At what point...

I'm currently in the process of looking for a home to purchase, and the main requirement is enough space to put in a studio. Generally speaking, at what point is the square footage simply too small to invest in the time and money it takes to make a reasonably good space? I built a 6' x 8' isolation room at my mothers house, not knowing I'd be doing lots of drum tracking - suffice to say I simply didn't build the room with that in mind. I'd like to build a room that's larger for a live room; maybe 10' 15' or even 10' x 12', and double use it for an iso room with gobos. Anyway, if you were looking for a home, what amount of space would you be gunning for if you were looking to build a control room, and live room, and maybe a single iso? I should also mention, the search function didn't yield a "your wasting your money and time with a room smaller than blah x blah because physics say it will sound like [whatever means it's awfully bad]"

Ceiling height is a big factor. I'm not sure about whats built in your area? Go with 9ft ceilings and apply the 1:1.14:1.38 ratio + what size drumkit do you have? The 2nd room will have to be big enough for the kit. easy as pie

hehehe... oddly, I searched for the EXACT same thing about 7 years ago... same results. I ended up looking for at least 1200 sq ft of detached space with at least 12 ft ceilings. My primary objective was a control room of at least 16x20. 3000 cu ft or larger would be just about ideal. I got lucky and found this property and ended up cutting my property taxes by a factor of x3.5! Farm houses with barns are great starting points, IMHO. 1200-1600 sq ft is a pretty decent barn... not that big, but in some parts of the country, it's a common size. The other bonus of getting into a rural setting is that you usually don't have to deal with too much air or highway traffic noise.

lilith_envy wrote:

Ceiling height is a big factor. I'm not sure about whats built in your area? Go with 9ft ceilings and apply the 1:1.14:1.38 ratio + what size drumkit do you have? The 2nd room will have to be big enough for the kit. easy as pie

Thanks for the reply's from both of you. I have kits of varying sizes, depends on who's recording. I've ended up with some pretty big kits that barely fit in the 6' x 8' room, and was very hard for the drummer to get in and out, AND close the door. I think it was a huge floor tom, double kick, 3 rack toms, a snare, cymbals out the wazoo. I also think a barn would be a great to own, I've been searching for barns or rehabs. So far, I've located a 3800sq ft property that's both commercial and residential, which had fire damage from an arson, but the place was destroyed before a single flame touched the building. The listing realtor claimed it'd be 35k to repair and make nice, but our investigation proved it to be about 3x's that. So, maybe 50k for the building, and 90k to fix it.