jean-Francois' audio, so you'll miss his side of our back and forth during the introduction.
Key Points
Soundproofing is that no outside noise and get in and out inside noise and get out. Sound acoustics sound inside isn't echoing like you are in a cage.
When considering spaces in your home to put a booth, pick a closet or area that is not facing an outside wall so you don't have a lot of cars and outside noise, able to travel through those walls. Jean-Francois loves using mass loaded vinyl when he builds booths. It's a very dense rubbery vinyl sheet that blocks out a lot of a lot of noise.
You can replace hollow cut doors in your home with a solid core door. It will again add that density that mounts to your space where at least from the door side, it's not seeping through the cracks. because then also add in a weather strip sweep on the bottom of door, on both sides, so it sweeps to the bottom of the floor. And then I had a window seal to the trim of the doors, so when I close it. It's a rubber seal in sections close.
As for panels, he uses a mixture of the foam panels. Also use acoustic panels, which has wrapped inside. With a bass trap, which is going to be your corner bass traps, which you can use the foam ones which are like a foot and a foot thick with wine, and usually one to two feet long. Acoustic panels diffuse a variety of sounds and waves, the highs and lows and mids, versus the foam panels that only kind of kill some of the highs and mids. So if you have a deeper voice, you'll want to use corner bass traps, because that's usually where your bass frequencies are going to resonate in the corners.