For close to 30 years voicebooth.com have been creating booths for Voice Artists, Vocalists, training facilities, law enforcement and more. Anywhere you can think of that a voice (or amp for that matter) has needed to be recorded, you’ll find a vocal boot that’s done the job.

Recently, George hooked up with the guys to talk tweaking the booths for VO, and while he was at it, took the opportunity to grab **** for an interview…

A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn’t partner with them unless they were), so please, if you’re in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em “Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you”… As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth…

https://tribooth.com/

And if you’re in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They’ve got a great range of top-shelf gear..

https://austrian.audio/

Hunter S Thompson

and welcome to another Pro Audio Suite. Today we’re a bit remote because George is up in Oregon looking@vocalbooth.com he’s there with Freddie Gaitley and they’ve been working together on something. Some secret sauce, let’s say. What’s happening, George?

Speaker B: Well, you know, at first I thought it was kind of be secret for a while. Freddie’s like, hey, man, we’re ready to go. We’re ready to talk about this, right?

Speaker C: We’re nimble.

Speaker B: How are you doing today, man?

Speaker C: I’m doing great, George.

Speaker B: We’ve had an interesting couple of days here. Freddie brought me up to meet up with the whole team here. There’s 13 guys that work here@vocalbooth.com, and I’ve gotten to work and collaborate with the whole team.

: Is guy still there?

Speaker C: Oh, Guy. We put Guy out to pasture a few years ago. So he’s enjoying his grandchildren.

: Did you take him out behind the barn?

Speaker C: We haven’t not quite that far. But he’s enjoying his grandchildren and enjoying retirement.

: All right. Yeah, we liked working with Guy.

Speaker C: Yeah, Guy’s a great dude.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the journey begins where you guys know me. I’ve been working with all the products that are out there. Right. I’ve dealt with all the booths. I know what works, what doesn’t. I have my own opinion about the pros and cons of all the different products. That was three or four months ago. I reached out to really nobody, just, hey, vocal booth.

Speaker C: Put it out there.

Speaker B: I put it out there and I said, you guys be interested in collaborating or just chatting with me about what could be done to your booths to make them go to that extra mile, that extra 20% or that last bit that will make it go from good to great acoustically. And Freddie answered my call. He had a zoom meeting with me really quickly. We had a great chat and flash forward a couple months later, here we are.

Speaker C: Here we are inside of one of these vocal booths that’s all treated out. And George the tech approved.

Speaker B: Yeah, we’re in a four x six vocal booth. The ceiling is just under maybe just under 7ft. And typically the vocalbooth dot coms are treated with well, you tell us a little bit about the design of these booths and how they’ve been built and the philosophy behind them over the last 20 or so years.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So we service a whole bunch of different markets. Of course, people call up that are looking to do the voiceover thing. Voice acting, long form, short form narrations. And then music and then testing or big facilities, education, industrial projects. There’s all secret industrial projects that we can’t talk about.

: Do you have, like, defense contracts? Like, you have to sign in?

Speaker C: I can’t confirm or deny. We might have some boots in Guantanamo Bay, we might not. I don’t know. There’s a lot of companies. We waterproof it. We don’t ask. What you’re going to do inside your Vocal booth is your business and the CIA’s business. Yeah, which is everybody’s business. We never know exactly who’s going to come in. So we offer all kinds of different levels of isolation, different layers of treatment. What we tried to do is kind of have a one shot fits most type of situation with, like, our Gold Series. So we offer nearly floor to ceiling pyramid, acoustic foam, silent ventilation, over 200 different sizes of booths, custom heights, anything that somebody might really need for their specific recording purposes. And then we can also scale up or down for the amount of isolation that they’re going to need. So if it’s just something in a really quiet room, we can go with something like a Silver Series. Normal office environment is going to be like a single wall Gold Series. Then we go up to, like, a platinum, which is our double wall. And then we’ve even got another platinum plus, which we start to put in layers of mass loaded vinyl and do a lot of crazy testing and things like those in those booths for really stringent use cases.

Speaker B: More industrial, maybe. Yeah. So I got to know their product. I mean, I’ve been in and I’ve helped move and I’ve listened to and I’ve tuned all these booths.

