shrinking room size.

[Nick_Black]

hey, my studio is currently 12x12 (ft) this is for both recording and editing (blues rock, usually) but I was thinking sectioning off a small space with hanging walls to have seprate rooms for tracking and recording, is this a good Idea?

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

No. One of the main points of seperate rooms is to monitor sounds in the tracking room over your monitors so as to hear any comb filteing effects. This requires various things, but the most important is ISOLATION between the tracking room and control room. In the case of hanging partitions...well, these will NOT isolate the tracking space. Isolation requires SEALED MASS. Since you are simply placing gobo type partitions in the sound path, unless these are quite massive and sealed, they will do little, especially if the airgaps are not sealed. Not only that, but structural transmission via walls, floor, ceiling will undermine partition installation. The only way around that is...well, two rooms within a room construction, or one of the rooms framing decoupled from the other via seperate floor slabs, and decoupled interior shiething. Not an easy task, nor cheap. Your best bet is to treat the rear half of your control room with variable absorption and possibly a poly type diffuser on the rear wall. .

However, your room dimensions create a square, which is indeed difficult to treat as modal resonaces are the same in both width and length. Best bet is to use Superchunks of 703 in every corner you can, including ceiling/wall intersections. But treatment is only as good as being able to see the room response via tests, and that is another animal entirely, but Low frequency absorption as a starter(superchunks) will do wonders.

Not only that, the smaller a room, the more difficult it is to treat. I would suggest keeping it one room, and concentrate on getting the flattest response you can. This requires time and effort, as well as test software such as ETF, and a calibrated mic. Other than that, it is total guesswork.

Here is an example of such an experience to illustrate my point.

http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=2597

fitZ