New home studio with odd ceiling construction

Hi Guys, After I bad start on the forum acting like a typical newbie, I tried to make a post worth reading... Up to you guys to decide if I succeeded! :shot: Where am I? The Netherlands, Flevoland What do I record? Mainly blues mixed with a bit of soul, funk, jazz and rock. I’m a guitar player first but like to play around with different instruments and record myself in the process. What kind of equipment do I use? I’ve got an electronic Drum kit and a MIDI keyboard/controller and two Line6 Pods (guitar amp modulators, PODxt and POD X3 version) for recording electric guitar and bass guitar. In addition to that I’ve got a Shure SM57 and Rode NT1a mic for recording vocals and accoustic guitar. I’ve also got a tube amp (Epiphone Electar Tube 10) which I sometimes use for recording electric guitar, but so far I’m having a hard time getting a proper tone recorded through the amp. The tone usually sounds distant and muddy I don’t have an analog mixing board and record completely ‘in the box’. I use the Berhinger BFC2000-WH midi controller to make my mixing life easier. I also use it to impress my friends by having the faders move automagically! For monitoring at the moment I use the Beyerdynamic DT-770 PRO headphones but I’ve just ordered two Yamaha H560 speakers for proper monitoring. I’ve also ordered two heavy stands for the speakers to position them properly behind my mixing desk. The MIDI equipment and Line6 pods allow me to play and record with headphones so I don’t have to worry about neighbours or girlfriend getting upset. What am I attempting to do? Create a good listening environment so I can mix my own recorded material through the Yamaha H580 monitoring speakers. I do not mix on loud volumes (definitely not higher than 85db) or weird hours so soundproofing the studio whilst mixing isn’t required. Most of my recording I do through MIDI equipment so it’s easy to play on lowered volume. I do however like to have the option to record with my ‘real’ guitar amp and also occationally a friend playing the trumpet. Of course this involves soundproofing and accoustic treatment the room or a specific section of the room. I was thinking of building an isolation booth for this purpose so my neighbours won’t be complaining to much. I’m not looking for a complete silenced booth but if the sound of my guitar amplifier can be cut in half it would be great. I haven’t got a decibel meter (yet!!) so unsure how loud my amp actually gets, but it’s a small 10Watt amp. If I can manage to build a reasonable silent booth with my limited building skills I could decide to save up for a proper amp though! Where am I right now with the project? Deciding on the proper layout of the furniture and where to use treatment. I'm also investigating if it’s feasible to build an isolation booth inside the studio. As usual I was getting a bit ahead of myself and bought a accoustic kit from auralex which is supposed to help with mid and high frequency reflections. I should have used the money to buy a Db meter.. :? I expect the kit to arrive the coming week so haven’t applied anything to the room yet. I also bought two rugs for the room to dress it up a bit and was silently hoping on a miracle change of the room sound (I learned micacles don’t happen quite as often as one would hope..) What’s my budget? Lets say between EUR 1000,- & 1500,- but if required I can stretch a bit above that.. Of course EUR 10,- or 15,- would be a lot better! What do I have to work with? I live in a quiet domestic area with mainly young families in a ‘row house’ so have neighbours on both sides. The music room is resided on the attic which is on the second floor of the house. The attic is (somewhat) evenly divided in two rooms, I got the room without the staircase but with a unusual placed wall containing a fireplace funnel. All inside walls are made of thin plasterboard. In the other room is our HVAC system and it is placed against the wall dividing the two rooms. It does produce noise when turned on but I’ve got clear agreements with my girlfriend to not use it when I’m making music. The two outside walls facing my neighbors are sloped and do not connect to their houses directly. Against the sloped walls, thin plasterboard of about 80cm heigh are fastened creating an empty triangular space behind it. There’s not much going on in this void exept for some plumbing pipes. I was hoping to cut out a panel and put my PC behind the panels to eliminate some of the noise coming from the fans, etc. There actually already is a panel in another part of the room which was created by the previous owners to access the plumbing pipes. Facing the garden there are two big sliding glass doors of 220x250cm. These sliding doors are also the biggest noise makers in the housing block. When a neighbour opens or closes their big sliding door, a low rumbling sound is clearly audible in my home. I suspect it’s because the concrete floors and walls on the ground- and first floor are all directly connected to the neighbours. Across the sloped walls and roof there are solid wooden support beams of 7x16cm. These run all the way through the complete attic extending to the other room. The working area is 435x410cm and the highest point in the room is 260cm. See the attached Sketchup model for more detailed measurements. What’s it made of?

