Small Basement Studio

[Gammon2018]

Hi all! So, I'm finally getting to build a studio from scratch. I built a studio in an existing basement about 15 years ago, and this site was very helpful. Now I'm in the process of finalizing plans with the builder for a new house. There are a number of constraints on the house (it's pretty small) but I'm hoping I can get a nice useable space. First, some things about my work:

1. I work almost exclusively with a cappella singing groups, usually from universities around the US
2. I spend about 2/3 of my time mixing and the other 1/3 tracking
3. I'll be recording almost only vocals, and I usually record two singers at a time. However, there are often as many as 10 people there at one time

So, I've designed myself a basement studio and I'd like to get some feedback on it. First, apologies for it being on paper, I figure once I know what idea I want to go with I'll make the official drawing in SketchUp. Some things about the space I've got to work with:

('office' = control room, 'living room' = lounge, 'closets' = vocal booths)

1. The Support Columns (4, pictured in Red) cannot be moved more than a few inches left or right, and cannot be moved up/down.
2. The bottom right section has stairs and those cannot be moved
3. the ceiling should be just about 9' from floor to joists, so I'm assuming 8'10'' after the RC and double drywall that I'll hang from the joists
4. The foundation is Superior Wall, and the pre-attached metal joists have concrete behind the metal facing. So my plan is to attach resilient channel directly to those prefab joists, and then two 5/8'' layers of drywall with green glue onto the channel
5. Interior Walls are [2 x 5/8'' drywall with green glue - 3.5'' stud wall - air gap - 3.5'' stud wall - 2 x 5/8'' drywall with green glue]
6. The weird squares between the control room and the two vocal booths walls are mufflers that I'm planning to build 8' vertical for air intake/outtake for each booth. The door to both booths will be on the right of them in that hallway.

One really nice thing about this that even though the control room is not that big, I was able to get it almost exactly to a 1 : 1.28 : 1.54 ratio.
So, my questions:
1. It would be more practical to have a smaller control room and a bigger lounge area, but obviously moving that wall over to make the control room less wide is going to make the room sound worse. But...how much worse? Is my room so small that having a good ratio won't make it 'great' anyway, so I might as well just go with the most practical option?
2. Can I get away with one wall between the two vocal booths? Space is at a premium there, so if I can do one wall with RC and then some type of good isolating (but not super expensive) door, that would be great.
3. Any other glaring flaws you see, or completely different layout ideas you think would work that still work around those 4 support columns?

Thanks so much!

James

[Gregwor]

Welcome!

Since my thoughts are all over the place, I'm not going to quote your questions or statements here.

