Somewhere (in the house)
This is one of the typical places for a so-called homestudio. A spare room in the house that is not needed otherwise. Sounds familiar? Under the roof. Down in the basement. A corner in the sleeping room. Dark, small, sometimes humid. Sounding horrible, even after lots of efforts to improve it. Very difficult to make it an inspiring place to increase your creativity.
Mostly vocals recorded in a place like this sound very typical, even if they have been captured very close to a microphone with cardioid characteristics making use of the proximity effect.
The bad news for recorded vocals that are full of these room resonances is that no mixing skills in the world can save them. The more eq the worse they become. The more compression the more terrible they will sound. There is no way to fit them in the mix. I struggled with that many years.
The worst thing you can do is to buy a lot of waffle foam that is so widely sold and promoted and found its way to so many homestudios only to make things a lot worse. Because small rooms and rooms with very low ceilings already suffer from honkyness in the mid frequencies and a huge amount of bass build-up. Waffle foam will only affect hi mids and above. The room will sound subjectively dry, because the frequencies that the ear is most sensitive to, are reduced. On the other hand the bass and lo mids will be even more prominent relative to the upper frequencies. I measured small rooms where the standing waves produced a peak of over 15 dB between 120 and 150 hz. To carve that out of a vocal, cutting out 20 dB could be neccessary. Imagine what that will do to the vocal signal itself!
Is it at all possible to make a small room recordable for vocals? Sure it is. Even big studios have small vocal booths and they record vocals in there though they have huge rooms available. And if you design your small room like a vocal booth you can successfully record vocals at home. But if you don't have a calling to be a mason, carpenter, tailor (for curtains and such like) and your skills are rather limited in those areas there is an easier and better way. Break free from the limitations of your walls and record
anywhere!
