General question about construction costs of small studio

Hello! My name is Mark, I'm a recent college graduate with two degrees: Music Industry, and Sound Recording. I understand my question is extremely vage, but at this stage in my music career I'm evaluating options. I have interned in a recording studio for about a year, and worked in a different studio for a year. I've also been building my own home studio in a loft over my garage. Since graduating college I've been trying to gather information regarding the cost of constructing a "professional quality" recording studio. I am not to the point of actually designing the building yet, I'm more gathering information to see what's plausible for my future. My question is: What is the general price range that I could expect to pay for the construction materials of a relatively small recording studio. To be more specific I would be looking for: a control room, a live room, one isolation room for guitar amplifiers, and a vocal booth. Now for the sake of this thread I'm ignoring the cost of the lot to build on (because I'm still determining location). For what its worth my going is to stay on the east coast of the US. Also, lets assume that I'm doing all of the construction myself. I'm only interested in the cost of building materials. The building would be ideally built away from a residential area, but I would like the sound from the studio to not travel more than 50 ft from the building. Lets also assume that the building would have a basement for future expansion for perhaps a "studio B" area so isolation would be needed through the floor. The studio would be used for mostly live instrument recording as opposed to electronic music - so the loudest recordings would probably be from hard rock and metal guitar amplifiers. Again I understand the question is extremely vague, but I'm only looking for a ballpark cost (in USD) of how much a building like this may cost me. Thanks!

It depends on the size of each room the amount of money you'll spend on materials.. duh ! So if you dont have ExACT dimentions of the space, a real plan of what you wanna do, you wouldnt know the cost But I tell you one thing tho.. It will be double the amount you thought it would be ! :lol:

sonictruth wrote:

My question is: What is the general price range that I could expect to pay for the construction materials of a relatively small recording studio.

Full price! An idea for the costs can be taken from the square footage costs of residential building. It was said on this board that a more accurate cost would be the square footage cost for executive homes (US). You could expect to pay anywhere from $75(USD) a square foot to $165.00 using local residential building costs(material and labor), depending on where you live. Using these costs X2 might yield a more accurate base, 150 to 300 a square foot. To try and determine costs based on simply adding walls, or modifying an existing structure, etc. requires time and detail and often a few visits to the site to determine this. And an updated material list, petroleum products have gone through the roof, so to speak.

jbassino wrote:

You could expect to pay anywhere from $75(USD) a square foot to $165.00 using local residential building costs(material and labor), depending on where you live. Using these costs X2 might yield a more accurate base, 150 to 300 a square foot.

Thanks! This is the the kind of info I was looking for. I know all too well the difference in location - moving from South Carolina to Connecticut the cost of property at least doubled if not more. Anyways thanks both of you for the responses, it gives me a rough idea to work with :D