Looking for tips for garage studio

Hi. This is my first post here, but I've been reading a bunch of posts over the past week or two, and must say I really love this forum. I'm starting to design a studio in the garage of a place I bought recently, and will move into in a couple of weeks. I'm afraid I don't have the ceiling height yet (will measure and post as soon as I move in), but the floor measurements are as follows: L: 6,46 meters / 21,2 feet W: 4,78 meters / 15,7 feet The ceiling is probably a little bit higher than some garages, but not terribly high. Venturing a guess I'd say approximately 10 feet / 3 meters. But I can't say for sure until I measure it for myself. What I want to do is build a really solid, soundproof control room, and simply treat the rest of the space, but leave it a little raw. I am designing this primarily for recording my own music, and I do acoustic music with a lot of edge, so I don't need a lot of isolation for the live room, and I'd like to preserve as much of the room sound as I can without it compromising the recording quality. That being said I'll probably want to build a tiny vocal booth, should I need them. For the rest of my acoustic needs I'll improvise with treatment until I'm satisfied. I'll also construct some dividers to arrange around drum kits etc. when I need those. Anyway, this is all speculation, and I really don't have any experience with this, so I was wondering if any of you fine people had any tips for me on how to make the most of my little studio space, how to make my control room the best it can be and any other little advice you might be able to offer. I'm afraid my skills with Sketchup and all those drawing programs is very limited, so I can't post any pics. Sorry about that. Anyway, thank you so much. I look forward to visiting this forum a lot in the future.

After reading my post again I now realize how increadibly stupid it is, since nobody could really give me any advice based on the info I supplied. I'm going to try to work out some kind of idea of what I'm going for and post it as soon as I can. If not in Sketchup then some simpler form.

Ok, I've fiddled around with Sketchup a bit, and by cheating severely and borrowing other people's objects I've managed to put together a rough idea of what I'm going for. It's got a lot of mistakes, it's definately not accurate, but it's a rough estimate of my goal. If anybody has the time and can be bothered to look at this a bit, any pointers would be greatly appreciated. This is just a first draft. I'm afraid I can't get the Sketchup file to a file size any smaller than 600 kb, so I can't post that... You should get the general idea from the pic though. Thanks a bunch.

Aloha and welcome to the forum, The control room and basic layout looks good. BTW, I've resized your pic. How were you planning to treat the live room & voc booth? Aloha 8)

Thanks. Very glad to be here. The vocal booth I'll treat to death (I have to look into the proper materials (again, I'm new at this), but I want the vocal booth for completely dry recordings). I want to treat the live room as little as possible. Basically I'm thinking of treating one corner pretty heavily and improvising with the rest until I can get a raw, boxy sound, but without offending frequencies. Obviously that can't be done until I have it set up and can experiment with different instruments. It's gonna take time. I do raw, mostly acoustic music, and I find dirty basement sounding ambience absolutely vital to some of my stuff. I'm releasing an album within a couple of months that was recorded mostly in a completely untreated office space, and the rest was done in a completely stripped down basement storage room. So basically I want to have both options - clean and filthy sound (but a nice filthy). One note: Looking this over I feel that the control room might be a little bit too long for my purposes. I think I might make it a bit shorter (without making it into a cube), to enlarge the live room a little bit. Any thoughts on that? Of course I can't plan this out exactly until I get a chance to measure every last inch of the place and get a feel for what will work. I move into the house in a couple of weeks, so right now I only have my memory and the floor plans to go on, and they don't show things like the radiators, the garage door opener, the sink etc. So I'll definately update this once I have every single detail mapped out (and hopefully a little bit more skill with Sketchup). I'm just trying to get a feel for the dos and don'ts before I really start to plan it inch by inch.

Aloha, Here's to looking forward to you moving in and more accurate measurements :wink: Aloha 8)