John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hi there,

My name is Milko and I'm from Holland. My biggest hobby is to make music and now I want to make a little studio in a spare room of my house. I got a lot of information from this fantastic site and also the book of Rod Gervais is great. With this information I made some drawings of the room and the planned construction.
I planned to record my keyboards, some vocals and sometimes some acoustic instruments like guitar and sax. I wil not record complete bands with acoustic drums.

As I said it is a small room of 16.5 feet by 8.7 feet (5.1 meter by 2.7 meter). I've got not a very big budget. My budget is about 3,000 - 3,500 Austalian Dollars (2.500 Euro). I don't have to buy instruments of this budget. I already have my synths, computer, protools, mic's, pre-amps, etc.

I will put some drawings to this site and hope you can give me some advise and tips or tricks to make my studio "perfect".

Your monitor setup is not symmetric!
Even worse, you put one monitor in a corner and one in the middle of the room!
The right one will sound much thinner, the left on will sound more bassy.

Make you listening place (in front of you) symmetric at least to your position. That is essential!
Whats behind you is not that much important.
Then reduce first reflections on the sides. 4" Auralex pyramids will work. (down to 500 Hz)
Angled walls, broadband absorbers (donw to 100-200Hz) are better.

Basstraps, corrected reverberation time are the next steps to consider.
But the first two points are the most important one: symmetry and no reflextions from the side wall at least in the highs and mids.

I would probably just rotate the desk against the wall to the left and pull it more int he middle of that wall to avoid reflections no?

I would build the vocal booth on the window side. And full room width, to achieve symmetry.
So the vocalist have daylight.
Than I would place the monitor set up in front of it with the window in view.
I would place the window (a glass door) between the booth and control room so that you can look through both windows to the outdside while mixing. Very pleasent for the eyes.
- room symmetry (acoustic)
- monitors rediate the long side (acoustic)
- view through the vocal booth the outside (ergonomic, daylight, eyes pleasing)
- door in the back, no need to go through the booth. (ergonomic)

Thank you all very much for your ideas!
I've made a new drawing. My idea was also to put the mixing place against the wall.

I also understand de full width booth. But I think I prefer the other side of the room. The wall with the door is an outside wall and also because of the door more difficult to avoid any noise from outside (every now and then you can hear pass a car). The other side of the room is in the house and I guess better to control te noise in the vocalbooth.

I want to put the construction on neopreen pads. Do you have any idea how thick these pads should be!?

Bad idea. The speakers should fire down the LONG axis of the room, not the short axis. In that configuration, your head is almost up against the back wall!!! And you don't have an room symmetry! The room needs to be symmetrical at least as far back as the mix position, and preferably the whole room.


Do it like this:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8173

- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Hoi Milko en welkom op het JLS forum.

Could you provide us with more info about the room itself? Is is part of a private home, a shed etc. What is it made of? (wood, concrete etc).