New build from the ground up

Hello everyone, I finally have the opportunity to build my own studio from the ground up :yahoo:. I'll try to give as much info as I can. This will be built in the Houston, Texas area and will be a pro studio. Luckily I am able to do the labor myself, including electrical and HVAC (father is a licensed electrician and HVAC contractor). I will have a slab poured, but other that that we will be doing all the work. The rooms I'm looking to include are a control room, live room, vocal booth, iso booth, mic locker, bathroom, kitchen/lounge, and storage. I have played around with many layouts and have come up with one I feel happy with. The whole place will be around 1,200sq ft. The building will be 30ft wide, 40ft deep, and I'm thinking 12ft walls with a peak height of 16ft. I need the building to be pretty quiet and am planning on doing double walls surrounding any of the audio rooms. My idea is 5/8 sheetrock, stud bay with insulation, 3in air gap, stud bay with insulation then 5/8 sheet rock. So this brings me to a question, on the outer walls can I swap the outer layer of sheet rock for 5/8 plywood and use this as the exterior wall of the building. For any walls not dealing with audio I'm planing on a normal single wall. As for the ceiling, non audio rooms will have a standard 8ft, but the others is where I am at a loss. I'd like to go as high as possible, but want to make sure that it is acoustically sound. Should I build them flat across? Vaulted? A combination? Also, if possible I'd like one side of the live room to be a little more "live" then other. If I am hoping for too much here let me know. For the floors, I want to do wood floors in the control room and am curious about doing bare concrete and staining it for everything else. If this a crazy let me know. As for the wood for the control room, are their benefits of solid vs engineered? I'm thinking of solid Bamboo as it can be refinished and is priced well. Also, would I be better off not doing the iso booth and doing a larger vocal booth? I'm debating just hiring a designer to optimize the room, at the very lease I will have them consult on treatment, but figured I'd post here to see what info I can get and try to save a little cash :D This is the layout I've come up with

Hi and welcome I think you'll need larger (or separate) entrance to your live room for loading in/out and nothing stand in the way. If you'd like to keep entrance this way. That table should be out of the way. If you really need table maybe you should get (or build) foldable or transformable table for space saving. like at 6:20 in this Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYV0qATsyts And you also need proper Visual communication for your vocal booth. Let me show you. Dot lines showing what you see through those windows. People in control room and booth can not see each other at all :shock: trust me you don't wanna record someone you can't see :lol: That 19 square feet space in the vocal booth is it for amp? If yes. I would swap that space with vocal booth because amp booth doesn't really need Visual as much as vocal booth something like this Blue dot lines're showing vision in Vocal booth and Red dot lines're showing vision from control room Just an example you don't have to do exactly like this Hope you'll get my Idea and sorry about my english :lol: Cheers Ken

Good point on the vocal booth line of sight. As for the larger way into the live room, Things can be brought in through storage which has a large garage door and then french doors.

Anyone else? Also, I've decided to make the iso booth a machine room.