New house, basement treatment...

[onesong321]

Hello all. My wife and I have just purchased a new house. My wife, being amazing as she is, has allowed me full reign of the basement and garage for studio purposes. The Garage's ceiling is 8' high, and the basement area has a drop ceiling that is 7' 9", however there is 9" of space between the drop ceiling and the floor above it. The floor in the basement is a tile...vinyl? Like what you find in schools and such. Not ceramic. I have included some pictures and a rough sketch-up drawing of the layout.

Essentially, I am aware of the costs involved, so I am going to do this in spread out stages. What would you fine people recommend I start with in the treatment department. I want this studio to last and serve me as well as a home studio can. I must start from the very basics, where should I put my mix position? and then where should I begin with treatment? I know it will need a lot, the basement is pretty reverberant, and the garage will be a slow process to prepare for drums, etc...

Also, I know there is much debate over the usefulness of a vocal booth, but would I be served in attempting to do anything with the crawlspace/closet as a booth?



My setup (at the moment) is a Tascam M-520 console into a Digi 002r, with a pair of Krk V6 Series 2 monitors (plan on purchasing a sub soon).

I thought about doing a roomeqwizard for the basement, but I'm not sure how good that will do using just the KRKs, not much low end coming from them?

Any and all help will be very much appreciated. This forum is amazing and I am glad to have found it.


EDIT: I am aware that where the arrow is pointing would be a bad place for the mix position, what I meant was that general area - it would obviously need to be further from that wall into the room - also note that the window in the picture is on the wall where I have said I would put the mix position....and I would naturally put a couch on the back wall behind the mix position. Or something like that. I know little, and am well aware of it, so I am going to be in need of much in the way of advice. I just don't want to be learning to track and mix in a room so crappy I can't hear what's really going on. Seems counter productive.

Also, I didn't know the images would load like that. not sure how that works.

[Glenn Kuras]

can you please resize the pictures? why to big and a PITA to try to figure out what you have going on.

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by onesong321

What would you fine people recommend I start with in the treatment department.

As Glenn said, your photos are impossibly large. But even without studying the photos I can give you my standard advice that applies to all rooms like this. All rooms need:

* Broadband (not tuned) bass traps straddling as many corners as you can manage, including the wall-ceiling corners. More bass traps on the rear wall behind helps even further. You simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Real bass trapping, that is - thin foam and thin fiberglass don't work to a low enough frequency.

* Mid/high frequency absorption at the first reflection points on the side walls and ceiling.

* Some additional amount of mid/high absorption and/or diffusion on any large areas of bare parallel surfaces, such as opposing walls or the ceiling if the floor is reflective. Diffusion on the rear wall behind you is also useful in larger rooms.

For the complete story see my Acoustics FAQ.

There's a lot of additional non-sales technical information on my company's web site - articles, videos, test tones and other downloads, and much more.

Especially see this video showing how my partner built and treated a very nice studio in his basement:

The Ultimate Home Studio

--Ethan

[onesong321]

Sorry about all that guys, these should be better...