Two floor annex for home studio - advice please!

Ruinarte

New member
Hi,

I'm new here so I hope this info isn't elsewhere!
I'd like some advice on studio setup. I have the option of two floors, but have only ever worked as the producer/musician in one room (my own home set-ups).
My fiance and I are buying our first house, which has a two-floor annex in the garden which will be the studio. I have a desk, synth rack, baby grand piano, full size keyboard + other assorted instruments and want to squeeze in a drum kit also.
The bottom floor is 4.24m x 3.71 and second floor is smaller due to a bathroom and built-in cabinets.

I was going to put the whole lot on the ground floor if it fits however it seems a waste to leave the top floor, particularly because my band would also use the space to rehearse and that would be a squeeze downstairs only (where the kit would be! and a baby grand)
Someone suggested putting the musicians downstairs and the production desk upstairs, but that wouldn't work well when I play/record/produce on my own. Running up and down the stairs to mic up etc is not practical - unless anyone can suggest a way around this that is sensible? Even with a remote DAW it seems impractical (how do you check if the signal is peaking and all those things? Would you have to buy the longest cables on the planet and run them down the stairs to mic up?).

My final thought is to have upstairs as the practice space with the PA and drum kit and on the odd occasion I need to record the drum kit, run cables up the stairs for that one reason.

What do you guys think? Any other advice would be great.

Jen x
 

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There are some 2-floor recording studios...but usually the control room on one floor, is occupied by an engineer, and the other space is the live room.

In your case, that situation doesn't exist, since you have a need to be in both places at the same time on certain occasions...which is not possible.
So the best solution is the one that feels the most comfortable to you. You know your needs and how you can use the two spaces to fit them.

Two smaller spaces on the same floor is hard enough...and I would always opt for having one big space. Two smaller spaces on two different floors is even more difficult. Also, the square footage of your two spaces is almost the same...I mean, the upper floor is like 7 sq ft smaller...but you have the balcony and the bathroom (iso-booth :D).

If you have people coming and going...then the bottom floor is going to make the most sense...and put your less used gear and less used situations, upstairs.
Of course...to me, a lot also has to do with the look/feel of the spaces...so maybe the upstairs feels better.
It really is a question only you cans answer...how best to use the two spaces.
 
Bottom floor for musical equipment. The idea of carting stuff up and down stairs fills me with horror.

Turn up stairs into a relaxation listening room
 
With all the doors, and stair opening, the 2nd floor woudl be a nightmare to acoustically treat and get things symmetrical. Use the 1st floor.
 
I used to live in a multilevel coach house and had to go back and forth from the basement to the first floor control room (2nd floor for us U.S. Americans) to record drums. I would facetime myself with my computer (webcam) and iPad, and point the computer's camera at the preamps or the audio interface to get the signal levels right (mute both devices when the call starts) and watch them on the iPad while playing the drums. Then I would use the Logic remote on the iPad to control play/record/stop and maybe set basic levels on the mixer if I needed to hear something more when tracking. It took a lot of time but it did work. I still do that now, except now my drums are in the next room. The other thing is once you dial it in, if you're going to leave the mics up you can import a drum session--tracks, buses, sends, VCAs, plugins-- from the last thing you recorded and just keep the same setup on multiple projects. Logic does this but I'm sure other DAWs do too. Lately unless I'm recording someone else's kit or a lefty drummer, I just keep importing my drum session into the next project. Saves time from having to do it every time you want to record something. It doesn't import the drums I played (but you can choose that if you want in Logic), just all the tracks and their settings so I don't have to keep putting that in every time!

To accommodate the microphone distance, I bought a 100' 12-channel cable snake from monoprice.com. It still is good 6-7 years later even though it's way too long for me now!
 
Bottom floor for musical equipment. The idea of carting stuff up and down stairs fills me with horror.

Turn up stairs into a relaxation listening room

Yeah, take it from a former touring musician who just had a hernia fixed last month after ten years of it slowly protruding from my guts like an alien baby: don't use the second floor for much of anything. Maybe a good vocal recording room or something. The last thing you want to be doing is hauling amps and such up and the stairs. I'm 99% sure my hernia started at a venue in LaCrosse, Wisconsin called The Warehouse, where the live space is on the third floor of this old building, and not only is the elevator always broken, but the stairs are old-school: only two flights to go up three stories. So it's like 30 stairs to go before you can take a break on the landing. Then another 30 stairs. Such madness.

Or, you can do what I am doing with my two-story outbuilding: forget the second floor as a separate space and open up the ceiling on the first floor to have vaulted/higher ceilings. That's nearly *always* better for control rooms and recording spaces. Just make sure to have a structural engineer look at your ceiling joists to ensure they're not holding up the building somehow.
 
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