Plans for a home studio - what do you think?

[jordan_ellipsis]

Hey everyone. I'm planning on extending my garage to include a home studio. Currently my garage has a small music room on the back where my band practices and its where i'll do any form of recording. It's tight in there, and is nowhere near acoustically treated. I've attached an image of proposed floorplans (before and after). Basically I'm adding a live room and vocal booth. There will be an upstairs added (not for studio use) and so stairs are required. Right now i don't have a great deal of time to look into things like acoustic treatment etc. but i want to get the planning permission etc underway so this job can be completed asap. So i was after everyones opinion at this stage while things can still be changed. Then, in the summer when i have more time on my hands, i'll become an acoustics buff and be ready to implement measures when the studio has been built.

You may want to look at the plans now as i explain things. The left side is the current layout, the right is the proposed extension.

The door coming into the garage on the right comes from the house. The garage is currently set back from the house by about 6 meters. Basically i want to pull it forward so that its almost inline with the house, and fill in the gap at the back left corner. The new garage space would still be exactly the same as the old one, just shifted forward by 5 meters (approx 21 ft). In the space of the old garage will be the live room and a section squared off for stairs and bolier etc. This leaves a fairly square live room, but a big one. This is where my band would practice, obviously.

My questions are:

What size should the vocal booth be? I haven't put measurements in as the wall seperating it from the storage can be moved. It has to be 5.2 ft wide though (with acoustic treatment i imagine this will be less).

Can you give me a breif idea of the acoustic treatment i should think about here?

Are windows good/bad/indifferent? I'd like there to be some in both the live and control room, but theyr not a neccesity.

Finally, is there any way i could use the space better?

I appreciate that this is a long post and i'm a fairly new member (well i signed up a while ago but havent really started using the boards yet) so im very grateful for any response.

 

[LemonTree]

just a thought...if you swap out the door between the vocal booth and live room for a window and make entry to the vocal booth through a door from the storage area then your vocalist has a line of vision to the live and the control room at all times.

Can be a handy thing if you're tracking a bassist of 2nd guitarist in the control room to help with seperation.

Also a less square shaped control room can only help things in the standing waves department

 

[VSpaceBoy]

A few comments for ya..


1) You'd better consider the acoustics NOW instead of LATER otherwise you'll make the job much much harder. You should build the rooms without parallel walls. Stay away from squares.

2) Can you build the storage area and vocal booth into the stairs area? This will give you a larger control room.

 

[jordan_ellipsis]

Hey guys, sorry iv taken so long to reply, only just got inet connection back. I managed to do a bit of reading... i never realised how much the shape of the room affects acoustics, therefore i do need to plan ahead. Gonna take some time to get round to working on this so for now its a suspended project, will return to it when i get some time off.