- I understand that you have up to 10 people at your place waiting their turn to sing. Having a lounge may be beneficial for people wanting get away from the music and chat, but personally, I think musicians typically like to be in the middle of the action - be in the control room. This would lend to the idea of having a bigger control room and a smaller lounge. Bigger control room = better sound.
- You only have 9 foot ceilings. I know it will cost $5000+ more but you really should try to get at least a 10 foot basement ceiling. I personally begged to get 11 for mine but due to the sewer invert and arch requirements, I could only get a 10 Taller ceilings will make your life better in every aspect. Do it.
- Small vocal booths are small rooms. Small rooms sound like crap. They're boomy and chesty sounding. Everything you DON'T want in a vocal recording.
- What I'm saying is that your design seems to prioritize your lounge while putting your actually recording spaces on the back burner. It should be the other way around.
- You're talking about RC mounting drywall for your main rooms while having a true MSM wall between your control room and lounge. This too all seems backwards to me.
- For vocal recordings, isolated rooms are critical. I really don't think you'll achieve the level of transmission loss you're going to need by using your proposed construction techniques. Especially between your too tiny ugly sounding booths. The door will be completely reliant upon mass law and hoping your seals are out of this world good.
- You have taken ventilation into consideration, but missed some critical points. You do have the required 4 silencers for you control room but you're missing 8 others required for your vocal booths.
- You haven't indicated what you plan to do for HVAC. Will it be tied into your home system? If so, how do you plan to regulate the rooms in relation to the rest of the home? Basements (and studio rooms) are completely different temperatures compared to main and upper floors of homes. What happens when your singer is sweating their ass off and your spouse is upstairs freezing to death?
- If you put in your own air handler unit or whatever, have you planned out where you will run YOUR duct work? Where will you penetrate your exterior walls for your supply and return air?
- How are you going to maintain your isolation with your windows?
- Have you talked to your builder about duct work being dropped? Most basement have duct work and plumbing dropped below joists and they don't care where. They do the job as easy as they can so they get paid and move on to the next house. Framers then come in and build bulk heads around them when they finish out the basement. What's your precious ratio going to be like when you lose 1 1/2 feet at random spots in your room?
- Are you planning to sell this house eventually? Is that why you ate up precious studio space for a shower? If you plan to live there for a very long time and aren't concerned about resale value of having a basement shower for the accompanying basement bedroom (I assume your control room space), then utilize your space better.
- Have you talked to your builder about having your studio power on it's own sub panel? This ties in with HVAC -- if you need your own air handling unit or mini split/HRV/ERV unit's all add up to a lot of extra current draw.
- What are you doing for flooring? Have you considered paying the extra few thousand dollars and get in floor heating so that you can just epoxy your basement floor and maintain comfort, the best acoustic flooring there is, height, and save money/hassle installing some sort of flooring?
- Have you considered making your studio accessible (for wheelchairs)?
- Have you contacted your city hall to ask them if there was anything you should address in your build to ensure you will obtain building permits and you business license? (Reaching out pre-build and building a relationship with them now will make it easier down the road)
- You REALLY should build all of your studio rooms (control room and booths) as rooms in rooms with inside out ceilings. This will require you to use engineered LVL stud. Make sure you are able to get your lengths of it into your basement (either through windows or down stairs). If you can't after your home possession, you will have to get them down there during the build period. The same can be said about any other longer building supplies. Your stairs look short in your diagram which leads me to believe they are silly turning stairs which make carrying anything with length down them a nightmare. That leads me to another point - how wide are the doors from your entrance, down your stairs and into your rooms? Can you be sure you'll be able to get music gear or furniture through your plan? Maybe you need 3 foot wide doors throughout?
- Regarding upstairs, have you considered where your clientele will enter your house and their route to get to the basement? Will they have to walk through any of your actual home? What happens when someone needs to heat something up in a microwave or get some water? I suppose this is what your lounge is for, so in your lounge, make sure you get the proper plumbing ground work in place for drainage.
- AND, as someone who is in the middle of doing damned near exactly what you're doing, I will tell you this. This will save you a TON of headache so please, for your sanity, do this:
1. Ask them to use the thickest rim board they can around the entire perimeter of your home. Explain to them exactly what you're doing and that they can't compromise the integrity of that rim board. If they do, insist that you are informed and you will go and repair it yourself. They will cut holes through your rim board (to pour your basement slab for example). You have to go and replace the rim board with equal stuff and seal the hell out of it with Green Glue Sealant and some other heavy wood to cover the gaps.
2. Get them to use TWO layers for 3/4" OSB with Green Glue Compound between them and Sealant at all gaps for your subfloor of your main floor. This will prevent you from having to beef up your basement ceiling. Trust me. Worth it.
3. Get them to use wood to frame out your frost wall. It will allow you to easily cut and manipulate it when running your own HVAC and/or other build out stuff.
4. Touch base with every contractor working on your house and go over your plans and make sure they 100% understand what you're doing and how critical things like surface density is. I can't tell you how many times I've found holes cut through things and when I point them out they say "Oh, we'll just fill the hole with some spray foam" and I then have to explain surface density to them. Studio building is pretty much nothing like normal house construction.
5. You really should get your builder to hold off on starting your house until you have even kind of solidified your plans. If they've given you your basement dimensions and jack post placements, tell them you need at least 2 or 4 months to design your studio. This will allow you to move your posts a few inches here or there, or ask them to avoid certain things or add certain things (like moving some sistered LVL stud over a few feet so that you can fit in some of your HVAC duct work or some conduit. This also would give you time to figure out where you can place conduit in the ground. Ask the builder if you can go and dig in conduit in your basement before they pour the slab. This will allow you to have a nice clean floor with no power or low voltage lines run astray. You really are silly to not run conduit through your slab if you're building from scratch like me.
6. Make sure you have a place outside your home for an outdoor mini-split unit. Hopefully you can place your electrical panel somewhere that will make building your spaces cheaper when running isolated ground outlets.
7. Even though your studio isn't going to include your garage, do yourself a favour and make sure your garage is actually large enough to park a full length full sized truck and have some room for things like an air compressor and tool box plus some storage. This will come in handy several times in your life, but one of them being for storage of studio gear, build out supplies, a place for tools while building your studio, and of course a place to build things for your studio.
8. Wherever you figure out you will have an indoor mini split head, make sure you have plumbing ground work in place for it to drain. The same goes for your air handling unit.
9. If most of your studio is North (according to your drawing) of your main support beam, ask your builder to run duct work and plumbing South of it so that you don't have as much crap to box in as your outer leaf. Obviously it will make your MSM gap distance smaller and will make the dreaded 3 leaf system. It's unavoidable in situations like this, but the less of it that exists, the better.

