4 October 2022

Moving my studio!

Moving house (and Home Studio)

Moving my Home Studio. I’m moving house and moving my home studio! It’s the end of an era – I’ve been living in my East London house for over 7 years, and performing voiceovers in my home studio there for 5 of those years. Whilst I wait for my new flat to be ready, I am temporarily moving back in with the ol’ parents for a few months. I don’t want to be out of work for this period. So my parents have kindly allowed me to set up a temporary home studio in one of the bedrooms. This way my voiceover work can remain unaffected during this transition.

Setting up a makeshift studio

My original home studio was comprised of acoustic foam tiles. These are great for soaking up the sound. However, they need to be glued to the wall and some tiles needed to be cut to fit corners and ridges etc. My parents would very much like the room put back to normal once I leave. Therefore gluing foam tiles to the wall was not an option for me

A great temporary replacement for the tiles are towels and quilt covers. Setting myself up in a corner of the room, I covered the walls and ceiling in old towels and quilts. Then I fit a curtain pole across the corner space. Securing it to the top of a wardrobe and another piece of furniture. Then I was able to hang a heavy duty velvet curtain across to enclose the space. This keeps reverb and echo down to a minimum. If I didn’t have the curtain there to deaden the sound, it would sound very boxy.

After I had set this up, it was important for me to do a sound check. So I recorded a sample and sent it off to a sound engineer I work closely with to see if the sound was good enough for a broadcast quality voiceover. It’s always a good idea to do this, because they can tell you exactly what it is about the sound that needs tweaking. When I first set up my home studio in my old house I encountered a problem. I’d installed the microphone the wrong way around (I didn’t realise it had a front and back) and my sound engineer knew straight away why it sounded like I was in a box!

Rosie.