Studio built into a bistro with 110'x40' of space to build

Hi :) I'm so glad such a forum exists and people are so incredibly helpful to each other in solving so many tedious problems. I'm here for your help in designing a large studio and eventually building it, along with selecting euipment, tools and everything else :D I'm an industrial engineer and a business analyst based in Iowa City, Iowa and I mostly deal with ergonomics and control system design for unmanned vehicles. I have no experience or connection with music production what so ever. However, few months back I went through a research process at the end of which I decided I ought to build a recording studio! The plan is that I build the studio, get the more famous and talented studio in town to move into my new studio and work some magic on a daily basis there after. But the entire music industry is suffering the same fate the publishing industry is currently going through and there is lesser and lesser money for each professional. The "production house" is being replaced by individual players working with off the shelf digital equipment that produces pretty good results at times. And this forum is proof enough that anyone out there with motivation and reasonable amount of cash to spare can set up a recording studio in their basement, in warehouses, in old castles and even inside old cargo crates. So where is the value in setting up a large studio? What does a so called full fledged studio offer that a home studio cannot? While I'm still thinking about those questions I have come to a conclusion about one thing. Every large studio will have to come up with serious innovations or consolidate (merge) with other studios to keep the overheads down and stay competitive with home based studios. I decided I ought to try a different approach to the whole business of recording and at the same time give my mates in Iowa something better to do than to sit around at bars and drink lite beer (according to me, lite bear is an insult to every kind of beverage out there :x ). Goal: 1. Design and build a high end recording studio with a control room, 1 isolation booth and a live room that accommodates 50 to 70 audience members 2. Build a bistro around the CR 3. Let people watch every process that goes on inside a recording studio while the people working in the studio pretend that they are not a museum exhibit :shock: 4. Recording a wide range of music including very loud metal groups and ensembles with up to 15 members The third goal is like doing a reality tv show but instead of the drama inside a recording studio being broadcast on tv, people get to see it in person. What's the point of this? I believe that people will appreciate the craft more if they get to see it first hand and will most probably be inspired to become a part of it. And yes, that is when they get hooked and hand me their wallets :wink: Of course all of this might not work out but I'd like to make this studio coz I believe in the idea. Think of it like sticking a control room behind the stage area of this enclosure designed by John: Buddha Bar, Bayron Bay, Australia Challenges: 1. Managing cost 2. Incorporating glass into the studio design while making the various rooms acoustically well balanced 3. Blocking off the view of what happens inside the rooms at certain times (its possible that some artists will absolutely hate the idea of being stared at while they work) 4. Dealing with people slurping coffee and chit chatting while sitting inside what will be the live room 5. Maintaining a passage way across the length of the space and letting people walk through either exits 6. Low ceiling height 7. Preventing sound from leaking into neighboring enclosures (very high priority) Budget $210,000 max But that figure includes buying various equipment along with an ICON D-Control (well, may be not an ICON if more money needs to be put into the build) and also furnish the place apart from building the bistro. So think of it more like $48,000 for the studio build Current Stage I'm currently researching and designing the studio and am looking for as much critique as possible. All ideas and comments are welcome :) Space Available The general dimensions of the space are 110'x40'x14' The first few attachments are of the space and its current condition. It is located inside a large commercial complex that used to be a mall. It is still called a mall but most of the complex is taken over by University of Iowa for offices, class rooms etc. So sound cannot escape in any direction, specially not into the floor above. The length of the space is along East-West direction with the bottom of the image towards West. The West entrance opens out to the street and the East entrance opens into a corridor. Large sized equipment can be hauled in through the East entrance as the corridor is connected to a loading dock. However the mall's main doors close at 10 pm so after 10 pm only the West entrance can be sued. The floors have hard wood and the ceiling has lots of lighting. There is an existing HVAC system but I don't know anything about it at this stage. Conceptual Designs After spending nearly a month on this forum I've got a slight bit of an idea of how I want to go about doing this. The last attachment is what I have in mind right now. I've been through lots and lots of articles on this forum and on other websites as well. Eventually I'd like to incorporate the stuff I've gathered but right now I need someone to help me with the control room's ratio and figure out two leaf or three leaf or how-many-ever number of barriers in designing the control room and the isolation room. The layout I have right now, I think is decent. Any other layout can work better so if any of you would like to invest some time into layout, I'd greatly appreciate it. It would be particularly cool if you can come up with a way to slide walls out into the seating area so that the live room can be more private during the day time and later in the night the walls can be put away so that it looks more like a live music venue. However people must be able to access both exits at all times. But for now the priority is really figuring out the room's ratio and incorporating windows in as many places as possible. Again, I'm really glad that this community exists and am really excited about this project. Hope to receive inputs from you guys. Best, Sam

WTF I tend to have a lot of pretty wild ideas and tend to edit myself before broadcast, even on anonymous fora, and especially to my girlfriend. ...and this is right up there with the whackiest!!! But OMG just go for it. If you've got the cash, the will, and, like you hint, a bunch of people around you you with talent... go for it. What's the worst that can happen... you end up with some tables in the cafe where the conversation sounds marvelous!

sounds like an interesting idea. one thought to turn the CR on its side and add as much glass as possible. use drapes as needed. same for audience and isolated study areas. would need to factor in space for show production etc. i'd also consider adjust some of the post locations for improving the layout. this may require additional footings and beams but should be feasible.

