A blank canvas awaiting a masterpeice

Hi everyone! First post so be gentle please :D . Must start by saying thanks to all the posters, I've spent a good few days reading and I'm just glad that I found this site BEFORE (literally a week before) I got too far down the design road. My experience: No worries with building the bits, just not much clue as to the right bits to build to create a 'musical. space :oops: The objective: Garage studio. Ideally with a Control room, a live room and a vocal booth. Having the vocal booth either incorporated into the live room or at least with visual interaction would be preferred. The style: Acoustic traditional I guess sums it up. Vocals, Acoustic Guitars, Drums and some Keys. Nothing heavy. Maybe some Electric Guitar for those 'bluer' moments :) The location is on the site border and the neighbours are close, not attached, maybe 3m so it would need noise reduction which I think I've got covered from the various articles I see on the site. The location: Detached garage. On an existing site (I'm having to have it rebuilt because of various structural problems. 8m long, 4m wide and 3.5m high. It will have a garage door on it but I'm quite happy to have a brick wall behind it. It is literally a concrete slab at the moment so anything goes within those boundries. Nothing is set in stone in terms of doors or windows and I'm not worried if there arent any (well, obviously one door would be kind of helpful). I've looked at the garage designs on the site and while I like them I would really like to try to get a vocal booth in the live room. The control room would need to serve a dual purpose and that would be music/video but I'm assuming that they are going to be compatable. That's it I guess. Oh, budget... how could I forget! I have the kit to populate it already so I could stretch to £10,000 after having the shell built.

Craig, why not download the free trial of smartdraw (at smartdraw.com) and give it a shot - maybe a minor modification of one of the plans you see that's close? Neither John nor I have enough free time for much drawing these days, but if you give it a try I'm sure someone will be glad to say it's crap :wink: - and hopefully WHY :? Good luck... Steve

Steve, Already underway. I guessed you guys would be busy but its always worth a try :D . I ended up getting SketchUp 5 and have been messing about with that so will post what I done thus far for comments. I mean, how bad could it be... :lol: Thanks for your reply.

Hi guys, Well... a while has passed and there has been some progress. i have an (existing) 8 inch slab that was the original structure to which a wall foundation has been poured around it, but not touching. The outer wall is made up of 8 1/2 inch celcon blocks which has been rendered on the outside and painted on the inside. the garage door is no more, it's four walls and two doors (one at either end). i've had a stab at a basic layout, the 'walls' that are seen being floating walls (timber/rockwool) that will be inside the blocks and obviously a ceiling will need to go on there. the building will have 13 trusses 600mm (with a 1.2m pitch, tiled) apart which will either be boarded or not depending on what conventional advise i do or do not get :D i haven't added any treatment because although i've got, and read, Rod's book i thought i'd start simple and see what people think and then i can have a go at that. and by then i may have figured out Sketchup a bit better) by the way, the studio is called '0618'. cheers Craig.

Hey Craig, I would set up your desk along the 2502mm wall. That way, your control room will have better symmetry, and you can still make use of the window. My $0.02, Colorblind

Cheers for that CB, I'll modify the drawing and post it again.

hi again. funny how the longer i spend on this site the more my plans change!! so i've done a rough plan with the correct floor sizes (havent worried about ceilings yet). obviously the large room is the live bit. i'm just after a general 'you're on the right track' or not as the case may be. thanks.