Welcome to the Voiceover General Store. If you're a podcaster, voiceover artist or voice actor, or hoping to get started in the VO business, or a DJ getting into the voice tracking business, you'll need some sort of a home studio. Even if you do all your "work" in professional recording studios, you'll need to audition for jobs, and sometimes that's best done at home.

The simplest home studio consists of a USB microphone plugged into a computer. If a room can be made really quiet (no traffic, refrigerator, AC blower, etc.), you can record very good voice tracks anywhere, with just a little control over the room acoustics.

If you're on the road and find you need to record a spot for a favorite client, and your room at the Hyatt is your first choice, you may be OK. Turn off the AC, make sure the windows and doors are closed as tight as possible, and pull all the drapes closed. You can walk around the room and clap, listening to the echo, to find the least reflective spot. You may have to hang your bedspread over a closet door, or even step into a crowded closet. Of course, if you're really serious about recording on the road, nothing beats Harlan Hogan's Porta-Booth; a recording studio anywhere you want one.

Bottom line, any time you're recording voice, is you've got to get the noise floor down and eliminate echo. Record a few seconds of your voice at normal volume and then hold very still while you keep recording a few more seconds; normalize the recording so your voice peaks at 0 dB (100%), and play back the "silence." If the noise level is 55 dB down, you're probably fine for most voice work, especially if there will be background music or sound effects. For really clean product with no noticeable noise, you'll need to get down to 60 dB below your peaks. (If the noise contains a machine noise, like a lawn mower in the distance, whistling or humming fan, or dreaded dog barks, those are easily identifiable at -55 dB. If your noise is that high, it needs to be smooth, wideband noise that's not too distracting. Always aim for 60 dB down.)

But your home is the perfect place for a studio. If you're willing to do construction, make yourself some extra thick walls and isolate the interior of the room acoustically. You might consider putting a border of steel strip around the door and attach a (peel and stick or staple it on) refrigerator door magnet gasket. This will pull your door closed tight and seal the gap very well at low cost.

If you're not doing construction, you'll at least want tight storm windows and a quiet spot. Put carpet on the floor, and drapes on two adjacent walls, or buy studio acoustic foam treatment for the walls. You don't need to cover the whole wall with foam; just a few properly placed panels will do fine. Any small room will cause bass anomolies, so if you're making EQ decisions you should use bass traps to flatten the sound from both your voice getting recorded and your monitor speakers playing back.

So come on in to the Voiceover General Store. Everything you need to build and stock your home studio and your road kit can be found here, at great prices, at Amazon.com