The inside walls are all made of thin plasterboard. The outside wall containing the sliding doors is made of bricks which are covered by wooden planks. The sloped walls and roof have roofing tiles on the outside The floor is made of thick concrete, covered with linoleum.

What’s the plan? Main priority is to get a good sounding room for listening back to recorded material. Since it’s a small room with lots of corners I will need proper accoustic treatment to counter flutter echo’s, uneven bass response, etc. I also want to keep some room for comfortably working with my instruments (Guitar, Electronic drums and Keyboard) I’m still struggling with the position of my desk. Stuart kindly pointed out it’s important to have symmetry on both sides and suggested to place it in front of the window. This does however doesn’t effectively make use of the space in the studio for my instruments. Therefore I want to see if I could put the desk against the sloped wall. This will also allow me to put my PC behind the wooden panels and I will keep more room for the rest of my equipment. To try to create a (sort-of) symmetric room I want to build and place broadband walls in front of the windows so both sides of the mixing desk have a straight wall. If I put these broadband walls on wheels it also gives me some flexibility to move them around when required. To combat the mid & high frequency reflections I’m hoping placing the auralex material in the right places will help me. For bass trapping I’m thinking of building bass traps myself using some of the great posts here on the forum. Hopefully this setup improves the sound of my studio a lot, which does leave me with a proper way of recording live sounds. I want to see if I can build a isolation booth where I can record my vocals and guitar amp without disturbing the neighbours or girlfriend. However, I do not want to completely reconstruct the room to so it becomes unusable for future owners. That means I have to build an isolation booth that’s (reasonably) easy to take down again. The most logical spot to place my booth would be between the inner straight wall and the wall containing the fireplace funnel. The only problem here are the dimensions, it’s only 130cm wide and maximum 200cm long. I’ll also have to incorporate a sloped wall in the booth to accommodate for the sloped walls of the house itself. I’ve been busy with Sketchup the last couple of days (really love the program btw!) and managed to draw the room with just about the right dimensions. Here are some screenshots which hopefully make some sense… A sideview of the room: Top view of the room: Sideview without furniture: Room dimensions topview(metric system!!): Room dimensions frontview(metric system!!): Here’s the sketchup model: What questions do I have?

Are there any obvious flaws in my design? Will the position of the desk be alright or do I really have to face it towards the window to get somewhat of a accurate sound response? I do see I put the desk a bit to much against the wall in my attached screens so it's not near the 38% rule.. Will the broadband soundproofed panels be enough to properly treat the windows? If i'm going to build the isolation booth in that tight corner, will the walls of the room act like an extra leaf, causing potentially a triple (or more) leaf system? Is there a pill available that could turn me in an incredible musician so I actually have something good to record? Are there any other questions I should ask myself? Are there any other questions I should ask you guys?

