Home Studio Design - Weird Room

[vangelis]

Hello,
my name is Vangelis and I am from Athens, Greeece. I have studies in music technology and I want to create a little home studio. I am living in my basement office that has been separated by two MDF walls. The room in the middle of the walls is where I want to put my home studio. I want to use it to write music and then mix it and master it. I want also to record vocals because I am a singer. The problem is that I know a lot of stuf about sound but I am not an acoustics engineer and i have a weird room. I would appriciate any help in designing. I work also as an electrician and I am capable of making walls and building stuff and I have many tools. The problem is that I am on a low budget (lets say 300-500 euros) now and I want to write music for a theatre play and make my mixes to sound good. I want to make my home studio a long time now but I dont know what is the best solution and also because of the crisis there are not a lot of money to do it. But I want to try to make it. For a long time I was thinking to buld a wall and a ceiling and sound proof the room. I was thinking also to put 2 layers of Absorbers inside the MDF libraries that you see in the pictures and make bass traps with this. Making and sound proof room would make me have a place to record vocals. There is a road outside the window and there are cars passing. Not so much but there are.
I saw some vocal booth plans and I really liked the one that I found here on this site. But If I will go for that now I wont have the money to make anything else... So I said to record on a studio with my own gear and take it home to mix it and master it. I was considering also some other options like to put on a box absorbers and then put the mic in that box and record like a mini vocal booth but I know that this will have problems with bass. Also I was thinking another solution, to make to big absorbtion panels at my bed room corner, like I put on the plans that I made, and record there. (I could also place diffusion panels a the opposite corner). But I know that I will have to deal with the road outside and people walking.
So my first priority now is to make my mixing room and what to install as acoustic treatment in it. But I dont know if it is possible to have a good result in this kind of room. What would you recomend about placement of absorbers and diffusers? Would the Bass trap librari work? Should I build another wall, put a curtain or leave it like this? Should I close the entrance of the bedroom not to have reverberation from there? What is your opinion about recording vocals in these rooms? Thanks!

[Soundman2020]

Hi vangelis, and welcome!

You probably can get something reasonable with that room. What I would do is to first take out all the "letter box" things on the left and right walls, then build a window plug to better isolate that window above the desk. If you do want good isolation, then you could then build your inner-leaf room inside that shell, or if you just want treatment (no additional isolation) then I'd do the "standard" setup for that room: carefully set up the speakers and listening position in the correct geometrical location, with the speakers or very heavy, rigid stands up against the front wall, acoustic axis 1.2m above the floor, roughly 30° toe-in, both speakers aimed at the same point about 30cm behind your head, etc. Then do the normal treatment for that: thick absorption between the speakers and the front wall, on the first reflection points, a cloud on the ceiling, very thick absorption on the entire rear wall, and very, very large bass traps in as many corners as you can manage to fit them in.

That would be a very large improvement on what you have now!

- Stuart -