Maybe that's it for now. I probably forgot some things. But like me, you're spending a fortune on your house, make sure it will work for YOU.

Here's my build/design if you want to check it out.

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =1&t=21436

You can see in one post where I was beefing up the rim board. It was a nightmare. So if you can avoid it by having them use super thick rim board to begin with like I said, do it. The same goes for the double layer 3/4" sub flooring (which I also wish I had them do!)

Greg

[Soundman2020]

Hi James, and Welcome to the forum!

OK, lot's of stuff to comment on, and Greg already did that, so I''m just adding additional stuff.

1. It would be more practical to have a smaller control room and a bigger lounge area, but obviously moving that wall over to make the control room less wide is going to make the room sound worse.

This is a STUDIO. The priority is on RECORDING. That implies that you want to get pristine quality recordings of your singers. That will not happen in a small room. The size of the lounge will not contribute to that in any manner at all. Thus, your number one priority would be to make the control room as large as it possibly can be, and the lounge as small as it possibly can be.

even though the control room is not that big, I was able to get it almost exactly to a 1 : 1.28 : 1.54 ratio.

You have the priorities backwards here as well. From the purely acoustical side, it is much more important to maximize room volume, as compared to getting a great room ratio. Whenever I have to choose between those two when designing a room, I will practically always go with the option that gives me the highest total volume of the room. Ratios are less important.

There seems to be this concept among first-time studio designers that it is a life-and-death matter to get the best possible ratio for the room, regardless of anything else, and that simply isn't true. Yes, modal response is important for control rooms, but the overall sound of the room is MORE important. As long as your ratio does not have direct relationship between the dimensions (such as 16 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high), the you are probably OK. If possible, keep a margin of more than 5% difference between those, and you are even more OK. There's no need to chase the Holy Grail of a "perfect room ratio", because there is no such thing! Merely good ones and not-so-good ones.

Is my room so small that having a good ratio won't make it 'great' anyway,

Any time you have to shrink a room substantially to get a better ratio, means that you are making it less 'great' anyway... With few exceptions.

So go for the largest control room you can fit in that space, for both practical AND acoustic reasons. The MINIMUM reomended size for a control room, is 210 square feet floor area. It is possible to do a room in less space, yes, bu the smaller it ism the worse it will sound, and the harder it will be to treat.

2. Can I get away with one wall between the two vocal booths?

To be honest, on your sketch I don't see ANY vocal booths! Nor "control room" nor "live room" nor "lounge". I see an office, a ling room, a bathroom, a storage room, and a couple of closets. Did you post the wrong image, maybe?

In any case, trying to have a single-leaf wall between studio rooms is not going to get you much isolation. Single-leaf walls are governed by a concept in physics called "Mass Law". Take a look at that, plug in some numbers to that equation, and be prepared to be disappointed with the results. The laws that govern the universe prevent you from getting food isolation with a single-leaf wall.