:yahoo: Cheers, Thiezn

Hi, and welcome. There is an announcement at the top of the forum about what to do to assure getting as many responses as possible. The announcement leads to this post (click here). Actually, several people, who are experts on this forum, will not reply if you don't do what is written in that post. Many others who are very helpful, will not reply out of respect for the moderators' wishes. That said, I see several problems with your layout, and have some comments on your questions: 1) Symmetry: Your mix position must be located on the center line of the room, and the room must be symmetrical about that center line, at least for the area in front of the mix position (between the front wall and your head). Behind that it isn't so important, but in front of that it is absolutely necessary. If not, you will never be able to do a great mix that translates well. You did not do your room in SketchUp yet, and your diagrams are not to scale, so it really hard to say what you need to do to fix that, but most likely your mix position will have to face the "sliding window" in order to get ceiling symmetry. Model your room accurately in SketchUp and post it here. 2) Speakers: They should fire down the longest dimension of the room, not across the short dimension, nor diagonally. In your case, that is not going to be possible, since the only arrangement that makes sense symmetrically is to face the sliding window. But I'd say that symmetry is more important in this case, so you'll have to live with speakers firing down the short axis. 3) Geometry: The speakers should be angled such that the acoustic axes intersect at 60° about 15 cm behind your head, and your head should be about 38% of the distance from the front wall to the back wall. The speakers should be set at the same height above the floor as your ears are when you are sitting at the mix position, which is normally around 1.2 m above the floor. (That's the height of the acoustic axis of the speakers that I'm talking about, not the height of the speaker top or bottom). 4) First Reflection Points: You say:

"I understand that the best way to approach this is to sit in front of the DAW and have someone put a mirror against the walls. Then put the accoustic foam on all spots where you see your speakers."

True, but that is only for your first reflection points. You are going to need a LOT more treatment than just that! The treatment at the first reflection points needs to be about 2 inches deep at least (depending on what it is!), and needs to be a bit larger than the zones where you can see the speakers in the mirror. And don't forget the ceiling! There is a first reflection point up there too.

Because of the sloped ceiling I’m not sure if I should place accoustic material on there as well.

Yes. If you can see the speakers in the mirror, then that is a reflection point, regardless of the angle. Treat that point. That's why you use a mirror! It automatically takes into account angles. If light bounces off the mirror to your eyes at that angle, then high frequency sound will follow the same path. So if you can see it, treat it. 5) Bass traps:

Also not sure if I should look into getting bass traps and where should I place these then?

Yes, yes, yes and YES! It's a small room: therefore it WILL need bass trapping, and lots of it. Bass taps work best in corners. so use every corner that you can, and make each trap large and deep. The best bass traps are called "superhcunks" and you make them yourself by staking up mineral wool or semi-rigid fiberglass in the corners. That might not be so easy in your case, due to the angled walls, but you can build some kind of frame to keep it in place. Search the forum for "superchunk" to find how to build them. Second best is large sheets of thick (4" at least) semi-rigid fiberglass, such as OC 703, placed diagonally across the corners. All of the corners. There are 12 corners in a normal rectangular room, but you have more in your room. Treat as many as you possibly can. If you don't have good bass trapping in your room you will never get close to having even room response in the low end, so your bass will be muddy, blurry and highly variable around the room. You will not be able to do a decent mix that translates well. You might be able to do a mix that sounds good with your head held still at the mix position, but if you play that mix in any other room it will sound lousy. It won't work. If you find that all that bass trapping takes out too much of your high end, then you can wrap the bass trapping in plastic to keep the highs in the room. 6) The "fireplace tunnel". That is a large flat hard reflective surface right behind your head and speakers. It will need to be treated with lots of absorption. 7) The Window: That's another large flat hard reflective surface, and it will be right behind your speakers, where it will be creating all kinds of comb filtering and phasing artifacts. That will need treatment too, at the very least with some kind of absorptive panels placed up against the glass, right behind the speakers. 8) Floor: You didn't mention the floor, but since that looks like an attic space I'm guessing that the floor is just wood. If so, leave it like that: Don't bother with carpet or anything else until you have completed the rest of the room and tested it properly, to see where your remaining problems lie. If you still have mid - high issues then you can use some of the floor area to treat that, perhaps with throw rugs, carpet, or some such. 9) Also floor: If it is a typical wooden attic floor then it is basically a large drum head that will resonate at certain frequencies. You need to do your best to stop direct transmission of vibration into the floor, or it will sing along with you! So get or make some really heavy speaker stands, such as with concrete blocks stacked up, or hollow steel filled with dry sand, or some such, then isolate your speakers from those too, with foam, rubber, or some such. Auralex sells special pads for this exact purpose. Also isolate anything else that makes a noise, such as guitar amps, drums, etc. If you have acoustic drums, build an isolated riser to help minimize impact noise getting into the floor. 10) You didn't mention isolation, so I guess your family and neighbors really love listening to you playing and mixing? And also that you really don't mind outside sounds getting in to your recordings? I sure hope that is the case, because since that is an attic, isolating it effectively is not going to be easy or cheap. That's the obvious things that spring to mind. I'd suggest that you remodel your room accurately in SketchUp, take into account the above to re-do your layout, then post again to see of there are more issues that need t be taken care of. And don't forget to FIRST OF ALL read the post that I linked you to at the top. - Stuart -

Why not use the little area as a booth?

