Room for Recording and Mixing

[Larryboy]

Yes, I know that's not the best situation to have. Basically I'm having a new place built and am having a room built just for me and my musical needs. I would like to do recording and mixing in that room and need a lot of advice. The room itself is not going to be very big, maybe a little smaller than your average American bedroom, rectangular, on the second floor, with sound protection under and over (there will be a third floor for my kids). I've also read a few articles about room nodes and the like. Very interesting reading, but I feel that it's quite difficult to implement. Any advice is more than welcome. Here are a few questions

1) What kind of wood would you use? Should I even care about that? Is there any real advantage to having wood paneling instead of wallpaper.
2) Should I have sheetrock put into the walls?
3) Do you think foam in the flooring is enough to keep my mother and father-in-law sane (I play a fairly loud sax and also plan to have some friends over from time to time).
4) Can I really expect anything good to come from this or is this a pipe dream?

Thanks people.

[Naagzh]

Check out http://johnslayers.com.

[PhiDelta308]

You can get a good sounding recording out of just about any room. But it may not be the type of sound that you want for whatever style of music you do. As far as foam under the floor goes, foam has essentially zero sound proofing abilities (not trying to start a technical war here). If you are having the place built, and you really want to get it sound proof, consider floating the room, using high density materials such as sound board and or double layers of drywall/sheet rock, mounting walls to z-channels...lots of things you can do to sound proof. The two main methods of sound proofing a room are using high density materials and mechanically decoupling (physically isolating) the room from its surroundings. Auralex has lots of good stuff, check out their building materials page at

http://www.auralex.com/c_studio_cons...nstruction.asp

Once you have the room sound proofed, use foam to accoustically treat it. Foam will absorb reflections, making the room dead. Diffusors break up reflections in order to prevent standing waves, but don't completely deaden a room.

You should probably consult with a professional about this, it may seem expensive up front, but doing a job like this right the first time WILL save you a lot of time and money later.

-Chris

[Larryboy]

Thanks, you two. I'll check out those links and see what comes up.

[Larryboy]

PhiDelta, thanks for the link. That is definitely a treasure trove of info related to what I'm planning.

One thing though is that they are basically talking about how to soundproof a room, which is one thing that I really need to know, but I think I also need to know what kind of material the walls themselves should be. IE thick wood, paneling, etc. I live in Japan and we've been visiting model homes. I've been sure to do some speaking in most of the rooms that I've entered (or at least hear another person speak) and the best sounding room that I walked into was a bathroom where the bath and bathing area were all made of stone. I started speaking and was just amazed at the sound, it just sounded so good, and I could just imagine recording people there. Of course I can't do that with the room I'm going to have because there would be too many reflections for mixing. Is it even possible to have a room that sounds really good for recording and mixing?