Space is at a premium there,

Do you need TWO vocal booths? If you only have one, then you0d have a lot more space. Small rooms sound terrible in any case ("boxy" is the common term you hear used to describe them), and there is NOTHING you can do to fix that with treatment in the booth. Once again, "laws of the universe" and etc. You can't get around them.

Does the bathroom need to be that big? Maybe a small "half-bathroom" would be enough? Do you need that large "storage" area? Why does the storage area have a sink in it? Is that necessary?

I would suggest that you start with a clean slate: Just draw in the things that cannot be moved, leave the rest open. Write sown a list of your goals, prioritized, and think it through carefully to make sure you have them in the correct order. If you end up with "space for 10 people to shoot the breeze" at the top of your list, and "top quality acoustics" at the bottom, then clearly you have made a big mistake! If that's what you get, then you should forget the idea of building a studio, and rather design a bar or social club!

You already posted part of that list, stating that 2/3 of your time is spent mixing: therefore "good space for mixing accurately" should be at the top of your list. You spend 1/3 of your time tracking, so "good tracking room(s)" should be high on your list. You record acappella vocals, which can be quiet or loud, so therefore "good isolation" should be high on your list too. So should "good acoustic response for vocals". You record live artists, therefore "good sight lines" should be in your list: recording sessions go a lot better if the engineer and artists can all see each other clearly". "Good access paths between rooms". should also be on there.

6. The weird squares between the control room and the two vocal booths walls are mufflers that I'm planning to build 8' vertical for air intake/outtake for each booth.

That wastes a lot of floor space, and you are not leaving enough for that anyway: you would need much more. Silencer boxes for studios are BIG. Don't waste floor space on them: put them above the rooms, in the ceiling space. If possible design them to fit in between the joists above you.

Also, you only mention silencer for the HVAC to the vocal booths: what about for the control room? And the lounge? With eleven people in there, that's a LOT of oxygen being used up, and a LOT of Co2 being generated! Not to mention heat and humidity.... How do you plan to deal with that? HVAC is a huge part of studio design. Major. Most people don't realize how big it is...

The door to both booths will be on the right of them in that hallway.

Hallways take up space. Minimize. Design the studio so that there is minimal hall area. Generally, a good plan is to have the main entry to the studio leading into a single small "lobby" area, with doors leading off that into the individual rooms. In your case, the "lobby" could double as the "lounge".

One final thought (Greg also touched on this): Since it seems that this will be a commercial facility, run as a business, where you have paying customers and/or you pay performers, you will probably be subject to the ADA requirements, and will therefor have minimum door widths, corridor widths, turning paths, and suchlike imposed on you, for people with disabilities. So check the ADA regulations, and take those into account when you design. If this is in a basement, you might even fined that you need to install an elevator for wheelchair access. That's expensive!

Your space has potential, and probably could be used to do what you want to do, but I reckon there's a better way of laying it out, to be more effective and more efficient for the purpose.


- Stuart -

[Gammon2018]

Stuart/Greg - first, thanks so much for taking the time to write these highly detailed replies. I'm generally aware of the options for flooring, electrical, etc., having already built a space 15 years ago, but I'm not quite at that stage in the design process yet. Right now I'm just trying to get the best conceptual design for the space. First, a few things about my space:

1. The door at the top is the actual entrance to the studio, and will be easily accessible.
2. I'm planning to use Ductless mini-splits for everything. I'm still researching these as well as preparing to talk with the A/C contractor working on the house construction to find out what my options are, but I plan to make sure that they're accounted for in the foundation walls.
3. This is part of a duplex, so I cannot change the height of the ceiling.
4. I'm aware that ratios aren't exclusively important in room design, but when I put the wall between the control room and lounge in place where it needed to be because of support column #3, the room width just happened to be the ceiling height *1.28, and it was fairly easy to make the length 1.59, so I went with it. I'm open to changing those dimensions (subject to my priorities, as listed below).
5. The 4 support columns cannot be moved (as stated before), and the stairs cannot be moved, but everything else is fair game.

Now, a list of my priorities/thought process, so you can better understand what I'm trying to achieve.

