newbie needs help with unusual project in triangel rooms

Hi there, This is my second post on the site, I put my first in the building section which I now realise is a classic newbie mistake. Sorry about this. :oops: The first post unfortunately didn’t go so well, so here goes with a second. I have a budget of about 5000 euro to play with and hope to start building in early to mid march so I could sure use some help soon. I also have access to an excellent woodshop and two willing to give free work cabinet makers so I really would like to work with wood wherever possible. I need help mostly with the design / layout of the control room and a few other issues which I have outlined below I will post a second post tonight with some sketch ups and rough design plans and some photos of the rooms. My story is as follows. In my house I have two rooms which I plan to use as a studio. The rooms are a two storey extension onto the side of the house, both are triangle shaped and one is upstairs directly over the other. Does anyone know of a similar situation ???? ( ie upstairs downstairs ) anywhere? All the walls in both rooms are concrete 9” thick cavity block walls, rendered with plaster. The upstairs room (control room) has a small ensuite bathroom which I plan to remove the fittings from and turn into an iso booth.(see sketch up diagram) The walls of this small ensuite room are timber stud partition with plasterboard and plaster. The floor in this whole upstairs room is made of chipboard (seriously!!) and just plain crap, I intend to remove this completely, fill the joists up with semi rigid fibreglass and put in a new hard wood floor (good idea?) in order to get some isolation from the room downstairs which I plan to use as a live room. This upstairs room suffers from issues with bass and is in need of a lot of bass trapping. I plan to use super chunk bass traps in the three corners of the room, floor to ceiling, and also to use some panel type traps in the corners where the walls meet the ceilings and hanging on the walls themselves.. I dont know where to start as regards fittings and furniture etc etc and could really use guidance here. If anyone knows of pre made designs that fit into (or could be adapted to) this type of room please ,please please, post them below. I have looked through the site for weeks and found nothing similar at all. There is also a large single glazed window in this room that i was planning on building a dispersion unit into, is this wise ?? (i was going to make a copy of on on thomanns website ) http://www.thomann.de/ie/celestial_acou ... er_set.htm The downstairs (live room, also triangle) room has a ceramic tiled floor and has a really nice live sound that I wish to keep intact. It also has an archway with no door, leading to a conservatory. I need to build a double glazed door into this archway to isolate the sound of rain hitting the Perspex roof of said conservatory which can be quite loud in bad weather, don’t want to build a wall as I wish to use the conservatory as a chill area for people in the studio and also wish to be able to use it as an extra space in good weather. I really need advice about the installation of this door, it needs to be very soundproof. I also plan on building double sided panels for the walls of this room, one side to have slats and the other to be bass traps, is this wise?? I have seen some plans for them do they work well?? My hope here would be to get value for money ie dual purpose but if they are just a waste of time and energy then I would dearly love to know now!! Also all the doors in the rooms are just standard house doors that are badly fitted is it ridiculous to think I could gain some isolation from these using foam on both sides and some tight fitting seals or should I just try to replace them with fire doors , or buy more of the same and use the two doors in one doorway solution?? This is most important in the ensuite room upstairs as I wish to use that as a vocal booth and need good isolation there. Cheers in advance for the help!!!

This is a diagram of the upstairs room as mentioned in the above post. sorry but my sketchup skills are very few so its pretty basic, It seems my forum skills are pretty basic also as just posted a whole new thread instead of a reply !!! :oops: :oops: I will post some photos of the rooms tomorrow. thanks for looking

Hey Donal, I suggest you post your next sketchup to scale. That little box in the lower right corner in the program will help you determine the exact distances you need, It will make it a lot easier for others to help you. I tried to add on to your plan but, I got something like 1,000 feet for your building (American), and I knew that wasn't 3 meters. :lol: Trust me, it will help :wink:

Hi there, Yeah like i said before, sketchup skills are very basic its my first time using any kind of drawing program. sorry about this. It took me an age to just get it to look like this!!! I started a new one today but scrapped it after two hours, :horse: the measurements were all right but it didnt look like my room at all!!!!! :? I am gonna be pretty busy for the next few days as i have a lot of prep to do for a gig on wednesday, but from then on the studio is going to be my primary focus and i hope to spend a lot more time studying the forum. Has anyone seen a setup like this before with control room upstairs and live room downstairs, If you have please let me know about it!!! donal

Just keep on keepin on, you'll get the hang of it!

