I just moved, and would like to transform a closet into a recording space -not a vocal booth but a tracking / monitoring station. I saw thread a long time ago (maybe here) where people showed off their home studio setups in small spaces. search is not turning it up.
so if anyone has clever solutions to small home studio spaces, please share.
Ok, I'll take a start at this...seems that you were getting responses that didn't address that you want the closet to be your
control room for the engineer. That is what I was getting out of it.
1.Visual into any of the studio space(where the music is actually performed). Strictly audio is fine but there are lots of times whoever in the booth will be wondering, "*** is going on in there". A window into the main/largest space will help alot. But that causes a problem for...
2.Your computer monitor. You'll want as much monitor as possible, so you can see and control your track efficiently. But a big monitor could very well block your window(above). And you need room for...
3. Your mixer. Between a modest 16 track mixer like a PResonus 16.4.2 or an Allen & Heath ZED16 AND some room for using a computer mouse you are going to feel very cramped without at least 3.5 feet of width. And that would be super tight and probably lead to some work inefficiency. Between the monitor and board you will need a minimum of 2 feet of depth PLUS about 3.5 feet for a pull-out keyboard tray, your body and room to move your chair back. Other gear could be shelved above & below your work area but that will always be hard to get to and might lead to overheating if you don't ventilate properly.
You'd need a closet with a minimum of 4 X6' of floor space....and that would be really claustriphobic and hard to work in. You'll need to bring in ventilation for you and the gear and placement of lights so you don't have shadowing issues might be tricky. On the lights I'd suggest a multitude of small, weak lights so you can spread them out to get away from the shadow issue - LEDs are a charm for that, the Chinese make all sorts of strings, webs and nets of LED lights that are cheap and product little heat.
A manufactured, steel computer station might be your best bet, since the steel structural parts take up little room compared to say 2X4s and one with shelves above and below might accommodate all your gear. I have something like that in my home studio but I actually have lots of room and just wanted to use the computer stand.
Oh, consider active-powered speakers wherever possible, since that will spare you the space of dedicated power amps.
Hope this helped or gets the ball rolling.
