Mission accomplished. Look here:
Okay... recovered from those stomach cramps from laughing too hard? But it really works! Lemme 'splain...
You see, I got myself that fine dynamic mic (Sennheiser e815s) a few weeks back for 30 Euros, but as my recording room (=my living room) had absolutely no acoustic treatment (except for when I closed the curtains), whatever I tried to record with it always had the (completely undesired) "ambience" of my living room on it. To make matters worse, the Sennheiser mic is not forgiving, at all, when it comes to plosives.
Now, if I already had more money that William Henry Gates III, I would probably just have plunked down the cash for a few of these fine things:
However, while I'm working my way up towards becoming a multi-trillionaire, I thought I'd simply apply the basic principle of such a reflection filter, using something I might have around the house. What I found was some foam packaging from some computer gear which had just the right size. So I nailed that to the wall (really!) right next to where I have thick curtains to the side of and behind the singer/speaker. The protruding end is stabilized via a thin thread that's connected to the curtain above with a safety pin.
The microphone cable loops through another safety pin above. That eliminates the need for a shock mount, as the mic dangles down freely from there, eliminating problems with low-end rumble sounds from foot falls, touching a mic stand, etc.
So far, so good. Total cost at this point: zero buckaroos. I did a test recording, and the mic sound had gotten really dry. Nice! The only remaining problem were those plosives, so creating a high-end pop filter was next on my agenda. At first, I thought I'd steal a pair of nylons from my x-rated girlfriend...
...but, alas: we're currently about 6,000 miles apart, so... no nylons in the house. I was just about to run out to the store to buy a pair... (Yes, they would have definitely, indelibly stamped me "pervert" or "cross-dresser", I'm sure... but that's the beauty of feeling perfectly comfortable with my self: it would not have mattered to me... :)
Where was I? Oh, right! I was just about to run out to the store to buy a pair of nylons to wear over the weekend create my world-class pop filter, when I thought I might try out my latest piece of clubwear, first: a leather-look shirt, made from a very thin elastic material. (Yup, I occasionally wear "stretchy pants", too!)
So I wrapped that shirt around my reflection filter and secured it with some thin pins. (That way, I can even wear the shirt again, once I've relocated to Berlin, where there's a real club scene...)
Next: the moment of truth, and - lo and behold - the shirt takes perfectly care of all plosives! And it doesn't even muffle the sound, at all... it's perfectly transparent... wow! Sometimes I amaze even my self!
Now, of course, I've pulled out all the stops, recording 48 hours/day... ;)
You can marvel at the first stunning results here:
http://www.myspace.com/deuxrochers
No, really! Go there now! It's cool! It's fun! It's the "proof in the pudding" for my claims here!
For the third and fourth recording there ("For my own part"), I "channeled" vocal grand master Orson Welles, re-reciting his opening narration to Alan Parsons's landmark debut album "Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe" - three faves of mine rolled into one neat package.
The recording was done completely dry, without any equalization, without a low-cut filter, without any compression or limiting - just straight into a dirt-cheap Behringer Eurorack mixer, using it's built-in mic preamps (which, unfortunately, added considerably to the audible noise floor, along with the less-than-stellar onboard "HD" audio input of my digital audio workstation).
Then I fired up my wave editor application, trimmed the sound clip, did some very basic fade-in and fade-out, and then applied a really nice reverb. Done! (If Alan Parsons ever decides to do "Tales of Mystery and Imagination II", he can hire me to do the narration, don't cha think?)
Not too shabby for a zero dollar vocal booth, huh?
Oh, and about that other sound clip on my other MySpace profile (the third one): I'm not responsible for that one! I had stepped out of the room for a few minutes, and when I came back, it was just there on my MySpace profile... as if it had materialized out of thin air... ;)
