Control Room construction...waste of money?

[catastrophic]

While I prefer to track drums in larger studios, I would like to start mixing and also tracking guitars, bass, vocals and drums on occasion at home. I'm going to build a control room in by basement, but my ceilings are only 7' tall. Is it a waste of my money to build a double leaf wall with separate frames for inner and outer walls packed with insulation and two layers of 5/8" sheetrock on either side? I can't afford (height wise) to float the floor and/or drop the ceiling, so is it worth attempting any other forms of sound reduction if my ceiling and floor are to be shared between rooms??

I don't want a single room, especially for the low budget projects where I'll be tracking drums at my place.

[tINY]

You need to jackhammer up the floor and dig down another 2-4 feet. Then you'll have something to work with....

Or put the control room or traking room upstairs somewhere. Or maybe buy a new house.....




-tINY

[macrae11]

I don't think it would be a waste, but certainly wouldn't get the best benefit from the isolation. In our facility we have double walls but a common floor. We do get leakage especially from kick drum through the floor but it's low enough not to be a real issue. We can track vocals either in the iso booth or CR without any significant bleed. However our drum room is fairly large and the drums are probably about 40 feet away too. Might be more effective if you could partition it into 3 rooms though. Control room > Iso Booth > Drum room. Getting the drums two rooms away with some space in between should help.

[pixelhead]

I just started the planning stages for my new studio in my basement. I have 7 feet in hight to work with. I thought it was going to be a pain, but I decided to hire a studio designer/architect and found it will not be that bad (not optimal, but not bad). He said you take the hight and develope the rest of the room from there.

Good Luck

[confooshus]

I would be more concerned about the psyochological aspect... If I was stuck with several people in a room with 7' ceilings, I'd probably end up in a fist fight after about 10 minutes...

[nosebleedaudio]

You're going to need 4 to 6" of 703 on the ceiling to make a difference in the low mids.
7' will also place your head close to center, ceiling to floor dimension,not the best place.
Could sacrifice isolation for more ceiling height by not having a hard boundary on the floor joist.
My first thoughts...

[wallawannabe]

Sorry to interupt, but about how much does it cost to have a studio architect come out and evaluate/plan your space? I'm realizing now how dumb this question is....

But just a ballpark figure?