Built a basement studio, need serious help/low budget help

[anotherloss4words]

the plan below is of a basement studio that i recently built i have been a musician for about 10 years now and have serious about recording for about 3 years, i finally saved up the cash to put up a studio i have been collecting equiptment forever and now i am ready to take it to the next level, the spave i am working in is a 3'x3'x7' vocal booth, a 7'x7'x7' control room, and a 13'x14'x7 live room, i know its not the best place due to the low ceilings and lack of floating floor but i need help making it work. the outside walls are poured concrete and are about 8" thick, i also made some homemade absorbers out of a foam i found to be just a dense and stylish as the auralex, they are flat foam 14"x 14" and are about 1" thick. i made a band of these around the room about 3 feet from the floor in a diamond shaped pattern. the interior walls that create the vocal booth and control room are 2x4's, r 14 insulation and gypsum board, the walls that are exposed to the live room also have sheets of studio foam that was pulled from an old studio, the panels were in horrible shape so i stuffed them in the walls and ceilings, the ceilings in the live room was open rafters so i used gypsum board directly over with little or no insulation in most of the area, i did a textured finish with the spackle on the ceiling hoping to help acoustically somehow, the ceilings in the control room and vocal booth have been insulated well with r 13 and i istalled rescessed lighting on a dimmer, in the vocal booth i also applied a layer of auralex pyramid foam on the ceiling and the walls are treated with a textured paint , in the control room there is a sopphet that runs the length of the back wall, it comes down from the celing 14" and juts out about 12" the doors are regular luan doors that have studio foam on both sided of each door, the room is in no way soundproof as my budget was pretty strict but the control room is quiet enough that when the drummer is punding on the drums i can hear the monitors over him, the front window and vocal booth window are both doubled 3/8th lexan with a 1/2" air gap between, my purpose of this thread is to learn more about acoustics and how i can tune my control room for listening to mixes, making my vocal booth have the correct natural reflections, and most importantly making my live space work, please help i am open to any suggestion

[knightfly]

Another, sorry for the delay; this isn't my area of responsibility, but Barefoot's been pretty busy trying to get his new company off the ground so I try to check when I can -

I've got to get to work soon, but I'll try to get to you tomorrow afternoon after I wake up (12-hour graveyard shifts)

There are a few things you can do, but I'll need to know more first... Steve

[knightfly]

OK, some ideas;

First, your CR will need some help NOT to sound "colored" by its cubic properties - the alcove in front of the vox booth is its only saving grace, but still needs more absorption. Right now, there is no way you're getting a balanced sound field in that room; if you draw an imaginary line down the center of your head and equidistant between the two speakers, you should see the same elements on EITHER side of that line - if there's a wall on one side, there should be one at the same distance on the other; check the purple line on my markup of your space.

Second, if possible the computer should be UNDER the desk - whatever "white noise" it puts out will be muffled more, so you hear it less.

Third, you will need more absorption in both rooms; small rooms have more modal problems because the smaller dimensions place the modes at higher frequencies and spaced further apart in frequency, so they're more noticeable than in larger rooms.

I've included a couple of charts of axial modes for both a 7x7x7 room, and one with 7x9x11 dimensions for comparison; note that the cube has several sets of modes that are at the same frequencies - this reinforces the "coloration" at those frequencies, which must then be absorbed as much as possible. The odd-sized room spreads these modes out more uniformly, so less coloration of the sound. There is a lot more to it than this, but this is the general idea.

In the CR, the alcove next to the vox booth can be made more "invisible" acoustically by adding more absorption - check the markup for yellow stuff. Same with the wall/soffit behind the mix position.

In the live room, I replaced the curtain with more thick absorbent, you can use either rockwool, mineral wool, or rigid fiberglass in 3 or 4 inch thickness for that. As long as you don't use a solid back, this could be a free-standing "screen", with a frame and "outriggers" to support it - that alcove can be a good bass trap with that much depth, if you use heavy absorption where shown.

You only have one vertical corner in the live room that can use a corner trap, where I've shown it - with your low ceilings, there's not much chance to do wall/ceiling corners the same way. You also need absorption as thick as possible on the walls NEAR the corners, for more bass trapping.

I'm out of time for now, but this should help with some ideas of what's needed... Steve

[anotherloss4words]

thanks for the helpful information, i was reading in the other forums about corner traps and i will begin making some as soon as the holidays pass, i am a little rushed for time now but i will read over the whole thread as soon as i can and post a better reply
thank you for the help