It's basically held together with gum, scotch tape, and feelings, but short of me fixing the acoustic paneling on the one wall I didn't have a moving blanket for it's done. After fifteen trips to Home Depot trying to get the right lengths of 3/4" PVC piping, all the little T connectors and corners, having my irritated wife hold up the ceiling while I fixed the blanket covering the top, and endless futzing around with the new microphone and audio interface I bought, and having to deal with a couple of very curious pets, it's good enough to at least start auditioning some more.
You might remember my janky desk setup from before:
Well, now may I present the somewhat less janky PVC booth!
Now I can scream out my feelings in the privacy of my very own enclosed space, with jaunty XMas lights keeping me from tripping over wires. The building material was almost exclusively all purchased online through Amazon.com, with the PVC piping coming from Home Depot. I used leftover XMas lights we already had for the lighting, and my wife's standing desk on a plastic storage bin to get the laptop up high enough to sit at for when I'm not recording. The chair can be thrown out the moving blanket door curtain at my whim, which is itself being held to the PVC pipe frame by zip ties so that I can slide the curtain open and closed.
Most of the research for building this thing came from a VERY helpful YouTube video by Ken Tsurata (a.k.a. kenisinoregon).
Next on the to-do list is to further isolate the space by throwing even more blankets and acoustic foam and other such things on the inside surface of the two book cases and the walls surrounding it in order to soundproof as much as humanly possible. My new mic, an Audio Technica AT2035 XLR condenser microphone, is pretty damned sensitive and I'm still hearing that mic hiss in the background of a lot of my audio tests and the couple of auditions I wanted to get started on right away.
If there's two things I've learned through this whole process it's one, I am NOT a "handy man". There was a lot of trial and error that went into this thing, even with what I thought was a huge focus on measuring twice and cutting once. I'm surprised the people in the PVC section at Home Depot didn't know me by name by the time I actually got everything I needed to build that simple, little 6x4x4 box. And two, I know even less than I thought I did about audio technology. The only thing that's gotten me this far is episode 116 of Crispin Freeman's "Voice Acting Mastery" podcast where he discussed basic settings for recording equipment. But at least I never make the same mistake twice, and I'm having a ton of fun with these new auditions and collaborations that I can FINALLY START WORKING ON AGAIN!
Next on the to-do list is to further isolate the space by throwing even more blankets and acoustic foam and other such things on the inside surface of the two book cases and the walls surrounding it in order to soundproof as much as humanly possible. My new mic, an Audio Technica AT2035 XLR condenser microphone, is pretty damned sensitive and I'm still hearing that mic hiss in the background of a lot of my audio tests and the couple of auditions I wanted to get started on right away.
If there's two things I've learned through this whole process it's one, I am NOT a "handy man". There was a lot of trial and error that went into this thing, even with what I thought was a huge focus on measuring twice and cutting once. I'm surprised the people in the PVC section at Home Depot didn't know me by name by the time I actually got everything I needed to build that simple, little 6x4x4 box. And two, I know even less than I thought I did about audio technology. The only thing that's gotten me this far is episode 116 of Crispin Freeman's "Voice Acting Mastery" podcast where he discussed basic settings for recording equipment. But at least I never make the same mistake twice, and I'm having a ton of fun with these new auditions and collaborations that I can FINALLY START WORKING ON AGAIN!
That's it for today, folks. There will be updates real soon on a training opportunity I had to jump on here in Portland. Stay tuned or...reading...at...don't touch that dial or what have you. Yeah, don't touch that dial. [Finger guns. Winks with both eyes]
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