first post, design questions

I'd like to start by saying that this is the best site i've ever found on the internet. More knowledge here that is pertinent to the intended subject than anywhere else i've looked. I also love that it really doesnt push certain products. If there's more than one that works they get equal billing. Nice job! Also, I hope I have gotten the posting rules correct. Fingers crossed..... My partner and I will possibly be signing the lease for this space this week. It's in a basement. It used to be an abattoir. We are trying to make a long term plan that will enable us to be functional asap, but have a plan for what we're going to build/upgrade next. One of us works mostly with pop and rock bands, the other does more work in film and video. This will be a comercial studio. I'm leaving behind a barely functional two bedroom home studio and my partner is leaving a basement that he couldn't use for tracking during the day. In other words , we are low budget for those on a low budget. We want to build the studio to be functional now and to become world class over time. We are hoping to not have to spend more than $2000 for materials in our start up phase.(?) This phase is to just get the raw rooms built. We have a few people lined up to help in exchange for time once we're open. People with various skills. One of them has even built a few studios in the past. We also plan on doing as much of the labour as we can ourselves. We are thinking of using the two rooms on the right of the sketch as live rooms and are hopping for the most part to get away with treating them and not have to do much in terms of soundproofing. We both already have some absorbers and traps etc to get that going. This we will do first as we can then feasable start doing some work. (If we get tracks recorded at the space we can both mix at home for the time being.) We will have do do some work on the existing doors to these two small rooms and perhaps even install a second door or a sound lock for each opening. The long thin room is being left out of the plans for now. This is for a couple of reasons. One being that we hope to sublet it to someone as a practice/rehearsal space or a mix/edit room. Or just storage I suppose. That will help us keep our costs down. We also have discussed this becoming a lounge/office in the future. The other reason is that the landlord really doesn't want us to cut through the walls and this space is the most isolated from the others. We are planning on setting up some cameras and monitors for seeing from room to room in the spaces we will be using. This leaves us the large room. We will arrange our schedules to share the live rooms and want to build two control/mix rooms. This space has in the past been used by bands, with p.a.'s, for rehearsals and there is not a problem for noise going upstairs. Fingers crossed that there won't be problem noise coming back down from above. There never was on any of the four visits we have made. So we're hopping to not have to do anything but treatments to any of the ceilings. The ceiling by the way is concrete and i'm told it's 14 inches thick but i have not veified that. In the drawings the four boxes with x's in them are posts. I'm sorry I don't know their exact location as of yet but they are pretty evenly spaced in the large room. It has some beams running north and south where the post are. The beams are steel and so are the posts. The rest of the ceiling is not perfectly flat. It looks like there are other beams every 6 foot or so, running the same direction as the beams I mentioned previously, that were perhaps part of the forms used when pouring the ceiling slab. (I will post pictures and update my sketch with ceiling details as soon as I can.)The floor is of course concrete and has a gentle slope to what would have once been the drain. The existing walls of this space are also concrete with 2 inch white styrofoam on top. The largest room has been tiled overtop of of the styrofoam while the two smaller rooms have a thin layer of mortar overtop. Due to our low budget we are planning to only use one layer of drywall in the startup phase. And doubling it up later as funds become avaiable. We're probably going to not use RC beacause we feel with doing the work ourselves, we'll probably screw it up and defeat any benifit it may have gotten us. We are thinking of using double framed, insulated walls with a 4 inch air space. Our main concern isn't with perfect isolation from the live rooms to the control room. If we can monitor at a decent level without fighting to tell if we are hearing the monitors or the performers and without bleeding back into the live rooms it will work for us. A big concern is how much isolation there will be for the second mix room. This room will be being used at the same time as the tracking rooms but not on the same projects. It may be the only room with walls not touching any other walls. I'm posting a blank layout and a couple of ideas i've been messing with for wall layout. These are pretty rough. The demensions of the rooms to be built are estimates as well but not the existing walls. I'm not really looking for new drawings as much as feedback on a couple of questions i have. (The exact demensions will be worked out after I have more info on the ceiling heights and we will be trying our best to use the best possible ratios for room demensions.) *I took a couple of the ideas down as they are not what we are thinking of doing* Here's my questions at this time. 1) Is the 4 inch air space going to be enough to isolate the second mix room from the rest of the rooms? We could possibly up that figure. 2) Is there a formula to figure out how much gap or airspace would be needed to not have to use a second layer of drywall? 3) If we build these walls and realize that we need to float the floor or drop the ceiling, are these walls basically garbage and we start again? Or can we float the floor and ceiling after the fact? Leaving the walls still attached to the existing structure. I know that this would still allow flanking but will it help at all? 4) Is it possible to float the walls? Say with neoprene between the footer and floor, the header and ceiling and where the ends of walls meet the existing concrete? If it is possible, would it be worth it? I'm thinking that something solid has to go through that neoprene, thus defeating it. If anybody has any other things that you want to coment on please do. Esecially if there are alarm bells going off in your head while you read my post. I'm trying to do as much research as possible, but sure don't know it all. Probably not even enough.

or maybe use the two smaller rooms are control room and mix room with a small hallway on the side.

