Basement Studio (design help)

Hello everyone I've been looking to build a studio in the basement of my home for quite a while. I've designed (to the best of my abilities) the layout of how I would like the studio to be built using SketchUp. I would like to have a live room, a control room, and a vocal booth/room. I want to use the studio mainly to record a drum kit, guitar/bass amps/cabinets, vocals, etc. It will most likely be a lot of loud equipment. I have neighbors to my left and right. The main areas of soundproofing to keep the noise level down would be the wall the couch is on, and the wall directly across from that in the live room, as well as the wall connecting those two, which lines the steps. Those three walls and the ceiling are my biggest concerns. I drew the sketch exactly how the real room measures out in ft. and in. (except for the wall height in the control and live rooms. the height of the vocal booth has to be 6ft 6in) What I am looking to figure out is: 1) Do the dimensions of my vocal booth allow for capturing good sound or is there another way I should design the room to better capture sound? Ex: different dimensions, acoustic treatment, etc, etc. 2) What ways can I treat the control room and live room to get the best sounds without losing a lot of space? Any other suggestions or tips, please feel free to post them and help me out. I need all the help I can get. Thank you all very much. A link to the SketchUp file can be found here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12508887/Basement.skp

knicotera wrote:

Hello everyone The main areas of soundproofing to keep the noise level down would be the wall the couch is on, and the wall directly across from that in the live room, as well as the wall connecting those two, which lines the steps. Those three walls and the ceiling are my biggest concerns.

If you have three really good walls and one crappy wall, then it won't be much better than having four crappy walls. If you want the sound in one room to stay in that room, you need to soundproof the whole room (every wall + ceiling + floor). If you're concerned about space, you might think about not soundproofing certain rooms (for example, if you mix quietly, you might forgo soundproofing the control room from the rest of the building. I'll defer to others regarding layout suggestion. I would think you might want to swap the live room and control room locations though.