Newb help with designing a recording room

I just cleared out my upstairs guest bedroom and I want to use it as an all-purpose recording room for guitars, basses, drums, and vocals(I would move equipment in there to record and then store it in another room.) It may not be the best room to record in because it's square and the walls are flat, but this is a small home studio and its the best I can do. It's a square, carpeted room with two doors, a closet, a fairly large window with wooden shutters, and has a ceiling 7 1/2ft high, is 12ft 10in in length, and 11ft 4in wide. It also has 4 electrical outlets. The walls are all flat and have a thin coat of paint. So whats the best way to go about acoustically treating this room? What kind of foam should I get? How much? Should I buy thick carpets to drape along the walls? I need an all-in-one room to record everything. Sorry for so many questions-I'm a newb :oops: .Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!

There are two goals that you have to set. Your basic room will not be perfect at either of them. The question is how much do you want to spend to get how good. Isolation. How much do you want what you are recording to be heard by everybody in the house and the neighborhood? Then there is the other direction. Will you have to retake a track if a helicopter flies over. Obviously a pro studio can't tell somebody 'sorry we have to retake that one because the evening train came buy, not to worry though the next one isn't scheduled for 20 minutes.' Isolation requires adding mass to the walls and being sure that there are no flanking paths for the sound to get out. Absorbtion and Dispersion. Managing how the sound bounces around inside the room. What most people call how the room 'sounds'. Absorbtive surfaces are ones where the sound does not bounce off of the surface (mostly by letting them through and get broken up inside). Dispersive surfaces bounce sound away in many directions. Speaking in nontechnical newbie terms the things you want to avoid are 'the room is too live', which means that sound bounces around so long that there is still too much old sound messing with your new sound. Add absorbtion. 'Slapback echo', which is common with parallel surfaces, where the sound keeps bouncing like a ball back and forth, resulting in very rapid reverb. Can be helped with absorbtion OR with dispersion on one wall (so when the ball hits the one wall it does not bounce straight back to the other wall). 'Standing Waves' loud and weak spots for various frequencies based on room size. Absorbtion is usually used for these, particularly bass absorbtion since standing waves are most prominent in bass frequencies. 'Bass Accumulation' Because most absorbtion is more effective at mid and high frequencies the Bass tends to be overstrong. Absorbers tuned for bass frequencies, aka Bass Traps are used. These are most effective in corners.

My budget is around $1000 It's a large house so my family won't be bothered, and the walls are thick and the neighbors arent close enough to be bothered by the noise. I live in a surburban area, so I wont be bothered by heavy traffic, airplanes, trains, etc. And I'm not really designing a pro studio-its a Pro Tools LE/Apple G5 setup to record myself and small local bands. Its by no means a commercial facility :) .

So is your control room in a separate room, or do you have to do all this in one room? Designing the acoustics fro the "Live room" are different than what's required for a control room, where you'll want to create an RFZ for mixing, etc. No matter which, in a room that small you'll want lots of bass trapping and absorbant treatment. Just throwing carpet/curtains on walls won't do it because it will only absorb the high frequencies. Check the sticky's on this site and the SAE site for more info on this. SAE site also has some plans for bedroom studios.

The control room is in a different room

My friend drew the floor plan of the room for me. Any suggestions on how to treat the room?

Sorry to post again on this thread, but does anyone have any suggestions on how I should treat the room?

Go have a look at the SAE site if you haven't already. A tracking room isn't hard to treat. The ideal is to have the sound of the room balanced across the sound spectrum. Your first step should be to kill off flutter echoes, which are created by parallel surfaces. The obvious one is the ceiling- in your case, I'd make it as absorptive as you can. Putting up rigid fiberglass panels (OwensCorning 703 or equivalent) covered in fabric will make a big difference there. On 2 walls, I'd recommend putting diffusion of some kind, just so you don't deaden the room completely. Even just building curved plywood panels against the walls will keep them from being parallel. There's lots of ideas on the boards and at the SAE site on things like this. I'd also recommend putting in at least some bass trapping. Putting thick 703 panels across one or 2 corners would probably be sufficient, perhaps using the wall-to-ceiling corners (there's only one wall corner I see on your plan that you could use for this- the others all have doors too close). You may or may not want to put wood slats over these to keep the room more live- you'll have to experiment here to see what works for you. BTW stay away from the foam. You could spend $1000 on the stuff pretty easily, but you can do it all yourself with a little skill and a few trips to Home Depot. Hope this helps.

I need to treat the ceiling even though I have fairly thick carpeting on the floor? So I need to put bass traps on the ceiling corners, and put up large absorbers along two of the walls? What is a good recommendation for vocals since I dont have a vocal booth? Set up the vocals in a corner and then surround it with a gobo of some sort?