Thanks for the post gullfo. I think that your sketch would work great, except... the two small rooms are below storage space upstairs so there's even less chance of noise bothering anybody. (travelling both ways) Also, and I'm sorry I didn't put this in my original post, but there are streetcars that run past the building. These rooms are the furthest away, and seem like they will be ok as far as the rumble is concerned. The larger room will cost way more cash to isolate from that noise so we're planning on doing a bit of recording in the smaller rooms and seeing if we need to float floors or isolate them more. If this is the case then this would actually become our phase one build. I think its the walls and steel beams that are causing most of the sound transfer though, not the floor. I'm also leaning towards putting a ceiling on the mix rooms now to help with the rumble. We both feel we can deal with some rumble in the control/mix rooms. As I said before, we both are leaving spaces that are far from perfect working conditions. (at my place there are outside noise problems that include busses, planes, dogs, kids etc.) We both feel that this will be a step up for us. I know that it's not perfect, but it is the best we've seen in a price range that works for us. (Rent in around here is expensive!) Thanks again, all input is welcomed and appreciated.

I'm sorry I didn't put this in my original post, but there are streetcars that run past the building.

How close are you to the streetcar line? The building front. Andre

Hello Andre, I'm not 100% sure of the exact figure, but based on the size of our space i'd say we have the back half of the building. There's probably 50ft (of storage space) between our 8.5x33 ft room and the front of the building. Really hope this is going to work. But give it to me straight doctor(s), I can take it.... Thanks for your interest in our project.

how much rumbling is coming through the building structure vs the air?

Hi Glenn, There are two bathroom type exhaust fans into the main/big room and some sound could be comming through there. This system comes in through the west wall in the long thin room, turns and comes through the south wall in the big room. The long thin room also has a set of two half sized doors that lead outside and don't seal very well. We're thinking glass block and a small slider window for that opening. The duct work is pretty badly done, my plan was to rip it out and start again, with some sound isolation/dampening. You are making me think(crossing fingers) that maybe when we address these breaches the problem might not be so bad. We need to get in there and do some tests though. I think we should get into the storage space that's not going to be ours and see if there are any breaches there as well. We have finally worked out the details of the lease and are probably a day or two from signing, exchanging keys, giving cheques etc. Unless we bail on this space and resume the hunt.....

Well we got the keys!!!! So i've done some measuring, taken some pics and made lots of notes. Most of this info i'll put up soon with my updated sketches. The great news is that the street car is actually pretty darn quiet! The bad news is that what we thought was the street car was actually somebody in the office upstairs rolling around on their office chair. They don't have any flooring on the concrete up there. So looks like we will have to put in ceilings. Or roofs on our rooms if you like it said that way better. Even in the live rooms. So now it's time to research how much isolation we need and how much that's going to cost. In the mean time we can actually still be as noisy as we want after 5:00 pm. So it isn't so bad. We can always mix and edit in the day and record at night unit we get at least one live room done. It's going to be a little tricky using the space with a continual build going on, but hey i'm sure we'll learn from our mistakes so the rooms should get better and better as we do each one.

It's been a couple of months, but we're still at it. I'll try to update the sketches or add some pics. I'm just so busy now that it's hard to find time. We went with the largest room as a control room and did some treatment to the existing room. We also treated the second largest room and are using it as our live room. The concern about the streetcars and the neighbours turned out to be not to bad. We can be fairly loud even during the day, and the outside noise that gets in the live room is not a problem. (if we need to be realy loud or record really quite things we do it at night or on weekends.) We also have a second mix room treated and operational. We have been having some trouble with our power though. It's noisey. We tried a few things, like running dedicated lines for the gear in each room and re-grounding everthing but it only helped marginally. Our power pannel is shared by the buildings hallway lights, that buzz, and thebuilding has three stepdown transformers, that also seem to buzz loudly. I'm guessing that it's one or both giving us trouble. So, we just got a balanced power transformer/power supply. (Furman it-1230) So next it's hooking that up. My fingers are crossed that it will fix the noise. They claim it will not only fix the problem but also give us more headroom and a wider stereo image. I'll let you know how it turns out. Anyone have experience with these? If it works, then its back to building the iso room, beefing up some doors, putting some clouds up above the two mixing desks, isolating the second mix room better....... you know, it'll never end. On an up note, we're working!!! Recording and mixing I mean.

The balanced power supply has done wonders. Noise from the ac is gone and it seems to us that as a result the stereo imaging is better our preamps sound better and all gear in general has improved in sound quality.