Your construction budget is $10/sq. ft. ?

stuntbutt wrote:

Your construction budget is $10/sq. ft. ?

I missed that also. For barebones studio building start at the local luxury (executive?) home building prices and add 25%. In my part of the world this works out $250/ft². Andre

Hi, Thank you all so much for looking into this idea. In this part of the world there was a weeks holiday for Thanksgiving in which I managed to get some research done and managed to relax a bit too. Hopefully you all had a good week as well. Certainly, I'm glad that some of you think this idea is outrageous... outrageous can at times really help grab people's attention. I think it is necessary to adopt a rather risky approach to music production given that digital recording software has prompted numerous people to jump into the business and there are quite a few artists who easily lean towards their friends with a solitary mac or a pc instead of going to a professional studio. Many "potential customers" don't perceive the value in taking the normative route from the beginning. They hope that their low bit rate production will somehow become popular on social network sites and they can then approach a studio and a label. They aren't wrong, for the most part they are compelled by lack of funds to adopt the cheapest route and hope for the best. I believe, recording studios might have to deliver an "experience" that makes the whole production process too precious to give up on. This studio - Recording Oasis - apart from its services also offers accommodation. Their business approach is to let the artist "escape" to a private and leisurely location. Imagine if they had a spa or if it was a secluded rehab center! Hmmm.... someday I should seriously think about building that. But jokes aside, the concept of Recording Oasis where a scenic estate hosts a modern facility is something many people dream about but only a few have achieved. Btw, John also happened to design the studio. Here is his design. I think people at Recording Oasis have a more comprehensive approach to the business than many other studios I have come across while researching studio design. My approach is the opposite of Oasis, I would ideally like to build a recording studio in the middle of a busy train station :wink: where every other person walking by can see the process. Now I might be reiterating here... I would like to have the artists' process be exposed bare naked because even the mistakes an artist makes can be innovative at times and the chaotic rawness of the process is worthy of observation. I pitched this idea to some artists and they said they would be too embarrassed to let any one see their work unless it was polished and finished. I feel, artists ought to face their end customer more boldly or maybe... more casually, much like street performers. I think people will appreciate seeing the improvisations, retakes, edits, scratches and all the other frustration artists go through while doing their work. People might even cheer the artists to not give up on their projects when the going gets really really tough. Also, a musician who is afraid of an audience and weary of giving public performances is most probably just a bathroom singer (just kidding :mrgreen: ). Enough about the business concept. Lets talk design. Thank you for pointing out that 48k would be too little to make a 4,400 sq feet studio. I actually need a 1,600 sq feet studio with control room plus one or two isolation rooms. The live room would be a part of the bistro construction so there is additional money for that. I am thinking of the live room as a separate project within the build. I have been concerned about the budget estimate since the beginning though. And the $250/sq ft figure is worrisome. I can't afford that. Which means, there can't be a whole lot of luxury. I have tried thinking about the cost as dollars per square feet but that didn't help make costs more perceptible for me. I'm also not building from scratch so the 48k is my estimate for framing, dry walls, glass, wiring, fixtures, and labor. I intend to do as little to the existing structure as possible. The sound proofing aspect is rather expensive and I haven't been able to wrap my head around it yet. I would really appreciate your inputs on this when I get to that stage. If I use commercial diffusers, insulation that is also fireproof, sound proofing sealant/glue etc. the costs really go up. I have yet to find out if the building codes here in Iowa require me to have a certain grade of fire proof insulation. I also wanted to test the idea of using yellow pages phone books as insulation and experimenting on how much of a sound barrier a wall of phone books sandwiched between dry walls can provide. Yes, of course I'm serious... well, at least enough to try building an experiment. A yellow pages phone book is easily 4 inch thick and has a fair bit of mass. I think it can stop sound as good as other insulation of similar thickness and mass. Where would I get all those phone books to fill up all the walls you ask? I would have to request the world at large to donate (mail) their phone books to me. Yellow pages are any ways quite useless given that people have holly google. So hopefully people can find it worthwhile to give me their phone books. Or the experiments could just turn into a waste of time so if you know of people who have done such things and failed miserably please let me know. A quick google search told me that shredded yellow pages mixed with flame retardant material can be used as insulation but the product is rather poor in providing thermal insulation. Couldn't find info on its acoustic properties. Apparently there are people out there playing around with the idea of doing something with those useless books. I'll have to think more hard about sound proofing and costs particularly because no sound can escape in any direction, specially not the ceiling. I don't know about the STC rating of the existing structure, I'll have to add that to the