John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

How small of a room can I get away with for vocals and acoustic guitar only. I want to have enough room to be comfortable, but the smaller, the cheaper, and the more room I have on the outside for other stuff . . .

So any suggestions? Acoustics and comfortability are the concerns here.

shady area.

as far as i know a room can be as small as you like. Problem is, the larger the surface area of the wall and the bigger the size, the less chance of getting unwanted bounce back of frequencies and more chances these are absorbed or dissapate.

Technically speaking if someone can get in the room with a guitar then it's big enough, but acoustic dampening smaller spaces is a lot harder than large ones.

I see people put loads of old CD's on the wall randomly and LP's on the cieling in smaller rooms like vocal booths as the last layer of a good multi layered construction, that's cool and it's supposed to work well.

The BBC guidelines however say they need v.large rooms, i'm not sure of the exact reasons but probably because of audio quality and work space.

Here are some recommended room sizes i found.

thanks for the help
I don't understand how to arrange the cds . . . could you explain this . . .it sounds cool.

Would I still want to treat the walls with acoustic foam and bass traps or what?

Use the search engine with "diffuser" "calculator" and you should get the results. Others reading this probably know of better places.

Of course you want to treat the rest of the room properly which includes absorption and reflection. Read up in the Recording MAnual of the main page for further information. It is way too much to try and put in one post, much less my communication skills.

Andre

but i dont understand what you do with the cds?

maybe CDs make little reflections ... I understand it that way ...