: I think you and I have a history with Vocalbooth.com just being here in the US. Andrew, I’m pretty sure you’ve never been in a specific Vocal booth.com.

Speaker B: Booth?

Speaker A: No, I’ve been in the quiet one.

: Okay.

Speaker A: The one with the quiet name.

Speaker C: Yeah, right.

: The name which we shall not say.

Speaker A: Correct. Yes.

: Right. Because I’ve owned one, which I guess I should admit I sold for a profit.

Speaker C: Outstanding. That’s what we do, too. That works out.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: You’re on the same page.

: Right. To me, what Vocalbooth.com is is very effective, especially for the price point and good finish. It’s like a good looking booth, I guess. We won’t talk specifically about others, but it’s just like, obviously they hold their value plus.

Speaker B: I can say what attracted me to their product. The first time, rather accidentally, I guess, is I was at a client’s house and she had a I think it was a four x no, it might have been a four x six. And I was in the room setting up gear and tuning it and listening to the record, and I was like, let’s do a test now with the ventilation on. And she said it’s on. And I said, really? And she said, yeah. And then I reached up to the vent and put my hand up, and I was like, oh, it is on. And I was really amazed and impressed with the attention to the ventilation that was being paid, because that is where everybody else is falling short, like, very much so is ventilation. They’re either running too many fans, too quick, or too slowly or not enough, or you know what it is? They don’t run a big enough duct. These guys are running a six inch duct. And does that start in the Gold series?

Speaker C: Yeah. In the Gold Series. Right now, the Silver series used to have it, but the Gold series and the Silver series kind of alert a little bit. And now we have a brand new Silver that’s out there. It’s got a little bit less airflow, but in doing a little bit less airflow, we can go down to a smaller vent, but more of like an integrated system. We’ve also changed the price point and stuff to be very approachable.

Speaker B: The silver is brand new. They just launched a new version of it. And the ventilation is 100% integrated into the ceiling. It’s a very simple but elegant solution. And there’s some lighting in the ceiling, too. Very cool. But their bigger ones go with this bigger duct. And so bigger duct means slower airflow, more volume, but slower. That means quieter. And it’s just a much quieter solution than everybody else. So that was always impressive to me. But really, at the end of the day, when I emailed them, they were open to talk to me. First of all, have a dialogue, we chatted. I could just tell by the vibe that we were kind of getting along on the same page. They’re in Bend, Oregon, which is like, to me, a dream outdoor place to go. I’ve always wanted to go. So all these things came together and they’re like, why don’t you come up? We’ll try out some things. We’re going to start making some panels to test out. And I had no idea how quickly they could not only come up with ideas, but get them made. I would say, hey, we need to put one of these of this size in here. Carl would say, all right, go make me know. Or he would CAD something up and draw it up. And within an hour or two, we would have essentially a finished prototype that we could immediately start testing.

Speaker C: We tried to be real nimble with everything that we’re doing here.

Speaker B: It was really neat.

: What was the original background of Vocal Booth? Wasn’t it? You guys were building houses or parts of I forget what it was.

Speaker C: Yeah, actually, Vocalbooth.com started as so many businesses start in a garage. And Calvin Mann, who’s the founder here, he started in his mother’s garage. He was living there for a while and needed a place to record to keep doing some singing and songwriting and then built kind of a little four x four booth and then put an add online in 1997 and actually got a hit and a sale and then went, oh, my gosh. Now I got to really build one of these for somebody else. And are they even going to like it? And the funny thing is, he took off to deliver it himself to somebody over in I think it was new Jersey. And so he loaded up the u haul truck, the spray glue and the wood, and he was literally finishing the booth as he went across country and doing that in the back of the u haul. Got it to the guy, put it together. The guy was stoked. I still see him at NAB. He comes up every year and then shows me. He’s like, hey, I got number one pictures and stuff. And he’s been cranking with that thing for over 20 years. So then he came back and started a business and started really working at it. And then for the last 20 years, we’re just always, always looking for a way to push it forward, like, whether it be finding better fans, because new fan technology is coming out all the time, so we’re always staying ahead of that stuff. New acoustic materials, a better building process, more options, something that just performs better. And that’s where, where, when george came up and kind of, you know, do you guys want to know what’s wrong with all your well, yeah, of course.

