Please help - layout and dimensions of small studio - urgent!!! ;)

[Merlin]

Hello all,

I'm a keyboard player currently living in Thailand, and at the club where I play there's a room that was a minimart not being used. One day I was talking to the owner about maybe it would be a good idea to put a recording room in there. Well he's going ahead with it!!
I came in today and they've ripped out all the old ceiling and fixed up the tiles and generally getting ready for the re-fit.

So now he's asking me where I want things, so we can run wiring for power and lights etc. I explained the "room within a room" concept as I've read about a little bit on the web for soundproofing. Naturally I've got a lot of questions about soundproofing and ventilation/airconditioning too, but I'll save that for another post.

So now I'd like some input on the topic of room layout...

My concept is for the room to be a rehearsal/recording room, where a band can come in and work on songs, hear them back, fix things up etc and produce demo level CDs. I myself play keyboard and I expect I will be spending a lot of time in there by myself working on my own stuff and doing remixes etc.

The room I've got is 7.7M x 2.7M with a 2.8M ceiling [atm...]. All soundproofing etc will have to fit within this space. There's a shop on one side and a disco on the other. At one end of the room is the front door; at the other end is a rest room/shower.
I'm leaning towards not even having a control room as such - it will make things like aircon etc more complex, plus I think if I split the room up it will be a bit cramped for a whole band. Plus I want to be able to playback mixes for several people at once for comments/review, so the "sweet spot" will need to be kinda large. [like, maybe a couch? ]

Can anyone give me any heads up on potential problems bass wise with these dimensions? How would you layout the room? Control area up one end? What about the layout of the desk, keyboards, and monitors [both the speakers and the LCDs]?

Any good web pages or examples I can look at?


oh, and one last thing: if this is not the proper forum to post this in, please suggest a better place...

TIA for all help!!! thumbsup

[tINY]

You say Thailand... I remember seeing concrete structures with brick walls separating one part from another.

If that's the case, isolation will be easy as long as there are no holes in the wall.

That's also a big problem for bass management as there is no transmission or absorbtion of lower frequencies. You will probably need to build a lot of panel traps for the lower frequencies.

Since the 2.7 is close to 2.8 and pretty close to 7.7 / 3 you are going to have big problems at around 125Hz (wavelength of 2.75m) and half that frequency, 63Hz, with twice the wavelength. Also, the tangental mode (center of floor to center of long wall to center of ceiling) is 3.88m: half of the length of the room at 7.7m causing problems at 45Hz and 90Hz.

I would say make the walls thicker so that the 2.7M is less, but this is already really small for good acoustics. This room may be a lot of work and experementing to get good sound in....



-tINY

[natpub]

You can probably find all the answers you need, including some nice designs for small rooms, here:

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php

Enjoy!

[Merlin]

thanks for the replies guys.
I found that site after further searching around - boy do I have a lot more reading to do!!!