Advice Wanted (studio design in an odd L shaped room)

Hello, I hope I got all the info needed here. I am located in Edmonton Alberta Canada. My wife and I are building a house and most of the basement will be turned into my music studio. I'd like to thank anyone who gives me info right away! I am hoping to get some feedback on the design of the studio. I have read quite a bit on this forum and researched acoustics/dampening/ etc. quite a bit. I am primarily a composer for theatre and film. But, this often means recording small groups. I rarely record drums so isolation between rooms is not paramount. I also live in a rural area so noise coming in and out of the studio is not important. I am not very loud. My primary goal is to have a good dead listening room and a live room that is dead on one end and live on the other. I'm also interested in having a small vocal/amp dead room close to my mixing area. Construction will be insulated 4 inch walls (as I stated above isolation isn't too important for me -but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise). The ceiling will be made by stuffing insulation between the floor joists and then stapling fabric underneath it to hold the insulation up. I'll run finishing material under that every few feet to keep it taught and nice looking. I'll keep the cement floor and stain it some interesting design. In the pictures red material is absorption and blue is QRD diffusion. The green at the back of the control room is TBA. I'm still worried about standing bass waves there and may put in a Membrane absorber depending on what REW gives me when I'm in there. Dimensions are: Control Room H 9' W 10' L 14 ' Main Room H 9' W 13' L 23 ' Booth H 9' W 4' L 5' Note that the 9' height is to the bottom of the rafter. If you include the area stuffed with insulation then the height (to the bottom of the second floor of the building) is about 10'. My budget is $1000, $1500. However all the structural work is included in the build. All this has to cover is the absorption and diffusion. I own all the windows doors etc. already. I am hoping to get some feedback on the design. Will it work? Are there serious acoustical issues I have created etc. Thank you so much!

The CR is a bit small, below the 1500 cubic feet that I recommend. You will need more trapping than usual. It could work, no obvious issues that jump out at me. I would recommend that for the sake of anyone upstairs that you insulate between the joists and then cover the ceiling with a layer or two of gypsum board to improve the sound isolation. You have enough room to cover the ceiling with absorbent or hang a cloud over the mix position for RFZ. For the Vocal booth, the insulation between the joists and covered with fabric is a great idea as long as there will not be any noise coming from upstairs... You will need a lot of trapping in that booth. The Tracking room is great with all the different areas and angles and can work for a variety of groups/instruments. Cheers, John

John, Thanks so much! Got 1 follow up question. 1) If I move the front wall of the recording booth forward 1 foot (making it larger), and keep the fabric ceiling the new dimensions would be as follows. H 10' (if we count the space between floor joists as height given there will be no thick sound barrier there) W 10' L 15' That gets the 1500 cubic feet. However, I'd have to loose the gypsum board for isolation. The only person upstairs is my wife who works during the day (when I do most of my work). Perhaps the size is more important than the isolation? Thoughts. As for extra trapping. I didn't show all the ceiling bass traps I'm planing on putting in as it was tricky to do so in sketch up. I have a feeling I'll have to play a little bit of that by ear when I get into the space! Thanks again for the info. Luke

Forgot, As for sound coming in there is very little of it. I'm in the countryside and I got almost no traffic, the occasional dog bark is about as bad as it gets. So that shouldn't be an issue. Luke

10 by 10 is not a good idea. Modal problems. Try to stick with a good ratio. Here's a link to my room mode calculator. http://jhbrandt.net/RoomModeCalculatorSAE.xls Pop in the numbers to check for the best modal response. An inch can make a big difference. :wink: Cheers, John

Like John said, you have a small room, and there is no way you can get it usefully larger. It is going to need heavy treatment anyway, so maybe the counter.intuitive approach is to make it better by making it fractionally smaller. :shock: Also like john said: inches count for good ratios. Like you said: you need isolation. So maybe the solution is to drop the ceiling a bit, fit in some isolation, and get a better ratio to boot! For example, right now you are in the ball-park of Louden's fifth best ratio. By making your dimensions H=8'10", W=10", L=12'4" you hit Sepmeyer's second best ratio right on the head, and have plenty of room for great isolation in your ceiling. Good mode spacing, reasonable Bonello diagram, reasonable overall numbers, just a bit tight on volume. I came up with that after about 90 seconds of playing around with Bob Gold's calculator, and it does eat into your room volume, but you can probably do even better by spending some time with it. You also know better than we do which dimensions you can change more easily, so you can fiddle with them more knowledgeably, until you come up with a good ratio that maximizes room volume and also leaves you space for good isolation. Regarding your bass traps, you said "I have a feeling I'll have to play a little bit of that by ear when I get into the space!". Not really true. Small rooms need lots of bass trapping, period. The trick is to get that done while NOT also killing the highs! So plug in all the bass trapping you can, make it thick and large, but then also take into account that you do NOT want to kill the other end of the spectrum, so think about things like covering the bass traps with thin reflective plastic, and using slot walls liberally to keep the room lively while also getting good broad-band treatment. etc.

As for sound coming in there is very little of it. I'm in the countryside and I got almost no traffic, the occasional dog bark is about as bad as it gets. So that shouldn't be an issue.

No wind? No rain? No planes flying over? No noise elsewhere in the house (TV, vacuum cleaner, people walking around, phones ringing, people talking, pots and pans rattling in the kitchen, dishes in the sink, doors opening and closing, toilet flushing, radio, water running, etc....)? :) Small things, easy to overlook, but disastrous if they ruin your once-in-a-lifetime perfect take of the best performance ever! - Stuart -

Thanks so much! This is great information. That mode calculator is wonderful! I hear what you two are saying about isolation, lowering the ceiling and moving the walls to make sure the ratio is good. I will plan on lowering the ceiling, stuffing insulation in and having gypsum board for both the control room and the booth ceilings. I think I may still leave the fabric on the "live," room ceiling though. Most of the stuff I record will be done in the booth and the stuff in the live room will be quite loud. I think I can get away with having bleed from the outside world there. As for room dimensions. I'm seeing what you mean about a few inches making a big difference. I went back to my drawings and found that the width is actually 122'' not 10'. However, I can't really be sure of the "exact" measurements till the basement is poured. I'll have to wait. But, based on my drawing I came up with the following dimensions: L 168" W 122" H 108" It has good Modal response. But the Bonello Distribution isn't quite as good as what you recommended soundman. Two Questions in regards to that. 1) In the bonello distribution chart do you want to have the maximum possible difference between ideal and actual modes (assuming the actual is higher), or are you good as long as the actual is higher than the ideal? 2) Assuming I create a RFL around the monitors and seat in the control room can I use the rest of the ceiling (where the bass traps don't interfere) for diffusion so that I don't kill the highs? Thanks so much! I really appreciate the help. Luke

Luke, The "Actual" bar in any given 1/3-octave band, should be equal to or exceed the "Ideal" bar. If all "Actual" bars exceed by 50%, this is very good indeed. The room is really too small for diffusors. To maintain a balanced frequency decay, I suggest using some of John's slanted resonators in the RFZ and covering the corner traps with 1/8" plywood polys. You need as much trapping as you can get in that room. Cheers, John