Speaker B: This is not news that is taken that well by everybody.

: George had tourette.

Speaker B: It’s not taken as well. I mean, it’s not that they’ll say, f off, but they just will be like, okay, that’s nice. Thank you for being a fan of our product and bye bye. But they were like, no, let’s chat. Let’s see what you have, what you’re talking about. And then what’s been really fun is being here physically on site, watching them come up with a product, putting them into play and letting them hear the difference, and they’re like, whoa, there’s not a subtle difference. They can immediately hear it. And it’s been a fun discovery for me as well, because we’ve used some products I’m familiar with, as well as some other products, substrates and materials that I haven’t spent much time working with and discovered some things. It was as much a learning process and like an r and d process for me personally as it was for creating something for them. So that’s what’s made it super cool. And now we’re standing in and one of the key mics we used for all of our tests was a TLM 103. Freddie has one. We also used the rode nt one fifth gen. He also has one of those. And we used an NTG five because we wanted to have a shotgun as well. So we did extensive recording. I’ve probably spent three or 4 hours setting up different scenarios, different combinations of materials, and different microphones. I recorded all these files, logged it all, and I’ve got all the tests to prove it. So we can actually hear what these are doing.

Speaker A: And I bet yeah, I bet the microphone that was least successful would have been the NTG Five fifth gen.

Speaker B: I wouldn’t say that’s the way to no, I wouldn’t say that’s true. I would say when comparing those three mics, which I did the most, I was the least impressed with my final output with the NTG five. I liked the sound of the Nt one and the TLM pretty closely, equally, very similarly. And I mean, you know me, I’m big on mic placement. We all are. We always talk about proximity. We talk about being in the sweet spot. We talk about a fist and a thumb or a shock pinky thumb. Right. Right now we are in a four x six booth. We are minimum, I would say, 14 inches away from the mic. We’re standing on either side of the mic, facing inward, so we’re not close to this mic at all. And I don’t know what you guys are picking up on your end. What do you think of the overall tonal balance? Does it sound colored? Does it sound natural? What do you hear?

: It sounds pretty not overly weighted on either frequencies, but really no presence of any bumps and there’s no bounces, essentially.

Speaker B: And there’s not really a bounce sound.

Speaker A: Which mic are you on now, out of interest?

Speaker B: We’re on the TLM 103. Yeah. Okay. And I liked using this mic because I always consider this to be the torture test mic for a small booth unforgiving. Every time I get a recording with a 103 and a small, I’m like, oh boy, here we go. And so when Freddie said, I got one of those, I was like, that’s we’re going to focus on that. And when he also just happened to have the Nt one as well, I said, well, that’s a great one to test as well because it’s the more affordable entry mic. It’s still an excellent mic, just the price point. And so it was just a no brainer to do all our tests with.

Speaker C: Those two mics and kind of looking back at when we decided to work together, too. I mean, that’s really been our culture and our philosophy on everything, is keep learning, keep moving forward. We’re willing to have a conversation with just about anybody, even you, George. It’s worked out, though. So it’s been, you know, in having a booth that, for instance, the Platinum series, we don’t force anybody into studio foam on those ones. It comes with basically just walls that are completely covered in like, an acoustic felt. And then we’ll talk to somebody, if they’re very much just starting out and they have no idea about how they’re going to dress their booth out or something, then, yeah, a good snapshot is saying, okay, let’s just get you a bunch of foam in that booth and then you figure it out. When I talk to professionals, somebody who’s moving up to having to have that booth, that is, like George would say, the quiet on demand booth, then we’ll go ahead and make up like an acoustic package for them. Or we’ll just say, hey, listen, you get your booth. We’re just going to make it completely covered in the felt. We’ll take care of the isolation part, but you will have to work with somebody to get that tuned out to your voice, to your microphone, to whatever that you are doing. So being able to have something kind of right out of the gate that we could do, we can send out somebody confidently and know that this is like George is saying, this is most of the way down the road to being professional, being usable right out of the box. That’s really what encouraged us to get together with George and get this thing produced.

