Building a studio in basement - questions

[tomyco]

I plan on building a studio in my basement mostly for my pleasure. I have a Mac Pro Quad, Digi 002 rack & mackie 824's monitors. There will be no more than 3 musicians in the studio room at once, drums, bass & guitar. I am limited for space so would like to make as small as possible but workable. Please keep in mind I would like to keep the cost down.Questions1. Is there such a thing as soundproof glass or is it the thickness of the glass that makes it soundproof. If that's the case what thickness of glass is recommended or type of glass?2. What would be the bare minimum space for the control room and the recording room?3. The ceiling will be 7' 6" what would be recommended for the ceiling and floor?Thanks!

[mazz]

Most control rooms use two pieces of glass, both angled and not parallel to the wall or each other. I don't know the exact dimensions or angles, there's plenty of literature out there on all this stuff. I know the glass needs to be thick.Why build a control room? If your entire room is small anyway, adding a small control room may limit you as to what you can achieve acoustically and your mixes may be compromised as well due to the small room size. Many folks are using one room as a recording room and a control room combined. Once you get the drums miced up and do a few passes and listen back, you can adjust the placement that way. Guitar amps can be in closets, boxes, isolated with gobos, etc. Bass can go direct if the player is amenable to that option which eliminates a lot of issues such as disturbing the neighbors or the sleeping kids upstairs.I think you'll get a better sound at both ends of the process and wouldn't be limiting the flexibility of the entire space.Just an idea to entertain.Mazz

[booker]

My studio is in the basement. I just use headphones.

[mikehelms]

I'd certainly have to agree with Mazz on this one..I've helped to build a couple of these...One that has several booths and is used professionally and the other two were small and needed some compromise in consideration of the space...as to how small I can say this... the entirety of the space we had to use is a 8x8 room... little more than a shed really that sits of by itself..It is wood however not metal so that helped...We built an interior wall that we insulated and dry walled for sound proofing... so the space is even smaller now...but this guy is still doing broadcast quality work in there... The thing is when you record unless your doing a live version of your song for a demo, the only reason for you to be all playing at the same time is for ruff tracks to lay down other pieces to.. that said in truth your better off laying down a ruff Guit/Piono//Vocal track to a click and then laying the drums to it...so as far as having an Isolation booth it's not nessacary... for Isolation we built a five piece box w/ sound proofing that we could easily take apart and also easily gain entry into for adjustments inside.... to Isolate the amps..The thing you want to avoid is diminishing your Natural acoustics for some purposes when you don't have to..If you do decide to build a Glass separated booth you'll likely want too pieces of at least 3/8in thick glass I believe separated by a couple of inches... all this entails some work and logistics...Most of what you can do with two rooms or more you can do in one... sound proofing for recording and how and how much you deaden the sound acoustics of the room is more important for the recoding...One of the things we did in the other small studio was bring in some used cubical partitions.. so we could move them around for space when necessary i.e. practice... and then bring them in for recording to break up the covered cement wall acoustics some more.. we also used foam acoustic tile in there that were more permanant..In truth at the bigger studio the only reason they've used the multiple separated booths was for quick Demo's... one day recordings for Bands as an expense and time savings opportunity.. other wise it's one piece at a time anyhow...Michael