Creating My Recording Space

Before I was doing audiobooks and voice acting, I had a soul-sucking office job. The desk where I worked this job is located in my home's finished sub-basement. The room is oddly-shaped because on the other side of the back wall with the door, there is an un-finished area which contains our HVAC, water heater and water softener.

As you can see, a suitable setup for mindlessly quoting insurance, but not ideal for voice recording. Granted, with it being a sub-basement, a lot of the room is underground and therefore I get very little noise coming in from outside the house (mostly just my neighbor mowing his lawn, and maaybe the garbage and recycling trucks). I had been casually researching option for some sort of actual booth, and had the makings of a plan but some months went by and I never actually implemented any of it.

But then in June we had a mishap with our AC in that unfinished area behind the door. It leaked and flooded nearly half the carpet. In the process of getting everything cleaned up, I had to move most things off the carpet. After that was all dry, but before I went to put everything back, I figured now was as good a time as any to put up some acoustic shit. Until this point, I'd just had that one acoustic artwork panel on the wall behind my monitor. Ask me if I noticed any kind of difference in my recording after I put that up?? I truly couldn't tell.

I'd been thinking about making some sort of booth frame out of PVC pipes and shrouding that in acoustic blankets, but the way my desk corner is, and all the outlets I'd need to access, putting in a frame would actually be tricky. So I decided I would hang the blankets to go around behind me and on my left (when sitting at the computer). I also wanted to be able to have it open easily when I'm just editing or whatever, so for the one on my left side, I decided to put in a mounted curtain rod so I could slide that blanket open when I wanted. The one going behind me would be affixed to hooks in the ceiling.

Here we have the hooks installed, and the two brackets for the curtain rod. I set it up so the affixed blanket would wrap around the one end of the sliding blanket for a nice overlap when closed. I didn't want to deal with velcro or something to hold it shut.

Let me tell you, drilling holes up into the ceiling can be a bit awkward before you learn to make sure your face is not directly under it so you don't get the drywall dust falling in your face. Also, you know how these kinds of blankets are heavy? It sure made it difficult for me to hold everything up while I was screwing in the curtain rod (the blankets I purchased had these loop things that I had to have the rod through before installing the rod).

Well, eventually, I got the curtain rod up, and the other blanket connected to the ceiling hooks by the grommets in the blanket. As you'll see below, the blanket on the hooks is held quite nicely right up to the ceiling. The one on the curtain rod....well, there was always going to be a bit of a gap due to the curtain rod, but the loops in the blanket aren't short, so they hang even further down. I'm waffling if I should try to make that sit higher, or it might be easier to just have something from the ceiling hang down just a bit to overlap that gap. The jury is still out on that. It will probably be left as is for quite a while before I can be bothered to do anything about it.

Here is the look inside after just putting up the curtains and a string of fairy lights.

Next I wanted to put up some acoustic foam on the walls and ceiling. Here is how the 2 ft by 4 ft panels came shipped, versus after opening the vaccu-seal...

It said for best results to let it sit for 24-48 hours, so naturally I waited like a month before I got off my butt and finished this thing. I already regret leaving space between the 12x12" squares on the soffit which houses a ventilation duct, but I don't particularly want to pull them off only to find I can't re-stick them, so unless I feel like cutting some thin strips and sticking them in between, I'll probably just deal with it.

I quite like the look of the panels with the...I'm going to call them flat pyramids. Also, the squares made it quite easy to neatly cut out parts to fit around the previously mentioned soffit.

In conclusion, obviously this is not soundproof by any means, but since I have very little external noise coming into this room, I was just trying to create myself a little enclosed space so my recordings sound less like I'm sitting in a weird open room, which I think it has accomplished.

PS: The string of fairy lights, which I was initially excited about because you can change the color to whatever you want by remote, actually emits a slight buzzing sound so I barely turn them on, except to take pictures!