You have the following enemies, and they're totally different: noise that you are creating, and noise that others are creating. It's up to you to try and sound proof as much as possible. Doesn't matter how you do this. Tell your roommates to shut up. Cover the windows with sofa cushions or blankets or something. Sit in the closet. The goal is that you only have to do each recording session once. We can work on this in advance, but start thinking about it now. Old walls make echoes, empty rooms make echoes, you want rooms filled with shit, most of all soft shit like carpeting, rugs, beds, pillows, clothes, sofas. Not mirrors, windows, hard floors, etc. That said, don't begin adjusting things until you've established a baseline -- i.e., plugging the mic in and seeing how it sounds. Again, we can work through this together.

Check out James Taylor's hotel room recording setup:

it may have sounded terrible. who knows. and it may or may not be taking his guitar into consideration also. but what's interesting to note is that the pillows are SIDEWAYS -- which would be helpful because it makes them "thicker" by like 3x. Where? Right where his mouth is. The cushions below are less important because that's not where his mouth is--it's where his guitar is!

Here's an example of what Jenny rigged up at home using stuff she had around.

Binder clips and a laundry basket are NOT necessary…you can come up with your own solution, but the end result should be more or less the same.

Here you can see she added an additional interior lining in the last photo.

Finally, if you can’t construct something like this, then you have options like going into a closet (ideally filled with as much clothes as possible, or facing INTO the closet, or getting under your covers.

Again, I must emphasize that what everyone seems to find intuitive, i.e., getting into the empty bathroom with no windows, or sitting in a nice empty part of the closet with the door shut—that’s NOT what we want.

If you’re going to get into the closet, you want to be surrounded by clothes, you want the only empty empty space to be the floor and ceiling. The thicker the clothes, the better, get between them like you’re a kid playing, turn coats sideways to get more coverage, bring in a bunch of pillows…get a DRY sound. I don’t care if you can still hear the cars outside as much as I care about the sound of your voice bouncing off the walls. It’s easier to clean up a car or an air conditioner because it doesn’t sound like your voice and compete with it. The echo sounds exactly like your voice and competes 100%.

Check out this one with the pillows. It’s my current fave. I bought a box of 20 clips like that from Amazon for like $3, and in a hotel closet you can improvise—for example, I currently have a Yeti mic on a shelf, with two pillows hanging on either side of it, clipped to hangers, and one pillow clipped behind the mic, using the same two hangers, and one on top. I have the laptop on another shelf to record, and I use my phone to hold the script. You can see here that they focused on the reflections behind the mic, and also reflections behind the actor. You can read more about this here.