Speaker B: I mean, this is what I’ve wanted from any booth manufacturer to do. Right. I wasn’t at all picky about necessarily which company it was. I just wanted somebody to pay attention. And when they were so willing to listen and pay attention and try something and then put their money where their mouth is, bring me up here, Freddie. Put me up in his personal short term rental know, so I had a place to stay. They’ve been feeding know, it’s been a nice experience, right? But they took that chance and that risk to try something, experiment. And the results speak for themselves right now. So we have a room that we’ve just made improvements by simply placing two new panels on the two walls. So it’s sort of like a corner we’ve created with the new panels as well as bolstering the ceiling with a much heavier, thicker panel. So it’s like a deeper ceiling cloud on the ceiling. So there’s three new panels in here. Grand total is less than two x four. Two x three ish and three ish by four five on the ceiling, something like that. But the difference was dramatic. It was a dramatic improvement. It was just really a big deal.

Speaker A: Where was the difference out of interest.

Speaker B: So for me, the difference is in two main areas. One of them is just the general mid range. There was still a little bit of mid range ring that you would get in this room, especially if you got too far away from the mic. Like, if you’re in the sweet spot of the mic, you were fine. If you wanted to relax, get back off the mic. And this is really a big thing for video game producers and engineers that are always acting the actor to stand back from the mic, give us some more space. That’s where these booths, they don’t hold up well. It gets very boxy. There’s too much resonance because the two inch foam on the walls can’t control much energy below roughly 1000 Hz. After that, they don’t do that much. So what we’ve done is we’ve now focused treatment that’s broadband and now can work much below 1000. It even goes deep enough that it seems to deal with down to at least as low as my voice will go, which is roughly 80. It flattens that out. And the back of a TLM 103 is going to be sensitive at low end. Right. Because when you have low end, it’s going to be essentially an omni mic, right. Like cardioid only matters for mid to high frequencies. Right.

Speaker C: Robert?

: Generally, microphones, even omni mics are more directional, often in more one direction, and then as the frequencies go down, they become truly omni.

Speaker B: Yeah. So these mics are the back of them is always a big problem. They’re going to pick up any buildup. We’ve killed that low end buildup with these panels. And so it changes the character of the mic to something way more linear. Like you were saying, it sounds more linear, it’s not boomy, and it has just a more natural tone. And so that was the goal. The goal was to do that, but then the next goal was to make it so vocal. Booth sales guys and everybody can just say, here’s the package. We know that if you do this, we have not the numbers to prove it, we have the tests to prove it. Right. We did a lot of recording so that it’s hard to back this stuff up with science, I should say. With numbers.

Speaker C: With numbers, yeah.

Speaker B: With specs, it’s just very hard to back it up. But when you literally record somebody and play it back, it’s an obvious improvement.

Speaker C: And that’s always really been a big thing for us, is like, I mean, somebody needs to get their booth and be stoked with it. I mean, that’s the beginning of our next sale. Our future sales is really the person who’s getting the booth needs to be happy. It needs to do what they expect it to do, and it needs to be just like a valuable piece of their studio and of their career. I got to say, we weren’t completely ignorant to who you were, and I’d followed you online and stuff for a long time, too. We all were familiar with your videos. I think we may have met briefly once at NAB or something, too, but never really got to have. And a lot of my clients and stuff, too did go and they worked with George. And so I would hear know, oh, George got this booth and he loved it, or George got this booth and he had to do some things to it and now we really love, you know, we kind of knew what was going on there when we developed these panels and stuff. After a few of our zoom calls and trading back and forth some emails, everybody kind of looked at it and went, well, is that really going to I don’t know, who is this guy and is this going to work? And then we installed them, we got them up there and then everybody walked by them and then went, whoa, whoa. Like even just out in the factory went, wow, these panels are crazy. And then so it became grabbing everybody from around the factory and going, oh, you guys got to check this out, look at what this thing is doing and stuff. So everybody was super on board and really excited to put together a few booths and to get some testing going and to invite George down. And we’re really thrilled with the product that we have to offer.

