[MrCrowbar]

Here's the deal: My current recording location is a tiny bedroom with the bad acting as a bass trap and lots of acoustic foam. It's pretty much perfect for vocals and rather quiet instruments, for guitar I just turn the flat TV a bit and get a couch table in the and I get pretty decent recordings out of my really budget equipment. But I want to track small bands eventually which is why I'm looking for a new apartment to get a little studio going.

I came up with a design that can fit a control room, vocal booth and tiny isolation chamber (for guitar amps) into a room that's 4 by 4 meters and I want to know if this will work. I know it's a bit cramped but consider that I don't need a big console or rack, a 19" wide Presonus StudioLive mixer/interface and a couple preamps and compressors are all I need, really. I also like small rooms, keeps you focused and you don't feel lost when you're in there alone.

The "live room" would be an adjacent room (or any room within cable range) where one can be loud (corner of the house) and that you can use for other stuff too. As it will be kind of acoustically treated and insulated, it would be cool for watching loud movies, right? I also don't want to dedicate too many rooms to just music (wife acceptance factor) and be able to mix/edit while someone else is watching TV or whatever in the other room.

I live in Germany where inner walls are usually brick, not just drywall, so insulation in normal houses isn't that bad to begin with. Still, I wonder what I'd have to do avoid war with the neighbors when tracking drums.

So here's my questions:
- Is the shape and size of the control room ok?
- Do I need the diffuser above the couch?
- Is 25cm thick drywall with stone wool inside adequate for a vocal and guitar amp room?
- How important is it to have a window from the control room to the live room? I plan on having a camera in both rooms and run video on the TV in the live room and an LCD in the control room.
- What do I need to do to track drums during the day without annoying the neighbors too much?


I would use that solution to record lots of acoustic stuff (guitar player sitting on the couch in the live room), vocals (vocal booth) and occasionally bands with drummer and bassist in the live room, keyboard and guitar player on the control room (miked amp in the Amp room) and singer in the in the vocal booth. I know I can't get 100% isolation on everything, but I suppose it's still much better than a practice room. The key goals are to keep build costs low and just have something comfy that can be considered a recording studio.


See PDF floor plan
(1 meter = 3.2808399 feet
textured blue/grey stuff is drywall with stone wool inside.)