Ok so with a bit of help and encouragment from lilthe_envy and a few other folks, i kept on keepin on. Ladies and gentlemen, i proudly present an quite accurate, to scale, model of my rooms. please be nice and dont mock it to much, as it took me quite some time and effort to get it to this stage. I suppose a bit of explaining is in order. so what we have here is two triangle rooms. one on top of the other. the upstairs room will be the control room and downstairs a live room. currently upstairs is between bedroom and home studio status with the strange shape in the corner being an ensuite bathroom with a shower, sink and no tiolet, this ensuite will be an iso booth. The downstairs room is currently an office for my promotions company http://www.myspace.com/sprigproductions It has a large arch way (with no door) leading into a conservatory, the arch in the skp pic is straight but it is round in real life, i just couldnt draw it correctly. ( give me time!!) The three side walls of the rooms are nine inch concrete cavity blocks. The stairs is drawn in quite roughly but in its correct position

Hi again guys. I have been trawling through this site for weeks and weeks now looking for a project similar to my own with no joy whatsoever. Does anyone know of anything like this that has been built with one room upstairs and one downstairs?? I would dearly love to see some thing along the same lines before i start to reallydesign / build. they wouldnt even need to be triangle shaped so to speak i just would like to get an idea of the issues that lie ahead. There is so little info about this kind of idea on the site i am begining to think i might be nuts to attempt it! :? help me please!!!! df

The reasons you are not finding information on one room upstairs and the other downstairs is simple. Most are talked out of making this decision and those that are not tend to not give up information on a regular basis. Even those that attempt to put just one room upstairs can see how, sonically, the building is going to be an issue and being off the ground is going to be an issue. Your project isn't out of the norm, even with the triangular shaped rooms.

Ok, thats a relief a little i suppose. So for instance lets say i cant be talked out of it, which is probably the way it will go as these are the only available rooms to work with. What are the pros and cons of a setup like this. where do i need to start df

Your room dininsions are short even if it was a square or rectangular, it would be a super small room. So you have two small rooms. Your expectations have to really be brought down as to what you can actually get out of the two areas. Your selection of which room to use for recording and which one to use for a"control" room will go a long way in establishing how successful this situation really works. Most here will agree that putting a room upstairs is not always the best option, even if it is the only option. But to place a room used for making sound over top of a room designed to capture this sound(or vice versa) is at best a series of compromises that have not been addressed, at worse, an exercise in futility. The ceiling/floor between the two rooms is your area to be concerned with. This is where most of your sound transfer is going to be taking place and possible where a large part of your money and energy will go. You mention 9” thick cavity block walls so is it safe to think these block are, overall, not filled? Not having anything to go on towards what kind/type or loudness levels you create or expect to generate I can only guess at most of this. But with small rooms, anything that begins to get loud is going to give the listener some real hearing problems. Any type of absorption will most likely have to go directly on the walls or you run the risk of having it right in your face. Knocking the acute angles out of the room that the walls create by the triangular design using bass trapping is an area you have to work on. Those angles are going to be an issue.

