DrD garage studio build

Hello everyone, First off thank you for such a great resource. I have been studying this forum for about a week and think I learned enough to start designing a small home studio. Soundman2020 has I good opening e-mail so I am going to use that as a template. Hope you don’t mind. Where am I? St. Petersburg, FL My Goal? My goal is to build a studio in my garage that I can mix and track at a mid to high volume without disrupting neighbors or my sleeping wife and kids. I need three Separate rooms. A machine room, a control room and a vocal booth. Where am I now in the project? Designing the studio and built the wall that will separate my room in a room from the rest of the house. How loud am I? I don’t know. I will go with soundman2020’s numbers and say 115 db (C ) What am I recording? Whatever I can fit in to my booth or control room. Mostly hiphop vocals but I will do all generes. What is my budget? Don’t tell my wife but around 10-15k. I have a lot of the material on hand so I may be able to hit these numbers. What do I have to work with? My house is cinder block construction. The garage was originally 20’ long. I built a wall to split the garage into two sections the small part will be the laundry room and the leftover will be the studio space 12x 12.5. The north wall is the garage door that will be removed and framed in. The west wall is block and will be fured out and dry walled. The east wall is plaster and separates the garage from the living room. I just built the south wall and it is 2x4 frame with dry wall on the side facing away from the studio. What questions do I have? I have a preliminary design I would like looked over for mistakes and criticism.

It looks good so far, but let me give you a suggestion. Instead of splaying the wall itself, make the rooms rectangular, and then splay new false walls giving you the angle so you use that space for acoustic treatment like bass traps. So far, you are wasting all that space between the existing wall and the splayed wall.

Thanks jbassino, Ok here is an update. The wall between the vocal booth and the control room i left splayed because there is no lost space.

Hi DLee, and welcome!

I have a preliminary design I would like looked over for mistakes and criticism.

I prefer that first design, since the second one kills the symmetry in your room. Symmetry is very important, so you don't want to lose that. Have you considered other layouts? It seems to me that there is a lot of wasted space in that "airlock" between the living room door and the two rooms. Maybe if you re-arrange things, you could use that space for a larger booth, a larger CR, or maybe even a second booth, or storage.... Is it possible to move that living room door, or is that pretty much fixed? Regarding the booth: You don't need to angle the left wall, since the right wall is already angled (don't worry about symmetry in there: symmetry is not important for the booth, but it is fundamental for the CR). Your booth would be a bit bigger if you didn't angle that wall. You could maybe angle the front wall of your booth a bit (the one with the door in it), which would make your booth even bigger, and would help control flutter between front and back walls, as they are parallel at present. Apart from that, I think your basic layout is fine! My only suggestion would be to do the design in SketchUp and post it here, so that others can maybe play around with it a bit. - Stuart -

As an aside, for double framed walls, the air is often thought of as sealed. I realize that yours is, so long as the main entry door is shut. What kind of access/traffic does that MainDoor get, is what I would be thinking. If, in the middle of tracking, your spring is modulated by the release of the compressed air just from simply opening this door, it changes the effective ability of your isolation, does it not? Other things that happen is the mass-spring-mass of a double wall is not where your control room wall and booth wall are out in the "main entry" way. These will either be open and exposed insulation or you will have already reduced your isolation from installing sheetrock directly to these areas. Essentially you will undo all your good work of decoupling by coupling this area back together. Still, if you have thought this area through then you are one step ahead of the game and already aware of the potential weakening and are devising remedies of which several exist. In any event, if this were my build, I would have to go ahead and do the interior wall all the way around the perimeter, not just part of the way. P.S. Which introduces the ceiling and how this will add to the potential reduction in isolation.

I prefer that first design, since the second one kills the symmetry in your room. Symmetry is very important, so you don't want to lose that.

Everything I have read so far has echoed this point. To clarify my rushed drawing I was just drawing the actual framed walls. Jbassino suggested building a false wall to maintain symmetry And gain some room for bass trapping. I think I will stick with the original because after further research it is better to have one big spring then many small ones. I can dry wall the inside of my control room for one leaf and the outside garage wall will be my second leaf (MSM).

Have you considered other layouts? It seems to me that there is a lot of wasted space in that "airlock" between the living room door and the two rooms.

Yes about a dozen. I am open for more suggestions if you have them.

Maybe if you re-arrange things, you could use that space for a larger booth, a larger CR, or maybe even a second booth, or storage.... Is it possible to move that living room door, or is that pretty much fixed?

I see I need to give a better picture of my layout. That area is my machine room. I have a server rack ( to my wife’s dismay) that needs to live there. Along with storage for wires and what not. Attached is my full layout.

Regarding the booth: You don't need to angle the left wall, since the right wall is already angled (don't worry about symmetry in there: symmetry is not important for the booth, but it is fundamental for the CR). Your booth would be a bit bigger if you didn't angle that wall. You could maybe angle the front wall of your booth a bit (the one with the door in it), which would make your booth even bigger, and would help control flutter between front and back walls, as they are parallel at present.

Great idea I picked up quite a bit of room with that suggestion.

Apart from that, I think your basic layout is fine! My only suggestion would be to do the design in SketchUp and post it here, so that others can maybe play around with it a bit.

Thanks. I will try to work with sketchup. Regards, Dusty

As an aside, for double framed walls, the air is often thought of as sealed. I realize that yours is, so long as the main entry door is shut. What kind of access/traffic does that MainDoor get, is what I would be thinking. If, in the middle of tracking, your spring is modulated by the release of the compressed air just from simply opening this door, it changes the effective ability of your isolation, does it not?

No traffic will be going through during tracking

Other things that happen is the mass-spring-mass of a double wall is not where your control room wall and booth wall are out in the "main entry" way. These will either be open and exposed insulation or you will have already reduced your isolation from installing sheetrock directly to these areas. Essentially you will undo all your good work of decoupling by coupling this area back together. Still, if you have thought this area through then you are one step ahead of the game and already aware of the potential weakening and are devising remedies of which several exist.

I have thought of this issue but have not fully worked out how to properly deal with it. I will not recouple my isolated walls.

In any event, if this were my build, I would have to go ahead and do the interior wall all the way around the perimeter, not just part of the way.

Not sure what you mean here. I have two isolated sealed rooms inside one big room.

P.S. Which introduces the ceiling and how this will add to the potential reduction in isolation.

I have not even started to plan the ceiling yet. I know i will slant it but thats about it so far. Thanks for the feedback Regards, Dusty

Aloha and welcome to the forum, How tall are your ceilings" Aloha 8)

How tall are your ceilings"

I have not designed the ceiling yet but the space I have to work with is 8'6". so my room that I will build my rooms in is 12' x 12'6" long and the ceiling is 8'6" regards Dusty

Dusty. Yeah, I what i meant its to make it rectangular, but simetrical ! Anyway, this is a design John did quite time ago for another guy, I rotated it so it fits your entry door.. maybe you could get this design to gain maximun space and modify it for your needs. Maybe find a way to put bass traps all the way, not just that corner. Cheers Javier

My build is over 50% complete. Here are some pics of my progress.