New board member and studio constructor. Here's my story...

Hello everyone! My name is Alex and I have to say that this is an AWESOME resource and a great place to learn new tricks. Had a little bit of trouble getting in here, but all is fixed and ready to go. Thanks John! So here we go..... OVERVIEW: My current studio is basically 1 room about 13' x 18' and 8' ceiling (the big room in diagram). Everything happens in there pretty much. The only "controlled" area is a ghetto rigged "iso" booth made out of 2 standing mattresses. It works tho. lol. This studio is for my band and other projects and I also work in post production media so I use this for a lot of business as well. ( ADR, VO's, editing, ...) PROCESS: As you can see in the drawing there is another room attached to the main (larger) room which is about 11' x 7'. The doorway into this room still needs to be cut since they are not linked together, there's a wall. This room (iso) currently has only 2 parallel walls (the one with the window, and the one across from it) , so as you can see I altered the wall across from the wall with the window with an angled wall which is my current idea to fix this problem. Also, the ceiling angles up so its naturally not parallel with the floor and goes from 8' to about 8' 3". I know it's not much but I'm also going to be adding some other elements to offset the ceiling from the floor some more. We are currently starting with whatever we can do right now. We have cleared the main room, opened the doorway into the iso booth, and were constructing the two angled walls in the iso booth. We will then move on to patching up some damaged walls, baseboards, etc... in the main room and ready it for paint. We will also be adding some drywall to all four corners of the main room to round that out a bit and put some bass traps. ( are the bass traps necessary if I have a rounded corner? ) That's pretty much where we are at, so I decided to come here and see what kind of recommendations I can get for design. I obviously plan on putting bass traps on every corner, foam the crap out of the iso booth, and pad some walls in the main room. On a recording aspect I don't plan on tracking drums in the iso room because I don't think it will be large enough. It's a big kit. So... I had an idea that if we needed to do drums for scratch I can leave it where it is, and I was thinking about putting one of those medical curtain things with heavy, heavy curtains that can be pulled around the kit for somewhat of a controlled environment. No parallel walls, not so dead of a sound, and it may allow for some room tone? Anyways, just an idea. LOUDNESS: Our loudness factor isn't really an issue since the only time we're LOUD is on weekends and I have a deal with the other residents in the cul-de-sac and all are ok with it and a majority of the recording is done digitally. ( a reason why I want this iso booth so I can mic some REAL amps! ) BUDGET: $300-$500 since we already have some material and I get free stuff from pops. QUESTIONS: What do you think would be the ideal setup having these rooms to work with? Since I wouldn't consider this a super pro setup, what could I do without? And I think my final question is, if you had a space like this what would you do? Maybe it'll help me with ideas. oh... and I actually have one of those Radio Shack noise meter things. Can anyone give me a crash course on how to work it? lol ok. I hope I have followed all the rules as a noob and thank you all in advance for taking the time to read this and help me out. Have a great day guys and gals! Alex P.S. The other diagram is just a rough idea as to where to put my stuff. Would this work?

What do you think would be the ideal setup having these rooms to work with?

To start with, you should place apropiately your mixing position, which should be simetrical to the room. Also you'd want to face the shorter wall. In other words you should face the RED wall. I could go and go about where to put speakers, at what angle, that distance of your front wall, but seriously, where to put the bass traps, whats RFZ, etc. this has been covered A LOT on this forum. I suggest you make a search on mixing setup.

Our loudness factor isn't really an issue since the only time we're LOUD is on weekends and I have a deal with the other residents in the cul-de-sac and all are ok with it and a majority of the recording is done digitally. ( a reason why I want this iso booth so I can mic some REAL amps! )

Well, a guitar amp fully cranked could go up to 100 db easily, so you need isolation somehow. Im pretty sure that 8 hours of recording loud guitar amps in a weeked could make even you go nuts. Also you need isolation BETWEEN your rooms, otherwise you will listening to nothing but loud noise. I would suggest constructing a stud wall/drywall room on all the iso room perimeter, and hopefully you could build as well a second stud wall in your control room perimeter, making a decoupled two wall system. If you are not THAT anal about noise leakage between rooms, then maybe, just one room system (in your iso room) could isolate it decently, you could probably use at least 2 if not 3 5/8" drywalls. Yeah, its going to be just a 1 leaf systen between the rooms but thats better than nothing ! Actually, in my actual setup (which i'm about to change soon to a new place) I have a DIY vocal booth, made by the previous owner of the room I'm renting. It is a poorly made 1 leaf vocal booth, but a loud guitar amp doesnt leak THAT much to my control room, I can actually turn my monitors up a bit and I'm good. Its not perfect, and I can hear the real amp, but it works!

$300-$500 since we already have some material and I get free stuff from pops.

Thats not enough really for what you are telling us to achieve. What other materials you have? If you don't care about not isolating properly a iso booth, and having to record loud guitars with headphones, probably with a LOT of leakage from the noise source, thats ok with you, and you could probably spend those $300 on some DIY bass trap. However, this is an studio design forum, so its true that we are going to encourage you to do it the right way. Like I suggested before, because of your budget, you should look into building a simple wall room inside the iso room. With 2 5/8" sheets of drywall on each side, filling the inside with insulation. But thats gonna cost you more than 500 for sure, and you have to decide whether or not you want a double glass window etc.

Well, a guitar amp fully cranked could go up to 100 db easily, so you need isolation somehow. Im pretty sure that 8 hours of recording loud guitar amps in a weeked could make even you go nuts.

Very true! In fact, at a level of 100 dB, maximum safe exposure time is one hour. Beyond that, you are pretty much guaranteed of irreversible damage to your inner ear, with selective hearing loss. Most musicians don't realize this: Which is why most musicians are partially deaf. I don't mean that as an insult or a joke: I mean it absolutely seriously. I did some research on this a couple of years ago for a course I was teaching on sound systems, and came across numerous papers documenting partial deafness in musicians. One that I recall was a study done on a symphony orchestra, (in Boston, if I recall correctly) where it was found that all the violists suffer something like 30% hearing loss in their left ears. It isn't hard to figure out why... In any event, a big guitar amp cranked up high sure can produce 100 dB, and more too. An average drum kit played hard can easily put out 115 dB. Maximum exposure time before permanent irreversible hearing damage at a level of 115 dB, is seven minutes.... How many drummers know this? And of those who know it, how many take precautions? Javier is right: You need to isolate your rooms, all around. - stuart -