1. After looking back at billed hours, it seems like I'm actually closer to 50/50 between tracking and mixing. So 'good sounding room for mixing' is not the far-and-away number one priority. I've been mixing in very small rooms for about 8 years now, and using a Sub-Pac and headphones to check, I've had good success. So anything that sounds better than what I'm used to will be a bonus.
2. My method of tracking involves having two singers (for example, both Tenor 1s) sing to a backing midi track. Repeat that process for all parts. Also, these are all college kids. I've tried many different methods over the past 15 years but I can tell you from experience that I want as few other musicians in the control room as possible. If there are 1 or 2, it works, but if there are more than that, they just start talking or laughing at things on their phones and nothing gets done. So it's an absolute requirement for my workflow that I have a lounge area that I can fit up to 10 people into since college groups usually have around 15 members. If anything, I'm afraid that my control room is currently too big relative to the green room, but where it is right now seems like an acceptable compromise between a workable mixing room size and an absolute need for a space to put 10 college kids where I don't have to worry about any noise they might make.
3. It's very important that one part doesn't bleed onto the other part's microphone, because I run everything through melodyne, so I've added double walls with double doors between the tracking rooms. I've also made them deeper, and actually I measured a small bathroom today and I think I could take away another foot or so from the bathroom and make the tracking rooms a bit bigger. I've done quite a lot of vocal recording in very tiny vocal booths of this size, and I've been able to make it work quite well, so I'm not sure why I couldn't treat something the size of these rooms and make them sound fine as well.
4. The bathroom does need a shower, though, since we only have one other shower in the house and we want to be able to use this as a second one when necessary.
5. I don't know if we're going to re-sell this house or not. I suppose my hope is that we live here for the rest of our lives. I admit this first design was made with a bit of a thought towards how easy it would be to make it back into a 'normal' basement should we move out, or should I retire from this line of work. But after consideration I'm more open to a design idea that just functions as a good studio.

So I'm attaching my most recent idea (other than wanting to make the bathroom even smaller), now done on computer. If either of you have an idea for a completely different layout, I'm absolutely open to them. We can move the windows anywhere on the outside anywhere except the front half of the left wall, because that is underground. The door can go anywhere on the top wall. The support posts need to generally stay where they are but I'm told they can be moved a few inches (which is the current plan for post #2, which needs to be moved out of that window). The stairs cannot be moved or changed. I'd say my 'requirements' are simply:

1. outside entrance door does not go into control room or tracking rooms
2 Green Room is roughly 100 sq ft. minimum
2. two vocal booths with good isolation from other rooms
3. Full bathroom, even if it's cramped

If you have layout ideas that would work better, I'd very much be interested in them. Thanks!

James

[Gregwor]

I can't think of any new layout that meets your requirements off the top of my head, but I will say this:
- Your room in a room design still isn't correct. You don't have complete or completely independent inner leafs for ANY of your three studio rooms!
- Your small vocal booths will sound horrible
- Your vocal booths are too small to adequately situate computer screens (so they are able to tell where they are punching in or anything) and microphone stands while standing in there AND closing/opening doors.
- Your vocal booths are too small to have the doors not be right in the corners where you rooms will desperately need as much bass trapping as possible
- Your vocal booths are so small, you will have to hope and pray you can fit large HVAC silencer boxes in the ceiling joists above them because there will be no room for them inside the rooms
- I'm not sure where you are going to fit/have ductless mini split heads in your booths. But you can't just dump stale air from your control room into the booths. That's illegal. Each room needs it's own source of fresh air which means each room needs a supply AND return duct AND mini split head. That's a lot of stuff to fit into those tiny rooms.
- Your booth windows appear to be touching in your diagram
- Legally, hallways need to be a certain width (I'm not sure if it changes country to country), but that little zig zag part of your hallway, if walked through at 45 degrees, is much more narrow than the rest of the hallway's width. I don't like that.
- Your control room's inner leaf seems to be touching the jack post.
- Having those 2 windows at the front of your room not be symmetrical might make your room look weird.
- Depending on the type of control room you build, that window furthest left on your diagram will potentially screw up your ability to build a proper soffit wall.

