When recording vocals it's important to minimize reverberation and reduce unwanted noise (e.g. spill in group performances). Professional recording studios offer an isolation booth to deal with that. A cheap and flexible Do It Yourself approach is to build a small room out of moving boxes and blankets. Even though there isn't the same amount of noise reduction achieved, this solution minimizes reverberation.

Before building a DIY vocal box, you need to choose a location inside your room that has already least reverberations. I'd prefer the center of a blank wall over a corner to avoid some room modes as well as amplifying low frequencies. Another aspect is to use a table turned towards the center of a wall for building the vocal box on it. By this you can place a display, keyboard and mouse in front of your microphone tripod for reading lyrics and controlling your DAW.

The building process is easy. Fold the moving boxes and form walls around the table. I recommend to prick small holes into the carton and use cable tie for attachment. Don't forget to build a ceiling with blankets and leave out an entrance to suspend a blanket as door replacement. Consider a carton floor or use a carpet and cover any gaps with more blankets. Arrange the microphone stand as well as other equipment and try to establish a cable layout carrying the connectors preferably outside of the box. Also set up your computer and other noisy hardware faraway, ideally in another room.

Set up your equipment and enter your DIY vocal box. Place yourself in front of the microphone and test the acoustic environment. If there are still reverberations, try to locate the source (e.g. plane surfaces of equipment) and consider covering it with blankets. You can mark your singing position inside the box by applying tape on the floor.

Category: Room acoustics