Sycamore Studios: Construction Diary

Well, here we go! I've been in the process of building my studio for a year or so, but only now are things starting to take shape. My diary starts now, because progress has been fairly sporadic over the last year. I'm 20 years old, doing a Computer Science degree. I've wanted a studio for a while since I’d like to become an audio engineer. My parents have been very generous in letting me locate one at home, and in the after much thought, we decided to build an extension on to our existing house. The extension is divided into three areas. The Control Room/Studio A small shower room A Gym, also functioning as my “live room” As I’m a student, I’m away from home for around 30 weeks of the year, hence why the live room will also function as a gym. Currently, most of my work is location recording, since this year I’ve been the Head of Technical team in my University radio station. I’ll probably still do some of the recordings next year, but may not have as much time as I’ve been elected Station Manager for this year =) Either way – the main purpose is to have a mixing room, with the ability to record small groups when the opportunity arises. I don’t need a huge amount of isolation, so everything was built as if it was a domestic extension. Time for the pictures! Here is the area before anything happened: This is what happened to the poor old shed after an encounter with a sledgehammer: Here’s an initial design of the wall construction. It ended up a bit bigger than this, but it gives an idea of the scale and shape of things. John was kind enough to do a quick design of the control room for me, and the design hasn’t changed much from that initial drawing. Thanks John! Here’s that design again for reference. Next post coming soon! Gareth

So, while I was away at University my dad was hard at work taking care of the construction. I didn’t have much involvement with the planning of this, since I have no idea what it takes to build a house! I do know though, that due to new construction being close to a banking we had to use “piles” under the house. I’ll post some pictures of what happened – but from what I gathered it’s something like a “sprung” floor. I don’t know what effect this will have on the studio, but this was what had to be done. Here are some pictures of the groundwork, and how not to drive a minidigger! Woops! :D :D Piles: :oops: ! Pile Driver?! Piles in the ground The steel cage that sits on the piles Nice and neat ready for........ ....a REALLY big cement mixer: Cement and a bit of brickwork Block and Beams Up we go! :D Cavity wall insulation - Celotex On goes the roof! And this is about where we were this time last year: Gym/Live Room french doors: Studio/Control Room window (earlier picture - forgot to take one at the same point as the above!): Looking in to the studio from the window: I can’t really remember exactly how long everything took; I’ll have to find out exactly when we started on the build. It was at about this time I made a start on constructing bits for inside the studio. The first thing I tried was the soffit frames. While I think of it, I’ve had very minimal woodworking experience. My attitude to this project was that everyone else seems to be making some awesome stuff, so if I put my mind to it I’m sure I’ll do okay. A load of guys have made outstanding studios on this site with little building experience, which really inspired me to have a good go at it. I’ll leave this here for tonight, but I promise to get this diary well up to date in the next week or so! Thanks for reading so far Gareth [Edit:] Not sure why some of the pictures came out big - I'll edit this when I get chance. Will also upload the pics to the site too when I find a decent batch resizer. Don't have the time just yet but I'm away on holiday for a week on Thursday so I'll do it then :) Cheers Gareth [Edit2:] Resized images and re-linked every photo to a perminant album! woo!

A fantastic diary. thanks for sharing it with us. Andre

Looks really nice Gareth, I look forward to seeing more of your construction. /Gash

