Setting up a rehearsal space/recording studio, which option is best?

Starfire_KTreva

New member
I'm a vocalist primarily, but play a little of a lot of instruments, DH plays guitar. we're currently trying to get a band together and I'm looking at setting up a rehearsal/recording space for my own use, I have 4 options, ordered by price they are:

1: convert the bedroom our boarder currently has when he moves out at the end of the year. Our house is a turn of the century Victorian villa so it's got 12ft pressed metal ceilings and hardwood floors, that room needs the walls re-lining anyway so we could add soundproofing to the walls when we do that, however it would need to be some pretty beefy soundproofing, we've got 2 young children and practice time is usually when they are sleeping, so it'd need to mute it to a level where it won't wake them up, no shared walls with either of their bedrooms fortunately though. it mesures 3.99m x 3.99m (approx 13' x 13') with a chimney and built in wardrobes making it 3.58m (12') in one direction, it's at the front of the house and has a large window that covers most of one wall.

2: Convert the roof space, We'd need really good soundproofing in the floor but there is a lot of useable space up there, I don't know what the angles ceilings would be like for acoustics and there could be access problems, the only access currntly is through two offset manholes (false ceiling) in the kitchen.

3: purpose build in new garage. We need to replace our very old single car garage anyway so we could purpose build a rehersal/recording space into the new garage when we do that, however we still need some garage space for storage and so couldn't go much bigger than a single car garage in there. the garage also is directly on the street, literally the doors open onto the footpath.

4: build a whole new room onto the back of the house, we could go up to 6m x 6m in this case and it would be isolated from the bedrooms. Expensive though.

My preference would be for Option 4 but I don't think we could afford it at the moment. However can anyone suggest pro's or cons for any of the options and how to go about designing it?
 
I'd say option 1 sounds like the more reasonable/normal path. Something important to keep in mind though, treating a room for sound isolation is different than treating for tracking and room modes which effect monitoring accuracy when mixing recordings. Seems like a reasonable size room though for jamming and what not. You'll have to see about sealing the door up nice and tight and hang some nice moving blankets around. Maybe stack some insulation rolls in the corners for bass traps/tables. Pick up a nice handheld recorder for recording ideas and grassroots demos. call it a day. or not.
 
I bet option 4 would actually be the least expensive if you want real isolation. Retrofitting existing rooms to any meaningful level of isolation would be much harder.
 
@gecko zzed, Stairs? what are those,:confused: I have man holes and a portable ladder currently :P,my options would be a pull-down ladder, or a spiral starecase. I just don't have space to put a 4m (yes current floor level to floor level of an attic conversion would be 4m!) tall straight staircase in without losing more space than I'm wiling to in my kitchen. If I went with that option I'd probably put an extra deck over the top of the current porch and setup a pulley and platform for gear.

a note on option 1 that room needs to be taken back to the sarking boards on the walls and clad with Gib-board anyway. it currently has scrim from when the house was originally build and many many layers of wallpaper.
 
@gecko zzed, Stairs? what are those,:confused: I have man holes and a portable ladder currently :P,my options would be a pull-down ladder, or a spiral starecase. I just don't have space to put a 4m (yes current floor level to floor level of an attic conversion would be 4m!) tall straight staircase in without losing more space than I'm wiling to in my kitchen. If I went with that option I'd probably put an extra deck over the top of the current porch and setup a pulley and platform for gear.

a note on option 1 that room needs to be taken back to the sarking boards on the walls and clad with Gib-board anyway. it currently has scrim from when the house was originally build and many many layers of wallpaper.

All that makes 2 even worse!

Save up for 4
 
What about 3 except build the rehearsal above the storage/garage?

I would also suggest if you went that route to figure out a way to load equipment up and down to make it easier. Like double doors in the front of the loft and some kind of pully system to load in and out.
 
I did think of that but I'm pretty sure our local council won't let us build anything tall enough, that close to the street unfortunately.
 
Option 4 is the only solution, if you want any sound isolation from the house. Don't go square on the room, though (unless you are putting in some closets/storage. Square rooms have bad room nodes.
 
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