Garage studio questions

sourrox · Post by **sourrox** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 6:20 pm

What an amazing site! I am so glad I stumbled upon this site before I started building. I would have done it so wrong. I have a couple basic ?'s before I start posting my design plans and things. Here's what I'm starting with:
19x15x8 attached garage on concrete slab. I'm not sure of thickness, how do I tell and does it even matter?) I only need a control room and one vocal/gtr ISO booth. no drums will be recorded here. The main function of the studio will be a mix room with the ISO for guitar overdubs and vocals. Mostly heavy rock music. My first concern is soundproofing. one wall is only 12' from neighbers house and one side shares a wall with my house. I like to work late hours so I need to keep it as quiet as possible. I will be doing the room in a room thing but my main question is this, do I NEED to float the floor? cost and ceiling height are factors that make me not want to float the floor. would it be good enough If I only floated the ISO booth where the loud guitars are? I mix pretty loud sometimes but can my nearfield monitors really warrant floating the whole room? any thoughts would be great! lmk if there is any info that I omitted that would factor in to the decision. I will post plans and probably many more ?'s soon as I need to start construction within a month. thanks for reading this.
DD Ehrlich

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 12:07 am

Greetings and welcome!

I don't think you'd need to float the control room floor of this space. If you build a room-within-a-room you should have plenty of isolation from the rest of your house, and since your house doesn't have a structural connection to your neighbor, you don't have to worry about decoupling from their house...

I would float the iso booth floor tho. It's not going to be very big, and it'll give you the added isolation just in case you need to crank up a marshall stack at 3:00am to get the sound you need.

But yeah- building rooms-within-rooms and paying close attention to the door seals should give you plenty of isolation from your own house.

Good luck!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

sourrox · Post by **sourrox** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 4:53 pm

Thanks for the reply, and just what I wanted to hear as well! below is my design plan. anything jump out as being wrong? remember this is to be primarily a mix room. I look forward to hearing ideas that will improve my design. thanks again, DD

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 12:55 am

That design will work, but I'd think you'd have better results with a room that is longer than it is wide. The more space behind your listening position, the easier it'll be to control early reflections coming at the back of your head.

If you could somehow twist the whole design clockwise, it might serve you much better. I presume you've had a look at some of John's basic layouts... although you won't be needing a tracking room, they'll give you some ideas for control room shapes that you may not have thought of.

But yeah. With the shape of the overall space, I'd think having the control room taking up the lion's share of the right side, leaving the storage area basically where it is (that seems to be your primary entrance) and putting the iso booth on the top-left of the plan as you look at it, you'll have a better basic shape to your control room. And the better the shape is, the easier it'll be to treat the inside.

BTW your building inspector will be a lot happier with you if you put in a second exit out of here. Add a double-door system thru the outside wall somewhere behind the listening position.

Having a happy inspector is always a good thing.

Kase
www.minemusic.net

sourrox · Post by **sourrox** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 9:27 pm

Thats a good idea to rotate it and make the control room longer. I'll work on it. I kinda wanted the iso where it is though because that corner is the furthest from my house and the neighbors. If I build the iso booth right, it shouldn't be an issue though. check my revised plan below. I totaly isolated the iso booth on all sides. would that better? and I removed the inner wall from the storage room because it seems I still have the room in a room without it, right? thats about 15' of wall that will save some bucks if its not nessesary. that also takes away 2 doors which aren't cheap either. Is this a bad idea?

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Tue Apr 27, 2004 12:19 am

I'm at work at the moment, so I don't have time to really get into detail or to label any of the rooms here. The control room is easy to spot, the iso booth is in the bottom right, and everything else is storage. I figured the machines could go in the top portion of the storage area (beyond the dotted line shown) and wouldn't need to be physically separated from the storage area... If you're skinny you could squeeze between the walls and get the machines into the top-left corner there, but you only have 1'6 clearance there at the thinnest point so I don't know if that'd happen...

But this is what I was thinking about. The control room and iso booth walls would be John's inside-out construction, so you'd have space for your room treatment in the stud cavities.

I don't know if this will work out for you totally or not- I made a couple of assumptions here. One of which was that it didn't matter too much where all your storage was. When you showed that last 4' of garage space along the front, I rolled it in with the rest of the storage instead of separating it off. Without that wall taking up space you have more room, and having a 4' wide hallway as storage won't do you much good if the one thing you need is at the far end...

So if this doesn't work out, you could shrink the control room down some. This general shape would work out well for you, I'd think.

Kase
www.minemusic.net

sourrox · Post by **sourrox** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 4:30 am

Kase, thanks for the input! I want to keep the garage storage separate from studio. I need to build that wall anyway due to the garage door and I need it for lawnmower, bikes etc... it would be accessed by opening the main garage door. I like your layout though. would something like this work? thanks, DD

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 5:01 am

That'd work ok. If you rotate the whole control-room 10 degress clockwise, maybe more or less depending on exactly what angles you're using in the walls there, you could get the bottom-right corner of the control room to tuck right into the corner of the existing garage. That'd fill up some of the un-useable space on the top-right, putting it down into the storage area where you could get some use out of it.

Try to fill up as many of the un-useable nooks and crannies as you can.

But overall, that layout would serve you nicely.

Good luck!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

dobro · Post by **dobro** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 11:47 am

Hi Kase

In one post in this thread you said: "I presume you've had a look at some of John's basic layouts..."{

In my case, no, I haven't. I clicked around, but all I came up with was the link to the SAE site (which is great). Where are the basic layouts you're referring to?

AndrewMc · Post by **AndrewMc** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 12:39 pm

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html

dobro · Post by **dobro** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:57 am

Like your avatar, sir!

So - it *is* the SAE site. Okeydoke. Thanks.