I don't have a solution for you right now as I'm super tired and just can't spend the time brainstorming a different layout, but as of right now, I don't think this layout works. Hopefully someone else can make some suggestions! Great work on drawing up your space on a computer (even though it's not our preferred SketchUp program) and great work trying to modify it. It just needs some more work. You'll get there

Greg

[Soundman2020]

I agree with Greg.

Another issue with your dual vocal booths is that you have to go through one to get to the other: not practical. If the person on the far booth needs to go to the toilet, or answer their phone, or fetch something form the car, or take a break, but the person in the near booth is still singing, then you have to interrupt the session, break the "vibe" and concentration and "flow", just to let the person out. Then again to let them back in again. Try to avoid any design that requires people to go through one studio room to get to another.

I would suggest joining your two booths together into one single larger booth, and record the second vocal in the control room.

As Greg said, you need to fix all of your MSM isolation walls: they all have problems, where the inner-leaf is directly connected to the outer leaf. That can never happen.

HVAC: Your plan with using ductless mini-splits is going to be rather expensive! You'd need FOUR individual units, to cover the four rooms. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just get one single ducted mini-split AHU, and use that to handle all the rooms at once.

1. After looking back at billed hours, it seems like I'm actually closer to 50/50 between tracking and mixing. So 'good sounding room for mixing' is not the far-and-away number one priority. I've been mixing in very small rooms for about 8 years now, and using a Sub-Pac and headphones to check, I've had good success. So anything that sounds better than what I'm used to will be a bonus.

This night seem blunt, and harsh, and aggressive, but the purpose is to help, not harm: Why the hell would you do that? You are planning to spend tens of thousands of dollars on this place, you've been suffering with sub-par lousy acoustics for years, learned to work around it, battle it, live with the down side, etc. And now you have the opportunity to build a place that has spectacular acoustics, but instead you decide that you'll just go for less-than-mediocre, all over again? And carry on suffering, with sub-par acoustics? To me, that makes no sense at all. If that's the case, then why bother at all? If your goal is not to have the best studio you possibly can, then why even bother building it at all? Trak in the garage, mix in the bathroom, and be done with it!

OK, yeah, that WAS harsh, but hopefully it got your attention! That's sort of what we do around here: no punches pulled, no holds barred, just the bare, ugly facts, right in your face. I guess that's why you came here, too.

So there it is: I'd REALLY suggest that you think this through again, and decide to make the place as good as your budget will possibly allow, without compromising just because you work in a lousy room right now and think that another lousy room would be OK. It won't.

2. My method of tracking involves having two singers (for example, both Tenor 1s) sing to a backing midi track.

So track one in a the booth, and one in the control room!

Once again, some harsh "in-your-face" facts: Small booths suck. The smaller they are, the worse they suck. Small booths have a dull, ugly "boxy" sound to them and there is NOTHING that you can do about that. No amount of treatment will make a small booth sound like a large room. It's impossible, because the laws of physics prevent it. It cannot be done. The largest dimension of the booth sets the overall acoustic "signature" of the booth, and this is all related to wavelengths. One the dimensions get so small that the wavelength of the lowest frequencies you need to record no longer fit in the room, then you are screwed, and there's NOTHING you can do to fix that. If you build two small booths, you will have two ugly, boxy "chambers" that sound terrible when you track, and you'll once again have to jump through hoops with EQ and FX and dynamics and pixie dust magic to try to disguise the ugly... but you won't succeed. On the other hand, if you combine your two tiny booths into one larger one, you stand a chance of having at least acceptable acoustics in there (not good, but acceptable). And the control room is plenty large enough to track vocals nicely.

If that were my studio, that's what I would do.

3. It's very important that one part doesn't bleed onto the other part's microphone, because I run everything through melodyne, so I've added double walls with double doors between the tracking rooms.

No you haven't! You might THINK you have, but you have only done it partially. Adding double walls between two rooms will NOT isolate them from each other. Rather, you have to add double walls ALL AROUND THE ROOM, COMPLETELY, on all sides. Not just the one you think you need to isolate. The booths and the control need to EACH be built as a single-leaf self-supporting, independent structure that does NOT touch any other structure, and all three of them together are contained within an outer-leaf "shell" that surrounds them, and is also a single leaf.

