Noises Off

(Or, the joys of recording a life-changing audition during
your neighbor’s annual fireworks festival.)

Uncle Ralph has a hard time at parties, get-togethers, and
public events. That’s because Uncle Ralph is a little hard
of hearing and he wears a hearing aid. His hearing aid does
just that—it aids his hearing. It’s –tah dah—a microphone!
Unfortunately, it behaves like a sensitive large diaphragm
microphone...it boosts everything: clinking glasses,
passing cars, rustling garments, conversations halfway
across the crowded room (isn’t that Sam and Janet Evening
I hear?). So much of that extraneous background noise gets
pumped up that it can be hard for dear old Uncle Ralph to
hear the person right in front of him. He is constantly
distracted by background noises that the little microphone
in his ear picks up so disturbingly well.
Despite your protestations to the contrary, it’s my
contention that you have a lot in common with Uncle
Ralph, and background noise is one of those things (your
taste in Hawaiian shirts is another, but we won’t go down
that path just yet).
Wherever you’re trying to record, whether you’re in a
professional studio in downtown Manhattan or your home
studio tucked into an apartment closet, there are sounds that
belong and sounds that are better left unheard.
These days, anyone with a good laptop computer and
four or five hundred extra bucks to invest can set up to
record voiceovers with astonishingly good quality. Back in
the day (my day, that is) a recording set-up of similar
quality and flexibility would cost thousands if not tens of
thousands of dollars. Combine these recording break-
throughs with the Internet revolution (Thanks Al!) and you
are ready to record your voice for the world!
The problem is not your voice...(well, maybe it is, I
haven’t heard your voice)...the problem is everything else
you hear when you record...Noises off indeed!
Your brain’s audio circuitry is an amazing thing, really.
You pick out what’s important, and ignore all the
background chatter and static. You walk outside and you
think you hear only the beautiful chirping of the springtime
birds, the soft rush of a warm breeze...
But if you take a microphone and a portable DAT out with
you, you’ll discover that you’re hearing a whole lot more...
you’re hearing the rush of traffic on a highway four or five
miles away. The angry whine of a leaf blower. A distant
argument between Sam and Janet Evening over who takes
the kids to school.
So you rush into your house, sit down by your
computer. Close the doors, pull the curtains, put on your
headphones, and commence to record that all-important
audition using your brand new M-Box and the Marshall
MXL2003 large diaphragm microphone that you got for
just 150 bucks down at Sam Ash.
You sound great. Just like I said you would. But...
You also sound like you’re recording in a gigantic
echo chamber, or a large tiled bathroom. You sound
“boxy.” And you hear a constant humming noise under
everything you’ve laid down to a track. Like a fan. You
haven’t even started your career yet and you have a fan,
cool! Well, not so cools. In fact, it’s annoying as can be.
What the heck is that noise?
Probably, a fan. Duh.
You set up a microphone near a computer and you’re liable to pick up fan noise...laptops can be quieter, but
most computers do make some noise. Not only that, if you
put your handy dandy microphone stand on the desk
surface you may pick up vibration from hard drives etc.
through the stand base. Also not cool. What is a voiceover
tyro to do?
Well, you might get inspired and put a couple of soft
magazines under the microphone base...that helps. You
could also go out to the local guitar store and buy a
microphone stand and set the thing up so it’s on the floor
and the boom arm swings over to where you can talk into it
at your computer. Better still. More genius! You move
the whole mic and stand across the room (you need a
longer cord for the microphone, and this is not going to be
easy if you have one of those nifty USB-powered
podcasting microphones), maybe you even move the
microphone into the closet. Marvelous!
When I’m up at the cottage in Canada, and I am forced into
the closet (don’t ask, don’t tell) I leave the winter jackets
and clothes on the hangers...soft surfaces make for a nice
dead sound.
But you can still hear the neighbor mowing his lawn.
Noise, soundproofing, boxy effect...it’s all part of the
battle fought by the home recordist. I have to say I’m not
a studio design expert; the advice I have to offer is the
hard-won knowledge from the school of voiceover knocks.
Also, I watch the engineer when I’m at recording sessions
and ask the occasional unobtrusive question...people that
do recording all day long are people in the know.
So what about the trials and tribulations of recording
at home?
First, in my mind I separate some of the problems I get
when I record into two discreet categories:

1. Deadness.

I’m not talking about the state of
pushing up daisies here...I’m talking about the
amount of boxiness or echo effect you get in your
recording. A room with hard walls and lots of
parallel surfaces can make it sound like you’re
recording in an echo chamber. Because you are.
When you record with a cheap microphone built
into your computer, it’s not just the low quality of
the mic that makes it sound bad...it’s the harsh
surfaces of the room and even the desk itself that
make it sound tinny and hollow.

