voiceover
Recording Voiceover: The Booth or the Room?
Scope has two rooms that record clean spoken word: a treated vocal booth and a sound-treated studio. Which one your voiceover session wants, and why.
Voiceover is the least forgiving thing you can record. No music to hide behind, no picture to carry the ear past a flaw — just a voice, exposed. Scope has two rooms that record spoken word cleanly, and they suit different sessions. Here is how to pick.
The booth: closest to the microphone
The music studio has a treated vocal booth with a large-diaphragm condenser — the classic voiceover chain. A booth's job is proximity and silence: the walls are close and treated, so the room contributes almost nothing and what lands on the mic is voice alone. That neutrality is exactly what commercial reads, narration and audiobook work want, because the client will play the result over music, under picture, or against other takes recorded weeks apart, and it all has to match.
It books dry from £40 for two hours if you run your own session, or with an engineer at £35 an hour. For a one-hour read with someone else driving the desk, the engineered rate is the cheaper booking as well as the easier one. The full comparison is in dry hire vs an engineer.
The room: when the body needs to move
Some spoken work does not fit in a booth. Character voice with physical performance, a two-hander recorded together, dialogue replacement where the actor needs to see picture, or anything shot on camera at the same time. For those, Studio B is built as a room within a room: the isolation a booth gets from close walls, the studio gets from construction. There is space inside it to perform, plus a dedicated edit and playback area for review on the spot.
- Single voice, neutral read, tightest sound: the booth.
- Performance, movement, more than one voice, or voice with camera: Studio B.
- Need picture playback while you record: Studio B, where the edit and playback area lives.
- Podcast rather than voiceover: the podcast room is its own thing. See what a podcast recording actually needs.
Book the booth for the voice alone. Book the room when the voice comes with a body attached.
Three things that outweigh the room choice
Whichever you book: warm up before the clock starts, not on it. Bring water and a printed script — page turns are quieter than tablet taps recorded at voiceover gain. And record thirty seconds of room tone before you leave, because the edit will need it and no one has ever remembered afterwards.