The Recording Booth is Started

September 6, 2024

Well, there’s good news and not-as-good-as-I-had-hoped news. The good news is that all the recording scripts for Sleuthhounds: Cruise have now been prepared. The other news is that the recording booth that I need to do the recording of those scripts is not. Due to a bit of time underestimation on my part and a bunch of other unexpected obligations coming up over the past month, I’m not quite there on the recording booth. The domino effect is that I’m not ready to start casting the game either.

However, some progress has at least been made on the booth. There’s even some pictures to prove it. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the current construction.

Looking into the audio booth from the front.

The basic booth is a box that’s about four feet by five feet square and six and a half feet tall. Walls are fastened to one another with double-ended hex bolts. These fasteners are easy to screw and unscrew, which is an important factor in making the booth. When I don’t need the booth, I want to be able to disassemble it easily and store it away “flat”, so to speak.

Double-ended hex bolts hold the panels together.

To also help with storage, each wall is made of two separate vertical panels, which are held together by more double-ended bolts. The materials I’m using for construction are pretty lightweight, but a four or five foot by six and a half foot panel would be really cumbersome to move about just from its sheer size.

For the materials, I did want to keep the weight down, again to help with moving the booth around when setting it up and later when tearing it down and storing it. The basic frame is made from knotty pine, both because it’s lightweight and because it’s inexpensive. The walls are a material called SONOpanX, which I’d never seen or worked with before. It’s a sort of fiber board that comes in 4’ x 4’ sheets and is intended as a sound deadening floor underlay. I had no clue how good of a sound deadener it would be; I got it because again it was inexpensive and lightweight. One sheet of SONOpanX is, I believe, about twelve pounds.

Looking out the front of the booth.

One wall of the booth is mostly open at the front. The idea is the vocal talent goes inside the booth, which they can access through a door on the side, and I sit outside with my laptop to record the audio from a microphone on the inside. The front of the booth is left open so the two of us can talk back and forth.

Several years back, I made a portable recording booth from a storage bin and foam lining. It will sit at the front of the booth, with the microphone inside, and effectively work as the fourth wall. This is similar to the arrangement I had for a temporary recording “booth” in the basement that I made from three hanging drapes and the portable recording booth. I think the same idea should work for this new recording booth, but that has yet to be tested. Construction is happening in the worst audio environment in my house. It’s a room with four unadorned walls and a tile floor, so nothing to absorb echoes. Even so, with the main booth structure done, the amount of echo in that room has been significantly cut down.

The light will ultimately clip into the hole in the wall.

Now that the shell of the booth is in place, it’s time to move onto the interior. With four high walls, it can get quite dark in the booth, which is not conducive to someone reading from a script. In my old makeshift booth, I had a lamp perched on a stool. It would shine from behind, over the shoulder of whoever was recording. For this new booth, I’m building a lamp right into the side. I got one of those flat LED pot lights (not really a pot light as there’s no pot) to put on the side of the booth. With a circular saw bit for my drill, I’ve cut a hole in the side of the booth into which the light will ultimately go. I’ve tested the light there temporarily and it’s going to work really well for illuminating the inside of the booth.

A test fit of a mattress topper to absorb sound.

The next thing to work on is the sound absorbing properties of the booth itself. The SONOpanX does appear to be sound deadening to a degree, but only to a degree. Speaking at a normal voice level, I can still hear echoes in the room I’m building the booth in. However, I never intended the SONOpanX to be the main noise absorber. From working on my portable audio booth, I’ve had great success with foam mattress toppers for beds. I’ve picked up three such mattress toppers quite inexpensively and am now cutting them to fit the booth. My intent is to secure the corners and probably the centers in place with screws, but I also want to cover the SONOpanX boards with a spray adhesive to help keep the mattress toppers in place. My only concern is that the SONOpanX and mattress toppers are both quite porous, so they might just absorb the spray adhesive and not really “adheese”.

Once I have the mattress toppers and the side light all in place, there’s still one more piece of construction. I need to build a table of sorts to go inside the booth. The table will support the portable audio booth, which itself contains the recording microphone. I originally had the idea of suspending the table from the walls of the booth, which, I guess, would make it more of a shelf. However, after working with the SONOpanX, I don’t think it’s sturdy enough to support the weight of the table, portable recording booth, and microphone. So, I’m changing the plan to make a more traditional table with legs instead. I still want it to be easy to disassemble for storage though. So, that’s still a consideration, but that’s a tale for another blog post.

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