to-do-list. I haven't yet come up with an idea for insulating the exits either. I would like to have a large enough exit through which people can bring in their equipment and use as much of the existing East exit as possible. If the budget expands by 30k I can spend some time hunting for state appropriated moneys and am confident that I can get it but at that point the estimated profits don't work out too well. But then again the profits are just estimates. You know... all of this can go very wrong in the end and this just might be a place where coffee table conversations will sound marvelous... for a while and then the place will shut down :( Glenn, thank you very much for providing a design alternative. I hadn't at all considered adjusting the column locations. They have bothered me a lot since I started trying to fit a design into the space. So I have been waiting for the past few days for the mall management to get back to me on whether I can modify the space to that extent. I do need persons to be able to exit from either side of the space at all times though. There would be constant traffic through the changing room. And this is a really silly question :oops: ... what is meant by a changing room in a recording studio? And by airlock do you mean a corridor? I also forgot to list among the challenges the need to accommodate about 8 to 10 people in the control room behind the recording engineer. One of the important goals of this studio is to let bands of larger sizes do their recording here and it's very likely that all the band members will want to listen to the recording over and over again in the CR before they go tweak something. So there has to be enough comfortable seating for quite a few people. By comfortable I don't mean lots of sofas; some kind of a staggered or sloping, theater seats like arrangement can also work. The location of restrooms is also an issue that has been gnawing at my head. The existing space has a large window pane on the East end which lets people walking about in the mall's corridor peer into the space. I think its a very important marketing tool for the space, specially if I also intend to sell the place's cafe like atmosphere to university students and macbook air wielding writer wannabes :roll: There really is a second business being shoehorned into the recording business, mostly for the sake of attracting unconventional customers (persons who are not musicians by trade or even hobby) to do a recording. Perhaps they will want to do an audio version of their book or maybe someone will want to send their girlfriend a composition they were suddenly inspired to make by rattling coffee mugs with a pair of spoons. What ever! So now this second business is likely to add constraints like city code for number of cubical in a restroom if X number of patrons are to be accommodated and other codes for wheelchair accessibility etc etc. Hmmm... I don't have that info yet. It's great that all this conversation is also helping me figure out what is currently missing in my research. But any ways, there is an existing single toilet restroom because the space used to be a furniture store. I figured the new restrooms should be close to existing plumbing and as far away from either end so that people can be drawn in by what they see from the street and the corridor. And I expect them to be perplexed by what they see! Also Glen, could you explain the dividers you had in mind. Thank you all for your inputs and I really hope that you will help me sort out my design. I feel that I get to be less of a newbee at studio design every time I come to this forum. The attached files are images of the current location and the link bellow is something I got to experience yesterday. It's my friends' group playing in a local coffee house. There were a lot of people who weren't listening to the music and doing what people usually do in coffee houses and there were an equal number of people not drinking coffee (not benefiting the establishment directly) and just listening to the free music coz there was no cover charge. There was fair bit of noise, where I was sitting I the music sounded like faint background music. But then people suddenly stopped talking when the band started playing more upbeat music, motivating people to dance in a coffee house. The thing that I liked most, was the mix of age groups who were actually enjoying a night out together. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDmy0op3LJE Sam ps: I like to digress and write at length :wink:

what is above this space? it looks like its pretty well finished which i would preserve as much as possible and i'd skip trying to adjust the supports are it's not going to be in your budget. tweaking some positioning of the layout and so on it will be necessary. the "changing room" was just an idea as you'll need a private space for performers to prepare in, etc. the layout wasn't intended to be literal but to highlight the ideas that you may need to consider. i'd use that open window space in front as the entry into your facility and the darker end as lounge, office space, changing rooms, etc to support the behind-the-scenes activities. i'd then build out the CR and some isolation booths in the middle as they will fit your budget and leave the remainder to be decorated until you can afford more renovations. bathrooms will be needed up front for the cafe/audience and a small one in the back for performers and people using the studio. my thought on dividers was to allow space to be closed off using large glass doors/panels (like you might see in store fronts etc) or perhaps even the old style gymnasium dividers, or just ignore for now. you have plenty of space and with enough sweat equity to build it you might be able to pull off something to meet your needs. as far as purchasing significant commercial products - it will definitely not be in your budget. the facility will have to be built to code, no options there. this includes any ADA compliance as well as building codes for safety etc.