I have a garage that I am turning into a home studio. I wanted to use it mainly for recording live bands for promo videos for cover acts as well as doing some drum tracking. I currently have a doorway which I can use in the bottom of the picture but this is into my garage so I was going to use it to store my own PA equipment but then use another door on the other side of the building as a entrance to the studio.
I just wanted to mainly see if people thought this sort of room configuration would work (with the right acoustic treatment) based on the 6m x 6m space that I have and whether anyone would do anything differently. I can move the door at the top of the picture.
Do people think its also useful to have a vocal booth which can double up as a drum booth if needed or even keep the doors open sometimes to capture room ambience if recording in the drum booth. The alternative is to scrap the booth all together for a bigger open space and use baffles when required.
My approach would be to avoid booths unless you've already got as big a live room as you could want. In this case I'd maximise the live space and ignore the booth idea.
There are lots of things I like about your plan. An entrance vestibule is always useful because it is a place that you can put computers and other noisy gear as well as the tea/coffee making facilities.
Like you, I had plans of setting up a separate drum booth with the possibility of opening it up into the studio. In the end, I didn't fit the doors so the drum area is permanently part of the studio. However, I also have a separate very dry sounding vocal booth. In your case, with just a single booth, you would need the doors.
I can also understand Drew's point of view but I always prefer having a booth because I'm mainly working with other artists rather than creating my own music and a booth gives me much more versatility.
If you go for the booth, then why not make the door section sloped to avoid having two parallel walls? Also you could slope the ceiling so it’s not parallel to the floor. It’s hard to not have a small booth sounding boxy (though I know it’s bigger than some), so why not give yourself the best chance of avoiding that?
I like the idea of a booth from the perspective of having versatility as long as I can keep them open. I might have a look at your point of making the wall on an angle as well.
Making the ceiling angled now is going to be hard but I will be looking to put in some acoustic panels to combat this both on the ceiling and around the room.
A big interest is whether people actually feel they use the booths enough. I did see an old forum where Gavin Harrison (porcupine tree etc) was talking the fact that he likes to sometimes have a dry sound and then sometimes leave the doors open but he does have a massive space to work in whilst this isn’t that big.
Is there an advantage to having a bigger room and maybe sacking off the vocal booth and lower storage room so you end up with a much bigger space?
How much gear are you going to put in there? If you have to accommodate a large mixing desk you would probably need a different design to a setup where everything is contained in a small rack.
I was debating on getting something like a behringer X32 rack with a small universal controller/ mixer and then maybe a couple of nice preamps as well just for some nice options. So effectively, the desk doesn’t have to be massive.
I’m finding it difficult to judge all this as there’s a lot of people that seem to think that the bigger rooms are better than seperate small ones
richermusic wrote: ↑Mon Feb 20, 2023 9:35 pm
I’m finding it difficult to judge all this as there’s a lot of people that seem to think that the bigger rooms are better than seperate small ones
In other cases I might agree with them, but your design seems to allow both approaches if the doors into the booth are wide enough and I often find a separate booth to be really useful. I've had at least two rooms in every studio that I have had apart from the first.
Using a digital mixing desk will allow you to set up cue mixes easily which is essential when using a booth.
