Hey everybody, and welcome to the business of voiceover. This is the first lesson getting started setting yourself up. And in order to do any work for voiceover, you need a space you need a space for your workstation and you need a space to record in. So let's start by talking about the space that you record in. You do not need to drop $10,000 or more just to get your booth started it will cost you some money but if you start small and as you are able, you won't need a business loan or anything. The space you pick for recording should be as enclosed as possible.

Work with what you have. closets are the easiest or you can put up blankets to block off the corner. Have a room. basements are great because they're either all the way underground or halfway underground. So there's already a lot of sound isolation happening down there. In choosing this space, you want it to be something where if there's any noise where you live at all, which most of the time there is, this space helps block that out.

Now once you've chosen this space, those walls are something that your voice is going to bounce off of, and also go into the microphones, so you need to do some kind of soundproofing to your space. The general rule of thumb is that you want to have about 40% of the surfaces around you covered in sound absorbing materials. So that can be anything from bedspreads to blankets to soundproofing foam, it's not even that expensive. You can get it on eBay for pretty cheap to anything. You want to have carpets. If you don't have a carpet, you'll want to like get a little throw rug and lay something down underneath the microphone where you record at and you want to figure out as many ways as you can to get the echo out of your space and definitely the echo away from the microphone you don't want echo or reverb or anything picked up in your recordings.

In fact you don't want anything picked up in your recording but your voice and like I said make it work with the space you have. If you have a closet with some clothes in it you can staple or nail blankets to the ceiling and a few walls. One time I was living in a house temporarily and needed to set up a quick recording space in the basement so I made a booth out of PVC pipes. I went to Home Depot and bought PVC pipes that I had them cut and yes I did have p chair for a while don't hate. See they're in my basket for six foot ones, eight, two and a half feet ones along with eight elbow connectors. Put it together in less than five minutes and it was all for about 25 bucks.

Anyway I put my mic stand in there drapes, some sleeping bags and old towels over it. clamped a light on it and bam I had myself a booth. Some products I like foam Express on eBay is great. I think I got all that there for about 60 bucks and it comes with the spray glue. Also, these Porter booths are pretty neat. You can buy a brand name one, or there are videos on YouTube to make these for about 30 bucks.

The last thing I want to say about this is that it's all constantly evolving. I mean, the standards were much lower. When I first started doing small market jobs, they have evolved to become a bit higher standards. But then the ways to make your room sound soundproof has also evolved. I just found out today about this thing called the chaotic eyeball. Look at this.

It's like a globe with a pop filter on this sphere, that encases your microphone and apparently blocks out all other room noise which would be amazing. Like how annoying that I'm finding out about this the day after I built a massive vocal isolation booth. Anyways, you always want to be checking on what kind of solutions people are coming up with to increase your workflow, increase your productivity and increase your bottom line. Ultimately, you're going to set up your place where you record things you want to close it off. Like if you have a door, close it, you know, do it however you would do at the moment you would be recording, get up, go press record, and record 10 seconds of just the silence, the ambience, the room noise, and then put your headphones on and listen to that recording back and also look at the sound file.

You see if you have a straight line of silence, or if you have sound in your file. And if you do, then you know it's not quite right and you need to make some changes and go again and then you start to get better at that process too. And remember that it's not a crisis when the sound isn't perfect. It is all part of the process. It's all part of the workflow.