How to Plan Your Home Voice Over Studio
Acoustics, Location, Microphones, Mixers, Monitors, Recording
When you're planning to build a home voiceover studio the first things you should consider when trying to choose the right space are:
- Where is the best, most quiet space for you to have it?
- Is it realistic to think you will be able to work in this space relatively undisturbed?
- Will you be constructing a studio for practice or production purposes?
- Does the space have enough electrical outlets and are those outlets well grounded?
- Does your home studio space have a network connection?
- Does it have a good door on it that will seal up tight when you close it?
- How much window exposure does it have?
- Will your voiceover studio be close to other mechanical interference in the house such as heat pumps, furnaces and electric appliances?
- Is the space carpeted? How much furniture is in the room?
- Is the lighting incandescent or florescent? Are there rheostats in the room?
- Are there air vents in the room that would be a source of noise?
- Where do you plan to store computers and other noise generating equipment?
If you've found a good location for your voice over studio, what kind of equipment do you plan to use?
- Will your computer be a Mac or PC?
- What digital editing software do you plan on using? Adobe Audition? Digidesign's ProTools?
- Are you going to use a self contained microphone preamp/sound card system like an M-box or are you planning on using a PCI-based solution?
- Do you plan on having a mixer of any kind?
- Do you plan on having other outboard equipment such as vocal processors, equalizers, CD decks, DAT, ISDN or phone patches?
- What are you going to do as far as acoustic treatment?
- What are your plans for sound isolation? A voice over booth? A closet?
- How do you plan on listening to your productions? Headphones? Studio monitors?
- How much of your budget is set aside for a microphone?
- Will you be using a table stand or boom/shock-mount configuration for your microphone?
Don't forget to think of things like cables, CDs, adapters, FTP software, web space, large hard drives, CD burners, etc.
The shopping list for your home voice over studio can get kind of long and your budget is going to be a big consideration. Make sure to put most of your effort into planning.
Some articles you may find helpful as you begin to plan can be found here:
Constructing a network quality sound isolation booth...
Acoustic treatments for voice over production environments...
The getting started in voice over checklist...
Watch this movie to see how the new voice over isolation booth is coming.