Thanks for the helpful replies guys and my apologies for not reading the post rules first :oops: I've downloaded sketchup yesterday evening, what a great program! I never thought drawing was this easy..! I'll work on my design and try to incorporate your suggestions, and then update my post so it follows the forum guidelines.. Cheers, Thijs

Hi Gents, Since I made just about every mistake the average newbie makes posting here i've completely re-edited my first post for a more accurate description of my plans. :shock: Cheers, Thiezn

Dag Thiezn, welkom bij JLS :mrgreen: Sketch-up is prolly one of greates progs for free. I've been designing my ass of during the last years, just using SU. From studios to cabins, doors and even my garden :) Check the online vid tuts at the official SU website, they are a GREAT help! Looking forward to your design.

Bedankt Ro! :lol: I've gone ahead and started building my first broadband panel. Since you guys seem to like to seen pictures I thought I'd post some here. Keep in mind that I'm terrible working with my hands so these panels won't be the prettiest one you'll ever see.. Material used for a single panel 2x vurenhout(whitewood?) 2036x69x18 mm 2x vurenhout(whitewood?) 600x69x18 mm 4x Rockwool 221 panel(55kg/m3) 1000x600 mm (bought at bouwmaat in Almere) 1x Roll of Cotton 2200x1400 mm Bunch of screws staplegun So there you go, doesn't look to bad for a first try! Still have two more panels to go so I can place them in front of the big sliding glass doors. I decided to get myself a smaller desk so I can face it towards the window like Stuart recommended earlier. I did some calculations for the optimal listening position... Behind the desk, almost against the broadband panels I'll put my monitor speakers 190cm apart, and then my mixing position will be about 165cm from the panels. That should put me about 38% in the room and my head in a 60 degree angle of the speakers. The only thing remaining is to attach the Auralex accoustic panels to the walls and ceiling to treat the remaining first reflection points. Hopefully this would give me a reasonable stereo image and even frequency range, so I can finally create more balanced mixes.. Cheers, Thiezn :shot:

Hi Guys, :yahoo: Yesterday evening I asked a friend to come around to hold up a mirror on the walls so I could find the first reflection spots. After that I spent all evening sticking the accoustic foam up on the walls and ceiling. Since I had quite a bit of spare foam left I stuck some of it in the small cove so I can use that to record live vocals and my small 10W guitar amp. The room is really coming together now and can already clearly hear a (positive) difference in the sound of the room. I've been standing in different spots in the room clapping and shouting to hear the difference and am getting a pretty even response througout the room already. The only think i do notice is if I put my head in the corners of the room there's a definite increase in bass frequencies going on (as expected), so the next thing to do is to create some bass absorbers in the various corners. The first corners to tackle are the ones in front of my mixing position and the ones in the small cove. After that, i'll do some more clapping, shouting and listening to see if i need any additional treatment... I do still wonder though what the effects of the large wooden beams are on the sound of the room. Of course they introduce more corners, and I can hear the bass frequencies are a bit more audible when you keep your head in those corners. On the other hand they will probably act as diffusors as well.. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Would it be neccesary to treat all these corners (!!!) for getting a more even bass response? Here are some pictures of the current situation.. Please don't mind the mess :) Cheers, Thiezn :wink:

Hai Thiezn , nice to see some progress. And yes, I'd treat some corners for bass absorption to make it really 'perfect'

Hi Thiezn - check out this thread to see the amount of treatment needed in a space like yours. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13069