Existing workshop conversion 24' x 30'

First, let me thank Mr. Sayers and everyone here. I've learned so much already, mostly that I didn't know anyting to begin with. I've got an existing building. 24 feet x 30 feet. 8.5 foot ceilings. It is divided internally into a 24x10 section and a 24x20 section. The 24x20 section has two room, each 12x20. One of those 12x20 rooms is our current jam room. No acoustic construction or anything, just interior walls and wallboard with some homemade diffusion/absorption. I'd like to completely gut this building and make it a real studio. I'm stuck with the 24x10 and 24x20 section as the divider is a raised brick foundation that's part of the structure. Foundation is concrete slab. It's pretty solid, 30 years old and not a single crack. Outside walls are standard 2x4 construction. This was previously a woodworking shop/storage building. Sorry for the stick figure drawing, but would appreciate some layout ideas. We do mostly acoustic stuff, rock and country. I would like a vocal booth as we do some voice over stuff for the local radio station (at the station, I'd like to move the production here). Also a drum room, live room and control room. Other considerations: 1)This is a rural setting with minimal construction codes. Of course, i'll be checking first. 2) not much traffic, building is 1/4 mile from nearest street. 3) not too concerned about disturbing the neighbors cuz there aren't any! 4) I'm interested in the inside-out wall construction technique. 5) I'm OK with losing the windows and rollup door in the large section. TIA

If you're stuck with those room sizes, here's what I'd do with the space (in general) The 24x20 space is a nice big room. It's not big enough to divide up into a big control room and decent tracking room, tho. If you made that space into a combination of control and main tracking room, you could get a pretty good sound out of it. Then you could use the remaining space for storage and isolation. Of course, the 24x10 space wouldn't be too bad of a drum booth, either. A little bit like a tunnel, but it'd work. Can you move the door between the 24x10 and 24x20 spaces? You could split the 24x10 space into a drum booth and storage or iso area, and just leave the rest or the space for a kick-ass tracking room. I don't know that I'd want to put the tracking room in the 24x10 side, but it's certainly possible. Even with the 24' length, a 10' wide and 8.5' tall room is a little tight. It'd require a bunch of treatment to sound good, but it'd leave you with a 24x20 tracking room, which would rule. You could put an iso booth at one end of the 24x10 space (maybe 7x10 iso booth and 16x10 control?). Just thinking out loud. The other folks on the board will come up with good ideas for specific designs, but the overall layout is something you'll need to decide on first. Hope this sparks some thought.

Unfortunately, the doors will have to stay where they are due to the raised brick divider. It's four layers of brick with the wall on top of that. I do realise that I won't get all the rooms I want with this space. I'm OK with multipurpose rooms, but I would rather have a great control room and sep tracking room than a really big combination room that's just OK. It's a good thing that I've got at least a year before I start construction. It'll take that long just to read everything here, much less understand it. To make it worse, I need a small section to use as an office. Thanks for the ideas.

The room looks different when you draw it to scale this is how I see it. cheers john

That back door in the control room looks almost unuseable where it is... How much space is there between it and the speaker stand? I'd be afraid of knocking it over every time I went by. Or is this meant to have all the speakers soffit-mounted? Great layout. Making that little notch for the door a little bigger would probably solve it. Kase www.minemusic.net

Could be soffited. OR you could only put the speaker up when mixing, not tracking. Mixing is such a private sport. LOL IMO

The rear speaker is soffitted above the 7ft entrance hallway both sides. cheers john

John, you amaze me. Here I spent an hour drawing stick figures in Visio THEN I come check this thread. Nice to see we were thinking along the same lines though. You even read my mind. We aren't planning surround just yet, but hope to expand. BTW, what package do you do your drawing in? As far as interior construction goes, I was thinking inside-out in the vocal booth and the "live" room. The floors are polished concrete and I was planning on just painting them and throwing some area rugs around. I know that's super reflective but I was hoping the inside-out wall construction would balance that out. Here's what I can up with, your is "purdier"...

Ha - great minds :) The concrete floor will be fine - maybe build timber drum riser in the HVAC corner? Whilst you said you weren't thinking of 5:1 it wouldn't do any harm to allow for it in the future. ;) It won't be long before the standard home recording is released on DVD with 5:1 and pictures ;);) cheers John