best vocal booth on a budget?

[challism]

Yeah, it's amazing how much noise and imperfection you hear in old recordings. Even in stuff as highly regarded as the Beatles music. It's full of stuff that wasn't really supposed to be there.

Sounds very human. Modern music sounds very sterile and generic in general.

Yes, it's very endearing to hear the imperfections and they sound great. I hope that will return to music in the future.

[QVprod]

I'm with Selig--a vocal "booth" is a huge audio turn-off for me. every time I've tried something like that, it's sounded awful, and very unnatural--you then have to compensate for it in the mix by adding some ambience to keep it from sounding like you recorded in the void of deep space. I find that far more difficult to get sounding natural for some reason.

if you have a well-treated room, that's going to get you way more bang for your buck than a dedicated vocal booth, in my view (and if you don't already have one, that $500 will go a LONG way to getting you there!--and it's better for mixing!) of course, that assumes you're tracking vocals and mixing in the same room... anyway, just making sure you have some sound absorption on walls parallel to the mic will help a lot. I don't mind using a good condenser, but if you're worried about the room, a better thing to avoid (IMO) is an omnidirectional or figure 8 mic.

I think that approach is better because it's sort of like applying compression...you can easily overdo it, and using a vocal booth that's designed to keep things super dry is sorta like cranking the settings on your compressor to hear what it's doing, but you can't really dial it back like you can with a compressor. better to start with the room, and add some absorption until it starts to sound uncomfortable, and then back off a little bit with it than go all-in right off the bat.

I second (or third?) this! Treated room over a vocal booth any day. Will give you the same boxy sound as using a reflection filter. Different story if you're partition a room or using a different room for vocal tracking but even then that's still treating a room rather than being confined to a box of sorts.