I've done quite a lot of vocal recording in very tiny vocal booths of this size, and I've been able to make it work quite well,

And there's your problem! You have "been able to make it work quite well": But that's all. There's a huge difference between tracking vocals in a small booth, and tracking them in a decent sized room. Tracking in a small space implies "fixing" the tracks later, with digital magic, or disguising the ugliness by covering it up with music and effects. Tracking in a large space implies pure, clean, warm, crisp vocal tracks that don't need any fixing at all.

so I'm not sure why I couldn't treat something the size of these rooms and make them sound fine as well.

Because it is impossible! The booth itself CANNOT be made to sound like a naturally good vocal recording space. Your ONLY option is to kill the acoustics entirely, with massively thick absorption all around, so it is totally dead, then try to add some life back in with reverb, EQ, and dynamics in the mix. That is "faking it", not "recording it". If you don't mind fake-sounding vocals that just don't sit well in the mix all by themselves, then a totally dead room is possible, but it's also lousy for the artist: a dead room stifles the creativity and degrades the performance. A natural sounding room enhances the skill and the performance.

There's a reason people pay big money to record in large pro studios... it just sounds so much better, naturally, and requires MUCH less effort in the mix to get it all to "stick" together.

Highlighting some of Greg's points again with my "second opinion":

- Your small vocal booths will sound horrible

Right!

- Your vocal booths are too small to adequately situate computer screens (so they are able to tell where they are punching in or anything) and microphone stands while standing in there AND closing/opening doors.

Right!

you can't just dump stale air from your control room into the booths.

Right!

but as of right now, I don't think this layout works.

Right!

I would strongly suggest trying again, with a clean slate: Try putting the bathroom in a different place, for example. Re-think the overall layout, try different options. As the saying goes: there's more than one way of skinning a cat! (Weird, but whatever!)


- Stuart -

[Gammon2018]

Ok, I'm willing to re-think this somewhat. One thing that's confusing me, though - I seem to see plenty of Studios (including several designs by John Sayers) that have iso-booths with sizes of around 350 cubic feet. And I can definitely get my two booths to that size without changing the plan too much. If rooms of that size sound so bad, why do professional designers use them at all?

[Gregwor]

I seem to see plenty of Studios (including several designs by John Sayers) that have iso-booths with sizes of around 350 cubic feet. And I can definitely get my two booths to that size without changing the plan too much. If rooms of that size sound so bad, why do professional designers use them at all?

Can you provide some examples for us to check out? Personally, I'm dealing with a booth right now around that size (as my temporary location is my in laws basement!) and it certainly is challenging in every aspect. Granted, I built the booth very cheaply and it took me about 2 hours start to finish. It's very lifeless as I have every part of it other than the door covered in insulation. Basically, it sucks. Don't build one that small. It might work good enough in a pinch for an amp room where the microphone is very close to the speaker, but if I had the choice, I'd never build a room that small.

Greg

[Gammon2018]

Sure - as a first example, the studio plan in the 'putting it all together' section of Rod's Home Recording Studio book has a booth about that size. Then checking on, John's site, the first one that comes up in the list is 112F studio (http://www.johnlsayers.com/Pages/112F.htm) also has a booth around that size.

[Gregwor]

as a first example, the studio plan in the 'putting it all together' section of Rod's Home Recording Studio book has a booth about that size.

I do not own Rod's book, so I can't reference it. Maybe he will read this thread and answer....?

Then checking on, John's site, the first one that comes up in the list is 112F studio (http://www.johnlsayers.com/Pages/112F.htm) also has a booth around that size.

I cannot answer for John regarding that studio's design, but I can see there is one other thing that kind of breaks the rules in that design as well. Having the wrap around style control room glass with desk mounted speakers is pretty much a no no from what I've learned. The SBIR issues the glass and desk create would be horrific. Again, maybe John will read this thread and answer....?

Greg