Hey guys! I’ve been trying to sort out all the photos I’ve taken over the past year today and woah, it’s a nightmare! I’ve been having a look at the three main photo hosting sites and none of them make life easy! Photobucket – Horrible layout and uploader, and doesn’t have a nice gallery view Flickr – 100mb a month upload limit – it would take about 3 months for me to upload all my photos with that! Picasa – Can’t embed images in forum posts – uses some silly layout manager. GAH! :cry: :cry: :cry: Okay so after I got frustrated with all that I decided to stick with Photobucket. I’d have liked to have an application to deal with uploading rather than a web based form, but it’s the only one that actually “works”. I was going to attach each image to the forum since its frustrating when images are missing due to external hosting, but it would take me forever to do that, and I’ll probably put this diary on another forum. To compensate for this, at the end of my diary I’ll zip up all the images I’ve used and post them like that – hope this is okay by you guys! I’ll also post the photobucket album link so that if you wish you can view all the photos I haven’t posted in the diary. The first thing I started on for the internal construction was the soffits, so that’s what I’ll cover here – I’ll try to do things in the order I did them. I made a few threads on the design, so here’s the links for that: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... sc&start=0 http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... ght=#67479 http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... ght=#66540 I don’t have a full sketchup image of the final design on this computer, so I’ll look for that another time. You get the main idea from this though: Anyways, enough jibber jabber! Here’s the pictures: Cutting the MDF "platforms" Chop Chop! Evening out the cuts Frame complete: Time to make some speaker boxes - here's the plan: And heres how it went: Inner skin Air vent Painting with water proof paint All done ready for cement fill :D More to come very soon :D Gareth

Hey guys. Next thing I worked on was the slat absorbers. Started by cutting all the wood for the vertical sections, and then the horizontal sections. To get the most out of the wood I had to do some pretty close cuts. Messed quite a few up too! Getting two horizontal pieces out of a length of wood: After all the triangles were cut I simply trimmed the points off at the required distance. Putting the frames together: Plywood backs Slats in place (not fixed yet – just looking:D) Sanded all the edges to give a nice bevelled appearance With slat fixing points in place (again, just looking!:D) Varnishing :D Next up is the rear wall frames – coming soon! Thanks for viewing Gareth

Look GREAT! Keep it up!

"Lovin it!" Awesome carpentry buddy, and the digger shot brought back memories! :wink: M4 eastbound, A34 southbound, M3 junc 12 - Studio 4! Anytime dude. :wink: :wink: Regards, Lou. 8)

somebody's a bizzy bee!

Thanks for the comments guys – it means a lot to me that you guys who know FAR more about this than me think I’m doing okay! :oops: Lou – Cheers mate, I’m just off J34 on the M4 myself – if you’re ever down this way - I'm sure you could teach me a thing or two! :wink: No big expensive tascams here though - just an old A&H Saber I picked up for cheap 8) :) The carpentry is okay considering I've never done any before, but no-where NEAR the standard of yours though! :shock: DH – Thanks mate, yours is looking ten times as good as mine though! Been reading your diary on the SOS forums – you sure know what you’re doing! Ro – Busy bee indeed! Though not as busy as I’d hoped due to other commitments… hence starting my diary now – makes me look quicker than I actually am 8) This is where things start to get interesting – putting everything in to the studio! I tried to make all the frames as individual sections since at some point I’ll probably move my studio to my own home when the time comes. Here’s the left soffit frame and three of the four slat resonator frames in place – not fixed yet. The slats will be hung starting from the ceiling, rather than standing on the floor, which will leave about 200mm underneath for some mains adaptors if necessary The soffit frames are in two sections, and will be bolted together, and the mains sockets will be attached to the lower section of the frame. The speaker boxes will be filled with cement to add to the weight, and they sit on some “armacush” rubber pucks that I got for free! I’ll find the datasheet for it when I’m back home. Not sure if its exactly right for the job – but we’ll soon find out… or not perhaps since I’m not that sure what I’m looking for!! :? :oops: Anyway - Here’s the right soffit and resonators: There’s only two on this wall, since I need to allow space for two 16u rack units with a shelf on top for my midi controller keyboard. It’s not evident yet, but I made a bit of a mistake here. If the frames are hung starting from the ceiling like on the left wall, the frame ends at about the height of the speaker box!! DOH!! :oops: :oops: To maintain as much symmetry as possible I’ve decided to hang the frame mid-way on the wall, and will just use rockwool to fill the gap at the top. :roll: Here’s some shots with the laminate flooring down and the room nice and tidy! This point was really inspiring – looks a little like a studio here! Next up is the rear wall framing – will get the shots up asap! Thanks for reading Always welcome to ask questions if I haven’t detailed anything enough Cheers Gareth