I haven’t posted much about the design and construction of my studio, mostly because I don’t want to give you the impression I’m unable to work for you.  I am available and ready for your project.  With that in mind here’s an update:

The new voiceover booth is coming along nicely thanks to the generosity of some fantastic people that know much more about acoustic design than I do.  The isolation walls and ceiling are done.  Over 300 square feet of acoustic insulation is on it’s way.  The new door should be delivered on Monday or Tuesday of next week.  It’s a heavy beastie but it has to be to provide the kind of isolation I want (and feel that you as my client deserve).

The Hart Voice Overs Booth

Today I got the flooring installed. Boy it looks pretty. And it won’t mess with the high frequencies in the voice range the way carpet does.

The new floor in Hart Voice Overs Vocal Booth

I’ll have the door system installed next week. The acoustic insulation should arrive in about another week. As soon as it gets here I’ll be able to treat the walls and hang a “cloud” on the ceiling. Then the new booth will be ready to go!

I’m very excited about the upgrade to this booth and I hope you, as a client or potential client, are excited about the great enhancements it will provide for your projects with Hart Voice Overs as well.

Australian John Sayers is one of THE guys when it comes to studio design and construction. He has built professional studios all around the world that are not only functional but also beautiful.

In addition to being such a great designer, he is also kind enough to help out the little guys and do it your-selfers. John hosts a wonderful forum at www.johnlsayers.com that is all about studio design and construction and is one of my main sources for research into studio construction. There is a ton of great knowledge and plenty of experts willing to help you apply it as long as you show them you’re willing to listen and learn.  Bookmark it. Read it. Use it.

John has posted a sketchup file of plans for a vocal booth designed to fit in the corner of a room.  (Click on the sentence to go to the post).  You need to install the free  Google SketchUp to view the plans.

John Sayers' designed vocal booth

John says the aircon ducting is an option.  Anyway, at first glance the plan looks fantastic!  Pay particular attention to the wall construction as well as the absorbers in the corners.

Two more thoughts:  If you choose to build this design or something similar you should create a build diary on John’s forum.  You’ll get lots of advice and expert help.  And if you do build on John’s design consider making a donation to his site to help him defray the costs of providing all the great information for free.

Yesterday I had a good friend and sometimes client email me and ask me about the new Hart Voice Overs website.  He said:

“I’m curious to know about the blog that you have been doing.  Was that a free application and did it integrate with your existing website?  How has it been?  You like?”

I’ve had a few other people ask so I thought I would share some of my response:

That my friend is WordPress and it is awesome.  Go to www.wordpress.com to check it out. And yes it’s free.

I really can’t say enough good things about it.  It originally started as blogging software but has really evolved into a complete content management system.  Originally I was just going to use it for my blog but I’ve now decided to build my whole site with it.  Brian Hart Productions needs a redo and even though I’m not planning to use a blog there I think I might use wordpress anyway.  It’s very intuitive, very easy to use even with multiple users, and there’s a ton of great support documentation on the web.

They have two options.  You can host a blog on their site – for example mine would be something like hartvoiceovers.wordpress.com or you can download the software and put it on your domain which is what I have done.

It’s highly customizable, there are tons of free templates to choose from or your can make your own.  It’s very configurable and easy to deal with things like SEO and subscriptions etc with the help of available (and again free) plugins.

Just a few examples of plugins I use – but I have a ton:  I have one that turns my site into a mobile version for use with blackberrys and iphones, ones that automatically post to twitter and facebook when I make a new post, one that lets commenters subscribe to see additional comments (and drive them back to the site), one that automatically generates an XML sitemap so the search engines can index the site easier, and one that displays my twitter posts on the side, one that finds photos with a creative commons license so I can use them legally and for free in my blog.  There are others that allow for payments, ad banner rotation and on and on and on.  Another plug in I installed automatically creates a database backup and emails it to my gmail account as often as I specify.

This is getting long I know but here’s another other cool thing.  With an app I downloaded I can create, edit and publish posts from my iphone and moderate comments.

So yeah, as you can tell I love it.

Brian Hart
Tel:  251.752.9221
Hart Voice Overs

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