I'm moving house in a month and will be looking to build a new studio room at the end of the garden. I'll probably have up to about 30 square metres internally to play with.
I'll want this for a variety of purposes - practising (mostly piano and keys, some drums), teaching, possibly rehearsing, simple small-scale recording.
I'm torn between two approaches: 1) Building one single large room in which I can do anything I want in terms of playing, rehearsing, teaching etc - while limited recording possibilities to MIDI and working through headphones to track vocals etc; and 2) Dividing the space into two smaller rooms, standard live room / control room combo, for more usefuless in recording, being able to track drums, vocals etc without having to work through headphones.
But I'm considering a third option:
What if I had one pretty big room, where I could rehearse pretty much anything I want, and do limited recording using MIDI, electronic drums through phones etc, AND this was my general mixing and editing room, with decent space and monitors. And then I have a very small room just to use as a control room when I want to track live instruments. With literally just a computer to record on, a simple small mixer and monitors. I would then do all the mixing and editing work afterwards in the larger room.
I'd be looking at maybe 8-9 m2 for the tracking room, and 20-22 m2 for the live room / mixing room. I suppose I'm modelling this on situations where I've seen live recording engineers and people recording in churches etc, set up in all kinds of not-ideal spaces, and still get decent enough results in tracking. Even though you wouldn't want to use those spaces for making detailed informed decisions in mixing.
It would be a compromise, but then so will anything be. I don't do enough recording (outside of MIDI etc) to justify devoting a larger space to control room than the room for playing and teaching in. OTOH I don't want to cut myself off from being able to do it when I need to.
Any thoughts?
Very small control room for tracking only?
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 13311.
check out this design for a small studio
http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5457
one modification you could make is to change the sliding glass doors to pocket doors - the type the slide away into the walls - that would then open the whole room up for rehearsal etc.
Thanks John, that's a really interesting approach.
Do the doors in your design slide away inside the partition? I can't see how else as the flat wall space either side of them is not wide enough.
How do you mean pocket doors would open the whole space up? Presumably they'd still need a wall either side of them, at least as wide as the doors, to slide into, wouldn't they?
Bearing in mind I'll have roughly twice as much space to play with as in your design (up to about 30m2), how could it be adapted to open up a wider space? Say the width of the room was about 4.5 metres for example, having a couple of sliding doors in the middle of the partition would still leave a lot of wall either side...
yes they do but it possible to half open up the rooms.they'd still need a wall either side of them, at least as wide as the doors, to slide into, wouldn't they?