My Attempt at a "Small" Studio

With luck I'll manage to attach my original layout and a picture page of my final setup. The room is 8 ft by 8 ft. At the moment my main recording is on-location at my church, and I mix at home. Darryl.....

Only one of the files made it through the first shot, so here is the floorplan. I wound up not incorporating the traps in the bookcases for the time being. The desk arrangement wound up a little closer to the walls than I originally intended, so the wall adjacent to the notated ADAT rack is bare for now. I'll probably put in some hangars for my bass and guitar, but that's down the road. Cheers!! Darryl.....

Darryl- that looks good for an extremely small room ;) In such a small room you must watch the rear reflections from the two walls that have the book cases, and the door. You are not going to be able to work on the low frequencies all that much but I'd go for making those walls as dead as possible. When yu say bookcases with traps could you please elaborate? cheers john

My original intent was to construct some traps based on Ethan Winers designs that would be attached to the walls, with bookcases then in front of the traps for storage (I have too much junk!). I thought I was going to have about 1 foot on either wall to work with, but wound up with about 3 inches on the wall next to the ADAT rack, and about 9 inches on the other wall. I threw together a poorman's bookcase on the 9 inch area (ie. cinder blocks supporting plywood shelves) as a temporary thing just to get me some space for all my junk. I still have about 12 of the Auralex wedgies left, and 5 or 6 of the diffusors (I bought a package deal at a store going out of business for $30) that I will be playing around with. I know I need to treat the door face for sure, but I'm not sure what else I'll do yet. The sound in the room right now is incredible. I haven't tried taking any mixes out of there yet to see how they translate, but I haven't ever been in an enclosed space that sounds as tight as this. I hope to find a way to actually measure the room to see if my ears are telling me the truth, but I haven't worked out how to accomplish that yet. Darryl.....

The problem with using Ethan's traps is that they are reflective in the high end which is what you DON"T want on your rear walls. I'd put your diffusors on your ceiling alternating with the auralex panels. I'd also stuff some of the auralex panels into some of the bookcase, and cover the door :):) cheers john