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In article writes:

That was going to be my next question. I have three rooms. One is a beutiful
large basement family room with a fireplace, nice lighting and plush furniture.

How about a pinball machine, wide screen TV with surround sound, and a
wet bar? Sounds like it would make a good lounge and place for the
musicians to hang out, rehearse, tune, and snack.

The other is a large unfinished basement storage room.

Great machine room. Put your noisy computers in there.

The other is a basement guest bedroom.

Probably too small for a band, but might be OK for a control room or
an isolation room.

I have been just working with my DAW right in the
family room but am thinking to move the setup upstairs to a spare bedroom so I
dont have to use head phones for tracking. I know I'll need to have a good
talk back system.

Having a separate studio and control room is a good idea, but consider
how inconvenient it will be to move a microphone if you have to trot
downstairs, move the mic, then trop upstairs again to listen to what
it sounds like. This (or you) will get old fast.

I'm not really happy with the family room as it is carpeted and has alot of
plush furniture. It's a really dead room but I have gotten some great
recordings out of it.

I think this is the second time in as many days that I've seen someone
express the sentiment "It really sounds great but I'm not satisfied
with it." What do you REALLY mean? What part doesn't sound great? Or
would you just rather not have to clean up the mess after a session so
the rest of the family won't get after you?

The storage room is cement floor and cement walls but
with lots of shelves with boxes. I havent used this room yet but would LOVE to
put the drums in there and work with the room ambiance.

So try it. The boxes will probably act at least somewhat as diffusors,
but you might find that you have annoying slapback echos or get some
comb filtering caused by close reflections nearly as loud as the
original sound getting into the mics.

Anyway I'm planning to use these rooms and move my DAW to an upstairs room. I
guess this means running a snake down to the basement but hopefully others have
more elegant solutions.

You might consider using the spare bedroom as your control room and
using an upstairs room as an isolation room. It might work out to be
more convenient, and make for less running up and down. If you have a
singer upstairs, rather than having to go up there yourself to move a
mic, you might just have to ask him or her to move a couple of inches
one way or the other.

I mostly plan to use the family room so the bands can have eye contact. It's
large enough for a band and I can still get fairly good isolation.

Eye contact is a good thing. Another approach when tracking is to have
a singer in the control room with you so the band and singer can have
eye contact. It might not be the keeper vocal track because of leakage
from the monitors into the vocal mic (or maybe you decide it's a great
vocal take and you can live with the leakage, but don't count on it)
but having eye contact between the singer and the band will help keep
them together. But how do you get this eye contact? Is there a window
between the family room and somewhere else? If you're looking through
an open door, there goes your isolation between the studio and control
room.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers - )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
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