Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - Control room combined w/ tracking room...good idea?

centurymantra · 3rd March 2006

I'm working on bringing the final stages of my project/home studio together and had a recent epiphany brought about by another thread and some pics of pretty nice studios that have their recording gear and what would be a control room (ors shoud I say 'area') in the same room that they track in. Essentially, a 'one room studio'. I'm now thinking that I might do this. My set up is located in the ground/basement level of my house. The tracking room is an addition on the back of the house that is on basement level but is a nice big open room with natural light. It's around 20' x 25' with large peaked ceilings and works quite nicely for tracking, though I'm still working on the acoustics. Adjectant to this is what was previously the laundry area and it is cramped...real cramped. It's about 6' x 8' not square, with some indented areas...still real small and with ceilings just over 6'. Pretty much sucks as any kind of real control room area...a joke really. It's nice to get the recording gear out of the way and I can do some rudimentary monitoring in conjunction with my Sennheiser HD600 headphones, but it's FAR from ideal. I was planning on moving my gear further back into the actual 'basement' part of the lower level with a snake running from an XLR panel in the big room, but this is still far from ideal. It is a bigger area but still with 6'1" ceilings...not to mention the furnace (which could be turned off). Overall, rather half-assed. The idea of just moving in with the musicians suddenly seems very appealing and the way to go. There are certainly some folks that like it and the point has been made that the interaction with the musicians is a priceless commodity. My setup is quirky, but pretty simple...pres & compressors into A/D into DAW/digital mixer. No big console. Fairly compact and it wouldn't take up a lot of space, although I have been thinking of getting into an analog console. I have very nice Earthworks monitors and it's been a shame keeping them chained up in that small room which they are simply too big for (was almost thinking of selling them off because of this). They'd have room to breath and I could now actually mix in the same room where I was previously hauling my DAW upstairs to my audio rig with ATC speakers for serious mixing. My notion is to use the laundry room where I have the recording gear now as an amp isolation area and rig a small pair of decent monitors up in that area as well so I could have a place to step aside to and offer a bit of out-of-room monitoring in certain cases.

I'd love getting some input from folks offering yea or nays on this as well as some words from folks using this same kind of setup. Here's some pics of my big room, though it is missing some parts of the room. There's no pic of the cramped control room, but you can probably get the idea on what that's like...

3rd March 2006	#1
centurymantra Lives for gear Joined: Oct 2005 Location: Michigan Posts: 665 Thread Starter	Control room combined w/ tracking room...good idea? I'm working on bringing the final stages of my project/home studio together and had a recent epiphany brought about by another thread and some pics of pretty nice studios that have their recording gear and what would be a control room (ors shoud I say 'area') in the same room that they track in. Essentially, a 'one room studio'. I'm now thinking that I might do this. My set up is located in the ground/basement level of my house. The tracking room is an addition on the back of the house that is on basement level but is a nice big open room with natural light. It's around 20' x 25' with large peaked ceilings and works quite nicely for tracking, though I'm still working on the acoustics. Adjectant to this is what was previously the laundry area and it is cramped...real cramped. It's about 6' x 8' not square, with some indented areas...still real small and with ceilings just over 6'. Pretty much sucks as any kind of real control room area...a joke really. It's nice to get the recording gear out of the way and I can do some rudimentary monitoring in conjunction with my Sennheiser HD600 headphones, but it's FAR from ideal. I was planning on moving my gear further back into the actual 'basement' part of the lower level with a snake running from an XLR panel in the big room, but this is still far from ideal. It is a bigger area but still with 6'1" ceilings...not to mention the furnace (which could be turned off). Overall, rather half-assed. The idea of just moving in with the musicians suddenly seems very appealing and the way to go. There are certainly some folks that like it and the point has been made that the interaction with the musicians is a priceless commodity. My setup is quirky, but pretty simple...pres & compressors into A/D into DAW/digital mixer. No big console. Fairly compact and it wouldn't take up a lot of space, although I have been thinking of getting into an analog console. I have very nice Earthworks monitors and it's been a shame keeping them chained up in that small room which they are simply too big for (was almost thinking of selling them off because of this). They'd have room to breath and I could now actually mix in the same room where I was previously hauling my DAW upstairs to my audio rig with ATC speakers for serious mixing. My notion is to use the laundry room where I have the recording gear now as an amp isolation area and rig a small pair of decent monitors up in that area as well so I could have a place to step aside to and offer a bit of out-of-room monitoring in certain cases. I'd love getting some input from folks offering yea or nays on this as well as some words from folks using this same kind of setup. Here's some pics of my big room, though it is missing some parts of the room. There's no pic of the cramped control room, but you can probably get the idea on what that's like...