2. Isolation.

This means putting yourself in a
position where outside noise doesn’t get in, whether
it’s fan noise from your computer, your neighbors
yard crew, or the dog scratching himself upstairs.
What you want on your recording is your voice...
not everything else that Uncle Ralph can hear in his
hearing aid.
Lots of people think the sonic foam they see in studios is
for soundproofing. To my mind, it serves more to deaden
the sound, by absorbing the sound waves and reflecting
them in a diverse pattern that prevents echo. Sound is like
water in lots of ways...for one thing, it moves in waves,
which is why you get echoy effects in the first place.
Envision a sine wave (you remember Auld Lang Sine,
right?) it looks an ocean wave...crests and troughs...peaks
and valleys.
Sound moving through the air creates waves like
that...with peaks and valleys...and it goes through the air
at a measurable speed—something like 1100 feet per
second, depending on the temperature. This is why, when
you see a lightning flash, you can count the seconds (one
thousand one...one thousand two...) until you hear the
thunder and compute how far away the lightning strike is.
This, of course, is all rather unscientific and can create a
false sense of security. When you hear thunder it’s time to
jump in the golf cart and get the heck out of there. But I
digress.
The point is, when that lovely, shapely wave strikes a
hard surface it does just what a water wave would do, it
bounces back...and when it meets the wave coming in, the
two combine in weird and wonderful ways to modify each
other. Two peaks meeting can increase the loudness of
some frequencies...a peak and a valley meeting can nullify
each other and create a soft spot...out of phase, the waves
can create all kinds of effects, including, echoes.
When you have completed your climb of the
Matterhorn, and shout out your success to the
mountaintops, what you hear is your voice coming back
with delay...a fraction of a second later if it bounces off a
nearby peak...much more delay if it bounces off a far away
peak. It’s a neat effect on the Matterhorn, and a great effect
in a hard sell car dealer spot—but a horrible effect in your
audition for the jewelry store commercial.
When it comes to echo and reverb and phasing, audio
engineers like to add those effects with outboard processors
or digital plug-ins...after the recording of the voice has
been laid down. So you want your recording to be pretty dead. You can add reverb later if you want to for some
reason.
So how do you make that “dead” sound happen in
your cellar studio, apartment studio, or closet studio? Or
worse yet, in the motel room, summer cottage, or Mom and
Dad’s place when you’re visiting and want to record an
audition on your laptop?
Absorption and control of reflection, that’s where it’s
at.
You want to record in an area that has non-parallel surfaces
so that sound tends to be diffused when it bounces off the
walls and doesn’t come bouncing back in even waves that
create echo and that hollow-sounding boxiness. (Some
people, musicians in particular, like a little of that relection,
calling the room “live” rather than dead. In the world of
voiceovers, dead is good...we can bring the voice back to
life with add-on effects if we want them.)
You also want to have soft surfaces, that absorb the
sound waves so they don’t reflect back strongly in the first
place...that’s why you see the sonic foam, the padded
boards on the walls, and the movable panels on wheels
made of foam or burlap (Gobos, they are called). Gobos
help absorb sound waves, and--being movable--they help
control the way sound waves move in the recording area.
In real world situations, voiceover types have been
known to fight “boxiness” in a temporary space by
throwing a blanket or towel over their head and over the
microphone as well, to create an impromptu “mini-booth”
to record in. I’ve strung blankets up on ropes kitty-corner
across a room at the cottage to avoid the echoy sound...and
I know of a nearby recording studio under construction
where they stood an old couch up on end behind the microphone to create a temporary gobo. It worked very
well indeed. And after the sessions were done, they could
lower the couch to it’s feet and sit on it. Excellent.
There are expensive add-ons that purport to do similar
things for voice recording on location...you can google the
Reflexion Screen, which costs more than 300 bucks. If you
look around on the internet a bit, you’ll find a number of
people who have put together temporary little boxes with
sonic foam and plywood, or acoustic paneling that they
erect around their microphone to create a better less boxy
sound. Harlan Hogan, author of “The Voiceover Actors
Guide to Home Recording” has made up a little “porta
booth” using a pop-up folding storage cube lined with
scraps of sonic foam. It’s only about a cubic foot in size
and folds up or storage or travel. You can google it...you
may want to make yourself one for those trips to Aunt
Winnie’s. You can spend the weekend in the country, stuff
yourself on her brownies, and still do your VO auditions.
What all these things, porta booths, blankets over your
head, walls of sonic foam, gobos, won’t do is isolate your
recording area from outside sound.
Again, sound is like water, it finds its way into your