Speaker B: And I’ll say one more thing. Another thing was a client had recently gotten one and he couldn’t say more about the customer service experience, how helpful you guys were. I had more than one person tell me how you really seem to get it like what’s important, what the priorities are. You listen to their needs, very attentively. And that was, to me important. That was really mean. You know, we’re all about service. George the Tech is all about service. We’re all about working with performers.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And you guys do that all day. Yeah.

: So the George the Tech vocal booth option, what if I have a vocal booth and I’d like to upgrade it? Is it possible to just buy the option and self install or I don’t know, or what’s required?

Speaker C: You bet you so that’s really a good question. And when we were looking at designing something like this, it had to, number one, be extremely easy to install. So we’ve come up with a way that you’ll see that’s very easy to install and depending on what height you’re at, too, it doesn’t require any tools and you can just get it dialed into your space, your height, your microphone. So it’s not even just like it’s pretty much a one size fits all because it’s so adjustable.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And then the way that we’ve been building our booths for probably about the last five or six years, we could retrofit any gold series very easily with no extra tools or anything. They just call up. We could absolutely fit it right in.

Speaker B: You don’t have to screw anything into the wall. No, not at all.

Speaker C: And then if we did our platinum series, any of our platinum series would be ready to go for that one. So again, like modularity and upgradability, it’s all there in the value. No forced into any kind of a new booth and no planned obsolescence for what we’ve been doing.

Speaker B: And these products would obviously work in other products as well. I mean, they would work. The principle is going to be the same. It works particularly well in this booth because the walls are already treated with a two inch thick pyramid foam. So what we’re installing is actually over top of the existing foam. So you’re getting this hybrid of material, and it ends up adding up to more than almost six inches thick. And that’s another reason it’s so incredibly effective.

: What’s the inside space? That’s kind of residual left over? It’s six inches thick times two, because you got two walls, so you’re losing almost a foot.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, like, looking directly in front of me, I got my hand on one of the panels, and that’s really directly behind our mic. It’s like eight inches behind the mic right now. And then to my left on the shorter wall, we’re facing the wide wall. On the shorter wall is the other panel, and they’re horizontal, not vertical, and they’re centered right on the mic. So equidistant top and bottom, above and below the mic. So you’re focusing all of that treatment where it needs to be right on the mic itself. And that’s why I think it works so exceptionally well. And then the panel on the ceiling is of a similar well, essentially same design, and we’re both about 6ft. And so that panel, even though it hangs down four inches, is still a good six to seven inches above our heads right now. So it doesn’t feel claustrophobic or cramped. It still has a decent feeling. And that panel on the ceiling takes care of the pressure zones. I’ve been giving them, like, a crash course on some of the acoustic properties of spaces and chambers and dealing with pressure zones and room modes and all this stuff, because that’s what it comes down to. But we don’t have to all understand the science of it. It’s just cool to visualize and show them on a computer, like, okay, here’s where these areas are, and here’s what we need to do.

Speaker C: And it’s been so cool to talk to somebody who has a practical understanding of that. Because I can’t tell you how many times over the years we get a call from somebody who they have no idea what they’re talking about. But they’ve read all these buzzwords or they’re trying to get something for tech. Told them that they need to get this.

Speaker B: Yeah, they’re hung up on some they’re.

Speaker C: Hung up on stats. They’re hung up on some things. It’s like, in the end of the day, what does it really mean? And that’s also, like, even just how we explain to some clients. They’ll say, how much isolation? What’s the NTC rating? What is the STC rating of your booth? And you’re like, well, what are you dealing with? Let’s just start right there.

Speaker B: What’s your source?

Speaker C: And then showing them some videos from some clients and being like, here’s a guy with some construction right outside his room. Or a leaf blower, like the nemesis of the voiceover world. It’s like, oh, these people are they got leaf blowers out there. And then they walk inside their booth, and it’s good to go. So that kind of real world application and also, that’s really a big thing of like, you’re talking about our customer service and the way that we conduct our sales is we do just see ourselves as consultants. All of our sales guys are going to have teachers hearts and we never go for the kill. I mean, it’s not just about selling a booth. It’s about creating a long term client. And that’s worked out really wonderful for us.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the whole thing about all this is it really is a dark art, the whole treatment and acoustics in a booth. Half the time, if you build your own booth, you either get lucky or you don’t get lucky. But I guess with your one you don’t have to worry about tossing the coin and hoping you get lucky.

