One room or two?

[laptoppop]

Good news: I *may* be getting some dedicated space soon.
Bad news: Its pretty small. It would be a 10x20 room with a sloping ceiling that goes from 8-12 feet over the 10 foot span (lengthwise).

I'm debating with myself - and I'd love other, smarter minds to join in... one room or two?

Should I make it one big room and do both tracking and mixing in the same room, or should I split off something like 5 feet on the end for a vocal booth?

I'm concerned about splitting it off because it would make it hard to ever record trios -- and basically impossible to do drums. I also think it may be easier to make the "larger" (still darn small) room sound good for mixing -- which would be its primary use.

I'm concerned about NOT splitting it off because it would be SOOO much easier to listen to the monitor speakers as opposed to headphones, both for setup and during tracking.

What would you do? One room or two?

-lee-

[laptoppop]

John,

You've got a couple of "garage" plans on the stuff you wrote for the SAE site (http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html for anyone that doesn't know about this killer resource) -- they look slightly bigger than 10x20 feet (sorry about the non-metric measurements, but I know you're multi-dimensional ). Would something like that be your recommendation for my slightly smaller space too? Garage two looks like it might work out for me -- one small change I would probably make for my space would be to eliminate the seperate door to the "studio" space and just use the sliding doors for access.

It looks like the "control room" would be about 10x12, and the "studio" (Micro-studio? ) would be about 10x8.

Thanks,
-lee-

[Dan Merrill]

In my two room place, I have a similar sized control room and opted for keeping it one large room rather than slice off space for an iso booth. . Very happy I did. I put 4 headphone stations around the room, and I don't mind overseeing any tracking with headphones if necessary. I have some gobos and portable acoustic treatments that help with isolation if needed for tracking.

Although it's probably fairly prevalent in home recording, it's certainly a different mindset to track in the control room and it depends on what type of work/ clients you have as to whether it will work for you. On the upside, I enjoy the larger, open work space I have for everyday work.

DAN

[laptoppop]

I'm about 65% decided to go with a two room approach (see my other post -- MicroStudio). In particular, I decided that the ability to use the speakers during tracking and setup was very important to me. YMMV

-lee-