Need Help With Recording Studio Design

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jwhit318

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I am stuck on a room layout to turn my garage into a studio. The deminisions are 22x22. I need a control room and a vocal/acoustic guitar booth also a live room for drums and amps /My wife also wants me to incorporate a theatre room in the live room section. I was thinking about a drum riser on the back of one of the walls and a projector screen behind it, to save space, i can just move the drums out of the way to watch a movie. I will be doing all the work myself. Any ideas would help. There is one door into the garage ,if you are facing the front it would be on the back right. Also I will be closing off the large 2 car door.

Thanks

J
 
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jwhit318 said:
I am stuck on a room layout to turn my garage into a studio. The deminisions are 22x22. I need a control room and a vocal/acoustic guitar booth also a live room for drums and amps /My wife also wants me to incorporate a theatre room in the live room section. I was thinking about a drum riser on the back of one of the walls and a projector screen behind it, to save space, i can just move the drums out of the way to watch a movie. I will be doing all the work myself. Any ideas would help. There is one door into the garage ,if you are facing the front it would be on the back right. Also I will be closing off the large 2 car door.

Thanks

J
Click to expand...
Why not have the theatre in the control room? It will be acoustically designed for listening.
 
well one thing is my step son has alot of friends and my wife lets them do what ever they want, I would prefer them not to be any where near the DAW, especially if i plan on spending $20,000 on equipment. I did think about that option at first. Thanks
 
jwhit -
If you are going to be able to put 20K into your equipment, I think you should forego the possibility of a dual use home theater/music studio.
22' X 22' - I would not bother splitting it up. Keep it all in one room, you'll have semi decent sized space, you'll be able to get to everything and not have to worry about isolation between rooms and multiple instances of A/C being needed.
22' X 22' will make a nice project studio with enough room to move around, especially if acoustic drums are involved. My former experience with a 28 X 30 single room project studio has throoughly convinced me of the need for good sized space.
If you are going to work professionally with relatively high paying clients, then yes, you might want a control room, and 22' X 22' would make a nice control room, but you would have no studio space available :( .
Chopping this into three rooms is going to produce three claustrophobic, hard to acoustically treat, expensive to build, unimpressive spaces.
my two cents, ymmv.
cheers
Chris
 
the paramaters:

you have:

22 x 22 space

you want:

live recording space
theatre space
control room
vocal booth

What can we do with this?

Firstly, 22 x 22 is not nice to deal with acoustically, and even though you will lose space, you get better acoustic results where room dimensions are not even ratios. So you might as well 'subdivide' it.

One possibilty is:

Build a partition across the room that creates one area of 22 x 13, and another of 22 x 9.

The 22 x 13 are is the live room and theatre. It's narrow, but making it wider eats into the other section

The 9x22 section goes across the back, and thus the door back right opens into it. This section is iteself divided into three bits. The first, at back right, is an entry/foyer thing, using the door at back right, and can be just 9 x 5.

This foyer gives access to the main live area, as well as into the next small section, the control room which can be about 9 x 12. In the back left is the third small section, again of 9 x 5, which will be the vocal booth. This has its entry off the live area. This places the 9 x 12 control room centrally, and in the partion between it and the live room you can put a window.

Normally you would have the desk looking out into the control room, but I would place the desk and monitoring system against the control left hand wall, because having the monitoring space longer than it is wide is acoustically better. This means whoever is mixing would look to his (or her) left to see into the live room.

If you have a concrete floor I wouldn't worry about a drum riser. The riser would further compromise room flexibility.

I would also try to keep at least one of the roller doors still functional , , , very handy for getting gear in and out.

On the left hand wall of the live area you can mount a viewing screen.

The right hand wall of the live area . . . well, you might paint this green in case you eventually wnat to do video against a green screen.

What you get here is a whole series of compromises. But you might get reasonable functionality from it
 
You'll move the kit to watch a movie? Oh yeah!
You'll allow the "do whateverthey want" kids in the same space as the kit? Oh yeah!
You'll only record when the kid doesn't want to watch a movie? Oh yeah.
Oh, you woke up - it was all a nightmare? Oh NO!
Everything sounds great actually except the bit about the theatre set up & kids.
Comfy chairs, pop corn & softdrinks, dark environment to stumble around in when watching the flick.
The compromises I can see relate to you not recording much, having gear knocked about inadvertantly or otherwise & the resultant fiction between you & the kids that will result on , well you know from experience I guess.
Build another room for the HT at the other end of the house.
 
rayc said:
You'll move the kit to watch a movie? Oh yeah!
You'll allow the "do whateverthey want" kids in the same space as the kit? Oh yeah!
You'll only record when the kid doesn't want to watch a movie? Oh yeah.
Oh, you woke up - it was all a nightmare? Oh NO!
Everything sounds great actually except the bit about the theatre set up & kids.
Comfy chairs, pop corn & softdrinks, dark environment to stumble around in when watching the flick.
The compromises I can see relate to you not recording much, having gear knocked about inadvertantly or otherwise & the resultant fiction between you & the kids that will result on , well you know from experience I guess.
Build another room for the HT at the other end of the house.
Click to expand...

yep I'd have to agree with that one. being 17, I know alot of my friends also see instruments and automatically are drawn to them like flies to.... well you know

I mean really at this point why not just convert the master bedroom to the theater and live in the studio! hah :)
 
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