Speaker B: Because the idea is with this improvement, there’s a very predictable good. We know this works and it’s just on my own. I haven’t had the time and space tools, resources to do this type of experimenting. Like I could have done it over the period of time. But the fact that I could stay here for a couple days, focus on this, have people making things for me, let’s make some of those boom done. It’s just been an awesome experience and really a great learning process too.

Speaker A: So what about shipping? If you’re not in America, what’s the furthest afield?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, we do a lot all over the world. We do a lot of things even for know, Amazon, intel and, you know, there’s things will be in Dubai, all over India. We just sent out stuff from Japan and Singapore. We do a lot to Australia. We used to do a lot more to the UK. We did lose a UK distributor out there about six, seven years ago, just to kind of an unfortunate accident. But we can ship anywhere. Yeah, we ship all over the world. We do international freight. We are confident with being able to be the importer as well for people. So we do are able to do that. We can go ocean freight, we can go air freight, and we can get usually a pretty darn good competitive rate even with doing that.

Speaker A: Do you have distributors in each of these zones that you’re talking about?

Speaker C: No, we don’t. Anybody can call up vocalbooth.com and talk to an international sales specialist anytime. And we’ll just work directly with you and then see it all the way through the process as well. So things are getting ready for shipments here. We’ll start talking to what’s it going to go through once it gets through customs. We’ll try to get ahead of all that process, get them all the paperwork that they need, and then we can even see them all the way through, even taking care of the clients duties and customs so that they don’t have to have another intermediary in between.

Speaker B: That’s what is so great. I mean, their willingness to deal with logistics, not. Every company wants to deal with that logistics, or if they do, they do it poorly. Their handling of the logistics. And that painful part is another reason to look at these guys when you’re looking at products, because it really makes the difference. Having somebody to deal with all that stuff is very frustrating at times, especially customs and port and the last mile delivery and all that stuff. It’s a lot to deal with. So you guys doing that in house is really great.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And it doesn’t stop there. As soon as we get it in and we actually get it there, we tell people that sometimes we can’t always control the very last mile of a booth like that. Something might show up. You’ll have to tell people, hey, worst case scenario, a giant truck is going to show up in front of your house with a driver who may or may not speak the same language and might be frustrated and have no idea what’s going on. Don’t worry, that’s completely normal. Just call me right away and we’ll show them a little video. We’ll video chat with the person and we’ll help you over that one. And then once they get the pieces in there too, don’t hesitate. Just give us a quick call, quick text. We can take care of something on FaceTime, even on a Saturday. And just we want you to be able to get that booth up and.

Speaker B: Get you guys aren’t that frustrated, so big and so busy that you can’t make the time to do that.

Speaker A: It’s very individual work, which is really important. There’s another product that I was having a look at, your website, that fascinated me as well, which was the let me think.

Speaker B: I know what it is.

Speaker A: You’re guessing me, aren’t you? Yeah, I know what it is.

Speaker B: The vo one.

Speaker A: Yeah, that looks really interesting.

Speaker C: Yeah, the vo one. It first came out of a trip to NAB where we had our booths set up at our space. And we always had like a 20 x 20 space with several booths, but we were like, I don’t think anybody knows what’s in these booths. We look like another something. These could be meeting rooms or anything. So I asked Carl, our production manager, I said, hey, can you whip me up a mockup of what would be an inside corner of a booth so I can put it on the outside? I can hang up some micro phones, some guitars. It’ll be pretty colors, pretty cool. It’s just a cutaway.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: And people can kind of get the idea before they even go inside the booth of what it is. And we had people coming up and saying, okay, yeah, that’s great that you do the booth, but could I get just this? Because I just have an office and I just need this. I’m not ready to come into an entire room. I don’t care. I love the way this sounds. And then they’d walk inside and it was a pyramid studio foam that was just kind of a wedge. And they’d walk up there, and even in that show environment, all of a sudden they go, whoa, the sound changes right here. This is amazing. My voice sounds better and everything. And you’re like, oh, yeah, this is going to be a product that we’re going to figure out and stuff.

