My girlfriend and I are going to look at buying a block of land. We're going to build a house and naturaully, build a shed-like studio in the backyard. I'm thinking that if we spend some decent money on it (Like 30-50k) then we can have a great quality studio with baffling insulation, a specific drum room, vocal room and live room.

Is there any advice anyone can give us regarding:

When I was studying Audio Engineering the school was being renovated and upgraded. The lecturer told us that you need to have false floors (gaps between the actual ground and the floor of the studio), walls and ceilings. How important is that? Also how thick should that be?

What are some suggestions on the layout of the studio? I like the idea of having 5 or so rooms for a band to play live together but all be in seperate rooms whilst having windows to all, so each musician can still see each other. Im not really sure if that's all that practical.

My idea is that if we spend some real money on this, we can help pay off the mortgage by hiring it out to the general public. I'd also like to be able to use it as a rehersal room because it seems like there's a real shortage of those going around at the moment. Especially in the area we're looking at doing it.

My requirements are: control room, live room (at least 36m sq/324ft sq), and storage room. Within the same building I was thinking about making a facilities room and lounge room.

Thanks
-Dave

This is a rough (not-to-scale) plan.

Any advice?

haha looks like a big shed!, looks good, maybe a few unnecessary rooms, depends what equipment you have because you may need to build around it. ive been in a pretty dead room before but it wasnt completely sound prof there are lots of ways of doing it down to everything from the carpet to the windows, foam on the walls, curving the rooms walls when plastering, using wood for good acoustics and having a curved ceiling the possibilities are endless, i advise going to a local studio and checking out some ways they use.

First things first, don't have square rooms. If I've learned anything in the hours I've spent online looking at studio designs etc.....don't have parallel walls unless you want standing waves in your recordings lol. Also, if you are building from the ground up, you can definitely work on the floating room concept, I would recommend looking online, visiting a good studio, and maybe even buying a book from your local music shop on recording/builiding a studio. There are a lot of good resources online as well, do a google search and see what you come up with. I would be careful with where you place the doors, and I'm not sure if those are doors or windows in your drawing, but if they are doors that might be a bit of a problem given you would most likely want the control panel facing the live room. Anyway, just some hints, I'm by no means a professional engineer but I've been to quite a few studios as well as done a ton of online research and read a couple books, so these are the observations I've made. Good luck, sounds like a fun project!!!
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Bob Seifert, SEIT
LiveSine Productions
Drummer of 3up3down