one room studio questions

hey there, I am from columbus ohio and have been reading through your forums for a while now. I seem to have blindly found my way to answers to a lot of my questions about room acoustics and studio design but I still have a few loose ends I can't seem to figure out. I am hoping someone here might have some answers to these questions or be able to give me a link or two to read through. I am someone who records guitar (mostly acoustic), and vocals. I work by myself and am trying to build a one room project studio where I can get nice recordings and also mix. Question #1 Do you want live rooms/tracking rooms to be rooms based around golden ratios for good acoustics or does it make sense to build a room with nonparalel walls? Should my room be rectangular or would I be better off with some other shape(trapezoid) when building an ideal tracking/live room? Question #2 In all of my reading all over the internet, I can't seem to find much of anything at all about ceiling shape/design. I see lots of pictures of professional studios with ceilings that are angled or a mix of several flat planes which I assume is to defuse sound. If you were building an ideal live room what would the ceiling look like? What about an ideal control room? Question #3 One article I found seems to really describe in detail how to build an ideal one room studio and I like this layout, but I wanted a second opinion. Here is a link to the Wes Lachot article http://www.overdublane.com/wes/database/pagemaker.cgi?1106083441 Would this room shape make a nice room for one person playing guitar and recording? And would a ceiling at an angle that starts at around 7.5 feet at the control surface side of the room and slopes up to 10 feet at the back of the room add even more to the acoustical space in the room? here is an image of the room floorplan (it calls for an 8 ft ceiling) from the article in the form of an attachment.

Wes is well known to me, and we usually agree on most things - his idea of a good, simple 1-room setup among them. If you build a rectangular room around established LWH ratios, it will still have a LOT of flutter and some modal issues - by the time you get rid of the flutter, the room may well be too dead for your tastes. So your choice may end up between "live enough" and "no flutter echo" - If instead you splay your walls and ceiling so that they are at least 12 degrees (total) out of parallel, you kill the flutter without killing the highs/high mids - that way, you still have the option of just how reverberant you want the room to be. I generally try to keep to one or another set of "ideal" ratios, taking the AVERAGE dimensions for width and for ceiling height - the front and rear walls may still end up parallel, but you will typically have quite a bit of absorption on those surfaces to keep flutter at bay. Generally, a "live" room should have a longer decay time than a CR, so for a 1-room setup I'd always build some 2-sided gobo's - absorbent on one side, reflective on the other - then you can reverse them if you want an area brighter for recording. The main reason for the difference is so that you don't mix in an overly live room and think you're actually putting that extra 'verb on the recording media - so if you keep the mix area drier, then the "wet" you hear is much more likely to be "on tape". If you stick with a single room, you're gonna want some sort of iso booth or closet for computers; otherwise, you'll find yourself looking for a "bandaid" to get rid of the white noise that's on every track you lay down. That's just a quick run-down, keep asking if you still have questions - that's what we're here for (and you thought it was just the dancing girls :wink: ) Steve

thank you for your speedy response knightfly and I think everything you said seemed to make sense to me. The two sided gobos sounds like a great idea I hadn't thought of and will definitly try. As far as an iso booth, I plan to take that trapezoid room and add a medium sized closet for storing crap and an iso booth. My computer might even be run in from another room. As far as the ceiling goes i'm still a bit confused. Would it be better to have an angled ceiling than a flat one? or does it not matter since two of the walls are angled. Common sense would tell me that the more angled room surfaces there are the more the room would naturally diffuse. Am I wrong? Last of all, a room with all these crazy walls will still have some reverb if it had no treatment correct? like it just would have minimal flutter echoes and nasty modes? (I am trying to make sure this room doesn't suck to play live in as far as sound is concerned) thanks again, h0bo4life