- All right, check this out.
So I literally recorded this in a studio inside of my car.
(vocal music)
- What's up everyone, it's Chris here,
and I don't know if you can tell,
but sometimes I make videos and it's been kind of tough
because I've always lived with a lot of roommates,
housemates, and lived in small apartments
with really thin walls in really noisy neighborhoods.
So trying to get crispy audio is just annoying.
And, especially when you're just starting out,
and you're going to do like a thousand takes,
it's really easy to get self-conscious
when you know that everyone around you can hear
every single thing that you're saying.
Ideally, you would just soundproof
and acoustically treat your whole room.
But if you rent, that's kind of hard
because the second you touch your walls
your landlord is going to assassinate you.
Plus it's really expensive.
So why don't you just go in your closet?
Now, people give that tip a lot
and I don't believe anybody's actually tried it.
It's like a WikiHow level tip.
This is not gonna work.
And even if you have a lot of clothes
it's probably not dense enough to soak up bass frequencies.
So we need a place that's quiet, private,
easy to access, budget friendly and has good acoustics.
Well, I do drive this:
A 2006 Toyota Corolla.
This is not the sexiest car ever.
It's at like 400,000 miles and I literally can't sell it
because, even if I repair it,
it'll be worth less than the repairs cost.
It has cloth seats, which no one likes more than leather
but they're actually way more sound absorbent.
The floor is already built
as a shock mountain against vibrations, so that should help.
And as you can see
there are no parallel surfaces inside the car,
so we don't need to worry about standing waves.
The big issue is going to be the windows and the doors,
which do have a lot of resonance.
So for the treatment, the best thing that I tested
was these moving mats.
They're designed for dragging around furniture
but they're really dense, they're really flexible
and they're really cheap.
And then I got five of these clamps
that you can find at any hardware store.
I got the two inch sizes to make sure
that they fit on the handles above the doors.
I'm going to use the front right handle,
the back right handle, the back left handle
and there's none on the left in the front
so I'm going to use the visor.
I'm going to push the front seats forward
so I can clamp the two mats overhead.
I'll clamp them together in the back
and, because the mats are meant to prevent punctures
I can actually remove one of the headrests
and use that to squeeze the mat
at the very top of the back window.
Now I'll fold the mats into the edges and corners
and then push the two front seats back,
and these will act as a reflection filter
on both sides of the mic.
If you want to go really hard,
you could bring in some acoustic panels
and just lean them around the sides
and then set up bass traps on the floor,
but for most cases it's not really necessary
so we're going to test without it.
This is the recording gear that I use at my desk.
Really just for yelling at teammates in Apex Legends.
Note, the $15 desk arm, this is important.
This is going to let us stick the mic
into the recording booth
but we do need a surface to clamp it on.
I forget what this thing is called
but we're going to open it up
and clamp the mic onto the front wall.
And here's what it looks like.
You see the mic is between the two chairs
and it can be pulled back
into the booth hovering right at recording level.
Here's what it looks like from the inside.
And the mic is in a good spot.
So I'll plug in the XLR cable
and then use that middle thing for cable management.
The other end will go into the audio interface
which will be connected to my laptop
which is also connected
to the midi keyboard on the dashboard.
So now I guess we just hop into the producer's chair
and start cooking something up.
I found a copyright free song I can just cover,
but I can only use stock logic plugins.
So let's see what we can do.
All right, so we've got a rough instrumental.
So I'll hop into the back in the recording booth
where I'll track all the vocals
and do the mixing, mastering, arrangement,
and all that other stuff.
And there we go.
It turns out acoustics, won't fix your technique
but we got something.
And if it's not studio quality
I won't be too mad cause it is a car
but let's see how close we got.
♪ Oh, say, can you see ♪
♪ By the dawns early light ♪
♪ What so proudly we hailed ♪
♪ At the twilight's last gleaming ♪
♪ Whose broad stripes and bright stars ♪
♪ Through the perilous fight ♪
♪ O'er the ramparts we watched ♪
♪ Were so gallantly streaming ♪
♪ And the rockets red ♪
Oh, fuck it, you get the point.
Obviously the sound quality is not professional
but for most people it's definitely good enough,
and you can just focus on getting better at your craft
until it makes more sense to upgrade to a studio setup.
It will be better
if you have a car with nicer sound deadening
but other than that, for how straightforward this is
I think it worked out pretty well.
So thank you for watching. I hope you found this helpful.
Drop a like, comment, subscribe, and I'll see you later.