Studio design for both rehearsal and recording?

mr.adambeck · Post by **mr.adambeck** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 12:52 pm

Hello Tape Op Message Board (this is my first post).

My new wife and I finally have the luxury of tearing down our garage and building an entirely new space. Seeing as we are both musicians (and in the same band), we've decided to try to build a soundproofed room within the garage for band practice and use the same room as well as a project studio for recording.

Our band is sort of experimental, pretty loud, and our singer tends to put his vocals through a Kaoss Pad with a lot of delay on it. It there anything we should keep in mind for design? Most practice spaces we've been in have been heavily deadened in order to help eliminate feedback issues, but I also really prefer tracking drums in a very live/reverberant room. And since our singer uses a lot of delay, feedback could be a problem in a live sounding room, but I'm not too sure about how to control things like that without eliminating the tone I'd want for a drum room.

It's also extremely important that the entire thing is as sound-proofed as possible, considering that our neighbors are rather close. We're building from the ground up, so if you have suggestions on how to best construct something, it would be greatly appreciated.

It's looking like the entire garage will probably be around 14 ft x 20 ft, with the rehearsal room taking up around half of it at (I know it's kinda small, but you gotta make do!) 10 or 11 x 20. The ceiling height has yet to be determined... We're just indie musicians with regular day jobs, so the cheaper we can do this the better.

Thanks for any help!

roscoenyc · Post by **roscoenyc** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 5:44 pm

Get the Rod Gervais book. It will help you a lot.
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Recording-St ... 1598630342
and save you a lot of money.
A good sounding room is a good sounding room
for rehearsing and/or recording.

My advise would be to leave the floor live. Either wood or plywood
or concrete. You are gonna have to incorporate absorption in your room
but kicking the life off the floor just makes for less fun in the long run.

mr.adambeck · Post by **mr.adambeck** » Thu Jan 22, 2009 11:47 am

I had a thought of maybe hanging thick curtains/fabric that could be moved out of the way when recording and wanting a live room, but moved back when needing a deader space for rehearsal. Would this work at all? Or am I just dreaming?

the finger genius · Post by **the finger genius** » Fri Jan 23, 2009 12:57 pm

Heavy curtains may help a little with deadening the high end. You also may want to consider building some gobos.

roscoenyc · Post by **roscoenyc** » Fri Jan 23, 2009 1:03 pm

get the book.
really.

If you don't you'll wish you did.

BenjaminWells · Post by **BenjaminWells** » Fri Jan 23, 2009 6:59 pm

I had the heavy curtain idea too and found this:
http://acoustic-curtains.com/

... got the book.

losthighway · Post by **losthighway** » Sat Jan 24, 2009 4:19 pm

The easiest thing I've found to help bounce my room from live room to practice space is rugs.

Less rugs a lot more live for recording drums, more rugs a lot more dead for having band practice and finding out I'm singing the backup vocals sharp.

Other than that wrapped 703 is really easy to move in and out of a room for deadening/livening.

Studio design for both rehearsal and recording?

Studio design for both rehearsal and recording?

curtains

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