New Studio Build Out Advice | John Sayers’ Recording Studio Design Forum archive

Greetings, Me and another Engineer are going to build out a space in an office building suite that I recently acquired a long term lease on. We are looking for advice on where to put the walls and what dimensions we should use to make the space practical for recording pop/rock bands. We have a contractor lined up that will trade his time for recording time so we have to cover subcontractors (electric/HVAC) and materials. We don't have tons of money (of course), but want it to be isolated enough to track everything with the possible exception of full drum kits during office hours and not piss off the ad agency in the suite next door. The links below are to digital photos, one very rough proposed layout, and the layout as it is with no internal walls built yet. The ceiling height is roughly 13 feet though it does vary down to almost 12 feet as we are on the top floor and the roof is slightly angeled for drainage. Ideally I would like a small entry way for a work area and desk (we do short run CD duplication also) and some storage of CD's and other supplies, a control room, drum room, 1 small iso booth for vocals, 1 or 2 tiny is booths for guitar and or bass amp mic'ing. The small room in the corner of the layout houses the heater which right now just blows out 1 giant vent into the room. In the rough proposed layout the room by the entry door on the angeled wall is the entryway/office. The room adjacent to that is the vocal booth. next to that is the control room (oriented so you would look left or right to see the drum room and the vocal booth). Then you have the drum room, closet, and heater closet. I know what I am wanting is very tight for a space this size but both me and the other engineer are used to recording in sub optimal spaces. So if we can at least get some decent isolation (not expecting total isolation by any means) between our rooms and especially between us and our neighbors (we don't want to make enemies with them by being loud) and the acoustic spaces are acoustically decent we will be happy. We are almost counting on being limited to nights and weekends for drum tracking since our budget probably isn't big enough to build out good enough isolation to keep drum sounds isolated enough from our neighbors to stay in their good graces. Other than full drums we hope to be able to record 24/7 if need be. The studio will be in a cool old 3 story brick building in the arts district of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. We are on the 3rd/top floor and luckily we have full access to the huge freight elevator which is 2 doors down from our suite so moving supplies and equipment up and down is no problem. OK here are the links: drawing of room basically as it is (no internal walls execpt small heater closet): http://www.thisisyouraudiospace.com/new ... _walls.jpg here is a very rough sketch of the first draft layout (vocal booth is mising doors): http://www.thisisyouraudiospace.com/new ... udio_3.jpg and some digital photos (note that the archway/entryway you can see in a couple of these photos into the adjoining sweet has been filled in since we are not renting the currently vacant adjoining sweet to the north of us): http://www.thisisyouraudiospace.com/new ... ayout.html The room is east to west long ways in it's alignment. The door from the outer hall into our suite is on the east side, the furnace closet is on the west side. The now filled in entry way to the adjoining suite was on the north side. That suite is still vacant but may not be for long and the existing wall on the south side is shared with an ad agency. As I said we are on the top floor and the ceilings and floors are fairly thick cement. If we can afford it I want to do another lower ceiling (which I think will be necessary anyway to achieve optimal dimensions in each room), and floated floors to keep from pissing of our neighbors below. I choose the space for the fact that the rent is reasonable for the part of town that it is in, it has relatively tall ceilings, the ceiling and floor are cement, and the other businesses in the building mostly creative type companies, ad agencies, photographers, graphics designers, printing company, another small studio on the main floor, and 2 other music related businesses. Thanks for reading my long post, and thanks in advance for any layout and build out advice you may have!