Speaker B: How long has it been shipping now?

Speaker C: We did that right in I believe it was in 2020 that we started that. And that was the other thing, too, is that there’s so many people were going home and needing to record from home. And the other thing is we’d always looked at, how could we possibly get away from that giant freight truck that’s going to show up and create all kinds of confusion? Is there any way we can get something upsable? So we kept looking at going from those big panels that were just a mockup to finally we have this foam core and this way of putting this thing together where it just velcros together, but then it gets very rigid. It works really well. It still has, like, you would say that vocal booth sexiness to it. It has a functionality and it sounds really good. And so that’s really where that one was born. We had a local guy here who’s in a rock band. He was not touring at the moment. He was like, hey, do you have something I could pop up in my studio right now to do vocals? Because I don’t really need a four, but I’m like, there’s another client, we need to talk to him. So we got one over to him really quickly. That was Christian Martucci, and he does Stone Sour and Corey Taylor. And so in his home studio, we popped one up, he started doing his vocals, and he said immediately he was recording with an SM Seven, b all of his vocals in there. And all of a sudden he went, oh, dang. I was able to bring my nice microphones back out. Yeah, I didn’t realize how much this SM Seven sucked until I was able to get my Neumann back out and start doing these vocals.

Speaker B: Mic is part of the equation. It’s kind of like acoustics is to photograph. Acoustics are to the microphone as lighting is to the camera. And you can use the good camera when you got the good lighting. And you can use the great mics when you have the good acoustics. Yeah.

Speaker C: So that’s been a great product. Again, we say it doesn’t provide isolation, but if you got a quiet spot, you can pop this up anywhere. It’s helped a lot of people get going on voiceover, or even, I think, Mark Preston. When his house got trashed by the hurricane, he called me up because he has been a long term vocal booth client. And he was like, oh, man. I went in there and my vocal booth is molded. I’m going to have to get a new one, and my whole house is I’m going to have to get all new gear. It’s a mess. And so I said, oh, where are you right now? He’s like, I’m at a hotel. And I said, I’m going to send you a vo one. So popped him one over there and he was like, popped it right on up in his hotel room and just was able to keep working and keep going. Something that’s only about 80 pounds and folds down into four Ups boxes. And right now we’re shipping those all across the US. At no charge. And then we can even ship them into Canada as well.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, they look really good.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: Very nice. Funny you should mention Mark Preston. I’ve been communicating with him over the last day or so.

Speaker C: Yeah, mark’s great. He’s really built up his community over there. Just a real nice, safe place, I think also for people trying to learn a place where they’re not getting hawked wares all the time. I appreciate he’ll call me out every now and then on one of his groups and say, you know, I think Freddie could answer this and stuff. So I kind of wait for the invitation. But it’s always a nice being able to jump in and give somebody some practical advice. And sometimes that advice is like you said, hey, just jump in your closet and get started.

Speaker B: Get going.

Speaker C: You don’t need an $8,000 booth to begin with. You’re just starting out. Get your training, get your stuff, and then kind of figure out what you need past there.

Speaker B: Yeah. When you give the right advice, when you create trust, then people will keep coming back to you.

Speaker C: That’s important.

Speaker B: That’s the key. Yeah, that must be our issue. Hey, Freddie. It was awesome. I’m glad you could cop into this booth with me.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Speaker B: Chat with my pals around the world.

Speaker C: No, it’s really great to introduce you.

Speaker B: But Andrew is in Melbourne, Australia.

Speaker C: Excellent.

Speaker B: Sorry, Robbo is not here. Robo is in Sydney. Okay, great.

Speaker C: Yeah, we just did a really big thing down there to University of Sydney. Lots of multiple diamond series boots and stuff.

Speaker B: Very cool.

Speaker C: You can see that on the gallery section of our website. And they have a very cool setup.

Speaker B: Nice. And then Robba Marshall in Chicago. So, yeah, we wrap the globe when we do this show.

Speaker C: Wonderful.

Speaker B: Finding the time to do it is the hard part. Yeah.

Speaker C: Well, great.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: It’s wonderful to be a part of it. And nice to chat with you guys. I appreciate it.

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