recording area through every available crack and cranny...
not to mention by creating sympathetic vibrations in every
flat pane of glass and wallboard. That’s where sound is
even worse than water, because the sound waves set up
vibrations in flat surfaces, which act like speaker cones or
drum heads and by vibrating, send the wave on into the
next room. A standard wall can keep out light, maybe
even a bit of water, but not much sound.
So what do you need to create a quiet space for
recording? You need isolation from outside sounds. Good isolators are dense and heavy...that’s why a cellar can be a
good place to record...though even the thick concrete walls
of a cellar will vibrate when a large truck rumbles by.
Glass block is a good isolator....heavy gypsum board,
cement board; all those kinds of things can be used to
dampen the vibrations coming in to your recording booth.
If you really want to make a quiet area...you may
want to build a little box within the big box of your room.
That’s what I did. That’s what a number of people have
done who do a lot of recording in their home. It can get to
be a significant project, and it doesn’t always go down well
with spouses, so research it carefully and make sure it’s
really necessary for the amount and type of work you do.
Soundproofing is a compromise in the home studio, so be
realistic. I have a friend who does hundreds of car
commercials in his home studio, and he worries very little
about background noise and isolation, because almost all of
his spots have loud music and sound effects under them.
Still, most of us are sending out bare naked voiceover
tracks—as it were—and we don’t want to have a lot of
background noise in the mix. To create a quiet recording
booth on a budget you need to adhere to some basic
principles. You need good tight seals on everything. You
need to make sure the box you create—your vocal booth—
is separate from the surrounding room...that it has it’s own
studs and walls and doesn’t share studs or wallboard with
an adjoining room, because those will simply act as a
drumhead and carry the vibrations of the noises in the next
room directly into your booth.
My little recording booth is only about 4 feet square
on the inside. The walls are thick with many layers of
gypsum board and acoustic panel. I have one hole in the
wall at the floor level through which my cables run to the
mixer, pre amp, and ISDN codec...Those cables run
through a foam tube stuffed with acoustic foam scraps to
prevent sound leaking in. I tried to weather strip the door
so it doesn’t let sound leak in, and it seems to work. I have
a small window so I can see my computer monitor, but it
has several panes of glass so the sound doesn’t penetrate
too much via the window. It would be even better if the
glass panes where not parallel to each other, but on an
angle to deflect the sound as it tries to pass through the
glass...but hey, there are limits here!
I’ve seen other studios that use glass sliding doors,
double doors, etc. The sky is the limit and it can get pricey.
You can also buy a Whisper Room or one of the other
portable studios and have it shipped to your house. I know
guys who do a lot of promos and voiceovers from home
who use those setups and they’re great. They also cost
thousands of dollars...so you may want to hold off on that
until you get the big affiliate contracts coming in (you
know, “tonight on News-Watch Eleven...voiceover talent
found trapped in his own recording booth!) Don’t be
putting any locks on those vocal booth doors. Sound tight
is close to air tight in a recording booth and ventilation is a
very big problem. Most of us simply open our door and let
fresh air in between takes.
It’s hot work when you can get it...and you can get it if you
try.
Maybe a nice corner in the family room with Harlan
Hogan’s porta cube is the best way to go at first. Or don’t
come out of the closet. I have a friend who does network
promos in a modified closet and he sounds great.

One last word on isolation. Okay, two last words: Downward Expander. I’m no
techie, but if you get to the point where you can afford a
decent mic preamp or channel strip, think about getting
something that includes the normal phantom power,
compressor limiter, and...a downward expander. This is a
feature found on lots of preamps including theSymetrix
528e and some of the Focusrite Platinum models. A
downward expander, used right, will clamp down on noise
below a certain level...i.e. background noise. It can be set
to listen for a certain threshold—a point at which the
background noise drops below a set volume—and then
block that noise completely, basically replacing it with
silence. This can be very effective at eliminating low level
sounds of computers, people chatting in an adjoining room,
etc. When the sound level rises about the threshold, when
you begin to read the copy for example, the downward
expander kicks out, letting the sound through. Done right,
the background noise is too low to be audible when you’re
talking, and is completely eliminated in the spaces between
words. It takes careful adjustment to be sure you don’t
clip the beginning and ends of words you want to hear...so
use a downward expander with care. It is, however,
something cool to put on the home studio wish list.
If you’re booth—or closet—is quiet enough, of
course, you won’t need it.