Converted Garage Studio in Brandon FL

Hello everyone, I simply love the amount of quality information on these forums and have seen lots of excellent advise and would like to pick your brain on one more home studio design. My girlfriend and I are moving into a new place in Brandon, FL. We're both fresh out of college so we couldn't afford the ideal space for a recording studio, but found a house in our budget that will have to work. I've had my little project studio in two houses - once in a 12'x14' room, then a 12'x12' room. As you can imagine those dimension caused all sorts of problems. I posted about one of those rooms here I have since built bass traps as suggested here - 6 2'x4' panels total. I also invested in 32 1'x1' squares of Aurolex. These all have been used in those two rooms with some success. I've always had the luxury of having a living room or dining area next to these rooms for tracking drums. The acoustics where we tracked the drums weren't the greatest but with some heavy experimentation we did come up with some decent drum recordings. Of course I would have the rest of the musicians in the control room with me. So, on to our current situation. The house we moved into has a converted garage (18'4" by 18'11") with a laundry room in one of the corners. You can see this on the attached Sketchup. In fact I tried to include all the pertinent measurements on the Sketchup. All the dimension in the Sketchup are accurate except for the height of the doors – somehow that skipped my brain when I was doing the measurements. Purpose: ---------- I have recorded a variety of bands - the latest of which has been a series of Gospel Groups. I usually track the drums in the adjacent rooms while the rest of the musicians are in the "control room" with me. Usually the guitars all go direct so I don't have to isolate their amps. I use Guitar Cab emulation and sometimes send the recorded dry track back to an amp later to capture that authentic sound. Vocals are usually tracked with the music as well - although they usually get replaced with isolated vocal takes. Essentially all the instrumentations gets sent to the DAW and then sent out to headphones, so the only audible sounds are the drums in the other room, vocals, and maybe some guitar strum noises. Generally this has been sufficient isolation. The guys recording here always loved the fact that I could record their performance with live drums and I'd like to achieve that despite having the adjacent room. Overall: --------- The room is a bit bigger than before, but I don't know if it makes sense yet to divide the room up into a control room and a live room. I do have a 50 foot 16ch snake I can run to the living room, but would like to avoid that. I was strongly considering dividing the room into at least a Control Room and a Live Room. Control Room / Area: ------------------------- Since I haven't had much space in the past I've always had my desk facing a wall - with my back to the musicians. I'd like to avoid that, and maybe have a window facing the musicians. Vocal Booth: --------------- The walls for the laundry room already exist. I'm thinking with some trickery I can turn it into an isolated vocal booth. The laundry machines do have to go in that room, so my guess is we'll have to work with some heavy carpets to hang over them. Now even having the vocal booth isolated would only allow room for 1 singer. Since I'm recording a lot of Gospel groups, I often end up micing 4-5 singers at once. I don't mind having them in the control room with me if that's what it takes to isolate them from the drums. But this would mean extra space requirements in the control room. The walls that already exist can stay or go depending on what would provide the best acoustic spaces - just keep in mind the machines and the water heater have to stay. Budget: --------- Again this is an area where I don't have much room. My father is fairly good at building walls, and with my help the labor should be essentially free. I'm guessing the cost will come down to raw materials, and will most likely have to cut some corners and stick to regular insulated drywall construction. I'm looking to do this for $1000-$1500 Current construction: ------------------------ Since we haven't moved into the house yet, I haven't had much of a chance to analyze the structure a whole lot (silly I know). But from what I gather since it's converted garage is that the two outside walls are cinderblock, the garage door is probably just closed with drywall, and the inside wall drywall as well. The ceiling is 8'4" high - with attic space above. Neighbors: ------------ I'm not entirely sure how the neighbors will react when they hear loud music coming from our garage on a fairly regular basis. We've been lucky so far, but this is more of a suburban area with houses about 20-30ft apart. Of course my chances of getting on their nerves will decrease exponentially with some isolation. But from everything I've read, I could easily spend my entire budget just on that alone so for now I think I'll give it a run for its money - unless of course you guys have some relatively inexpensive ways of doing that. BTW: The desk and monitors w/stands are measured models of the actualy things I own. I will like uprade to a more specialized recording desk soon, but I first want to get the space right. That's pretty much the jist of it and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Regards, -W

Here's a top down view of the space. Thanks again,

Here's my first attempt at dividing the room. Let me know what you think. -W

just a friendly bump...

i would put the live room near where the garage door was and put in a nice sized entry door to enable easy load in/out. i'd put the CR near the house doors with the utility room entering into the CR.

Wow, I like that a lot.... any chance you could upload the sketchup file? If not I could just trace it.

just import the image. its to your scale and only 2D anyways.