Hi there again. cheers for picking this up with me!!. My thoughts also were that the floor was going to be a serious issue. As you can see i didnt even touch it in the skp. file that i posted. ( will draw one today) At the moment it is just bare bones, one sheet of chipboard (seriously) joists with no insulation and a sheet of gypsum plasterboard rendered in plaster and then stipple (stipple is like a paint on decorative plaster, looks like drips) My plan was to remove the chipboard from above, put in another tight fitting later of gypsum plaster directly over the allready in place ceiling and caulk it into place tightly. i was then going to fil lthe cavities between the joists of the floor with densely packed fibreglass or rockwool. Next i was going to install a brand new thick heavy style wooden floor, and possibly a heavy carpet and underlay, although i am not to sure about the carpet. Any advice here would be much welcomed. The room downstairs has a poured concrete slab floor over compacted grit and stones. it is covered with heavy ceramic tiles. To the best of my knowledge it is a seperate slad to the one that the rest of the house sits on but it does join up to that slab where the door to the downstairs room is in the skp.file is it also runs through the conservatory. My basic thoughts on the control room being upstairs was that it would be less noisy than the live room and also it has that small bathroom which i can use as a vocal booth. however the small bathroom is on the same floor as the upstairs room and this area will need some isolation work to the floor. It is safe to assume that these walls are not filled with anything, if you google image cavity block u can see very well what i mean. With regard to purpose and what my expectations are, i dont expect to have a world class studio at the end of this build but i would like to have a functional setup. I dont plan on ever having a drum kit in any of these rooms or screaming guitarists either as proximity to other people is an issue as you know from my last post!!! Mainly i want to have a decent enough production facility to work with singersongwriters who want midi production and good quality vocal and accoustic instrument facilies (hence keeping the booth rather than tearing it down for the extra space) I also want to be able to produce my own music (dub, dnb, trance, irish trad, folk and ethnic stuff) Like you said this floor / ceiling is going to be my main issue, between upstairs downstairs and also the booth area upstairs. but like i said before i do have access to pro woodshop and a lot of help so major work can be done here while still keeping cost somewhat reasonable. I will go and do an skp cross section of the floor now and later tonight i will also post photos of said floor and the rest of the rooms. Cheers for the help df

ok so here is a before and after of what i gonna do to the floors. I am going to do a bit more research tonight to what way the joists are alligned but i need to lift some floor boards and wont have help until this evening to do that. pics on way soon Also is there an expert on floors on the site that i could consult with ?? cheers df

Hi again. Few more things. In the floor diagram above i had proposed to put in the extra layer of gyprock plasterboard from above, between each joist so as not to have to remove the ceiling that is in place allready. Is the original ceiling strong enough to hold this up or do i risk a collapse going this way. If it is to weak to do this would more screws from below help or is this deathramental. Bass trap plan for the control room is pasted below. All the yellow things are super chunk traps. My plan was floor to ceiling in all available corners. all around the window from the edge to 30cm out floor walls and ceiling and also all round room at top corner where wall meets ceiling. I was also planning on making some reversible wooden panel resonator / bass traps for both of the side walls and also building a removable disperion unit to cover the window when needed. Thoughts anyone???

Regarding your floor / ceiling area. It would be better to demo existing ceiling material and install RSIC-1 Clip and hat track, to begin adding some measure of isolation. But you have not defined what type of floor joist this is, the thickness. It is most likely a substantial framing member, but who here can tell?

Hi again. just had a look at the resilient channels and hat strips, I can see the benefit immediately without looking at detailed specs and testing. I will run with them if i can find a supplier in ireland / uk, provided they are not ludicrously over priced. Anyone know a good supplier?? As for the joists for sure they are timber probably 8"x2" beams. i am not sure which direction they run or how they are mounted in the walls, I plan on removing some floor tonight to determine accuratly what the situation is there. cheers df

Good answer. When you start thinking about re-installing the floor, this is the same kind of process you need to keep your mind on. Adding piles of material to the top side of the joists without some consideration as to how this material will interact with each other, the structure and the area below is not going to make the problem go away.

Sorry I havent been in for a few days Its been pretty busy round here. Gonna go take them pics now and will put em up later tonight.. Chers DF

ok here goes with some pics, i hope they fit ok i just spent ages fixing them to the right size This first one is the cr room exit to left and booth door to the right. taken inside the cr The wall to left is concrete 9 inch cavity block and wall to other left is bog standard 4 inch wooden stud.

This is cr rom window and to the left is the booth wall 4 inch wooden stud The cammo thing is a double bed being used as a makeshift bass trap Its not very effective but it did give some improvement.

door to cr from top of stairs with booth wall in front and window in rear the floor of cr entry door

Live room door and stairs concrete cavity wall

Live room door and wall angles from inside the live room

Live room wall angles (see earlier sketchup (tooscale on page one of this thread))

Live room angled wall and archway too conservatory