Production studio in Estonia (Tallinn)

Hey! Im Vallo (just turned 25 at 7th of december), I've been into music production for more than 12 years now. Produced my first hit song in Estonia while being 15 :) Im more into electronic music, but also play guitar, a very little of piano and at younger ages I played trumpet in a local smaller orchestra for 8 years. I'm taking my music career very seriously and have always been dreaming of building a studio with good sound, but never found a good room to start with here in Tallinn. Now I feel I did find one for pretty good price with hight ceiling and the owner told me I could build there whatever I need / want. :) I've been looking around in this great forum for half a year now I guess, watching how others are doing. I see some of you guys are very helpful and I decided to give it a shot if someone would direct me a little:) Im willing to build a cosy place with 1 CR and 1 booth to record mostly vocals in or sometimes some other acoustical instruments. Not going to record bands. I took 1/3 of a bigger " hall " (actaully a warehouse ). I got 7.95 meters of lenght and 6.64 meters in depth, 3 meters of height in most of the room. Im adding a picture to show you how and where the room is 2.4 meters high. On 2nd floor of a 3 floor building. In the upper right corner you can see a white door. There i have got another 9 m2 room, Just had to take it with the bigger room ( have no plans for it) and the dark door in front is going straight outside. Was done years ago for just to get a big machine in. Under my room is also a warehouse hall and upper floor is some kind of smaller car parts production. I have never heard them throught the ceiling. On the same floor Im there is also 1 office and I need to seal the room that im not going to bother them with my mostly pretty loud bassy music. I need to build a separation wall of the other part of the " hall". I am going to put up some pictures to show you what ive got and to describe my messy text i wrote :) On the 1st pic, i drew a gray line there to show you where my part of the room starts and where I have got to build a wall. On the 2nd picture is the plan of the floor. My equipment is Dynaudio Bm15 speakers ( passive )a computer with 30 inch apple screen, few keyboards ( motif es 6, access virus ti, korg ms 2000, roland jx-8p and a midi keyboard) I have also got a mackie logic controller, UAD-2 card. RME fireface 400 audio interface . I guess thats the most of it. (in the wishlist for next things are some nice pres, not sure which yet, a good microphone and ssl4000 compressor). The 1st thing for me now is to find out how big Im going to build the rooms I need and how to fit them in there. Any advice is very welcome!! Thank You! Vallo

welcome! what is the ceiling? is that concrete or is it a drop ceiling with more space above it? some concerns - the concrete structure will likely conduct LF sound pretty effectively so you might want to do some tap (metal and rubber) tests to see how much transfer is going on - perhaps on the floor above and below as well. you might need to build some floating isolation walls and floating floor to handle things. for the new separation wall, could that be block or framed? if you could build a block wall and then build your isolation shell inside that it might be pretty decent isolation. if framed, since you don't control the other side of the wall, someone else could end up easily punching holes in it... perhaps the same for block...

Hey! Thank you for answering ! The ceiling is just 1 leaf concrete and below should be the same. I will make it sure tomorrow. About the new separation wall I was thinking about gypsum with many layers and maybe the outer layer to be extra strong fire/hitproof ? But I want it to be effective for LF so Im not sure how many layers I should use for it to be effective or as effective as block would be? Ive looked at the STC charts but STC doesnt show lower than 125 hz.

1 Other thing. I could change the room for another one in the same building and on the same floor but then I would have neighbours behind 1 concrete wall.. But the has all 4 walls already. Its a bit smaller is about 9.8 X 4.6 X 3 meters It has a proper metal door. Im not concerned about the upper neighbours as there are my buddys who I am co working on music stuff. Below there is a wood factory.. They are making some kind of furniture. I could go for floating floor and walls and ceiling separated from the existing concrete. On the plan i have attached It is the room under the word " EVAKUTSIOONI" and the neighbours im a bit worried are next right to the room and below right.

the smaller room would probably be less costly since you can simply build up your inner isolation walls and ceiling there and it's already relatively secured. at which point then you should be OK (and your neighbors too). otoh, having the small adjunct room could be handy for storage and/or a machine closet and having a larger space is nice although the overall costs will be higher because you have more material and need to build the additional isolation wall to divide the space. i'd do some noise testing and see what's going on in terms of LF and vibrations.

I went there today and decided to go with the bigger room. I checked the floor and ceiling, didnt tap though.(the upper floor factory people had gone home already and under me is just a warehouse with nobody complaining about the noise). It seemed to be well sealed and tight, also thick. I went there with a construction/builder guy, he told me It would take him ~3 days to make the wall out of silicate blocks (120 mm in depth) < if you know better blocks for bass resistance please let me know. It would take up some money but im ok with it. After the wall is done I was thinking about taking my yamaha SW-10 subwoofer there and test how much LF goes through and then see if I need to float the floor ? and how many leafs gypsum walls i need in the room-in-room room. Now I am going to try to draw up the basic floor plan with the upcoming wall included in it... If anyone could suggest me any nice planning for my space ( CR + Booth ) Id be very glad... I dont feel myself being a good archiect / designer, so all the ideas are really really appreciated. The room is 7.95m long, 5.42m from left side is 300mm high and then there is a 55 cm part which is 2.4 high and then again 67 cm 3 meters in hight. so all tohether the room is 6.64 m wide. < you can see it from the picture what i mean by the lower part. :)

sounds like a good plan. i may even take a shot at sketching something shortly...

Thank you man ! Im also uploading a picture to show you how the tricky part of the ceiling is!

Damn, i must have lied about the lower part of the ceiling, i wrote it before how i remembered now while making the sketchup file i checked my notes and is seems its a bit lower than i wrote before.. Im really a noob with sketchup but I tried to do my best to give you accurate dimensions how the room is. I didnt make the windows there because i forgot to measure them.

thanks! chances are we would have that lower part behind the pillars used for soffits, ducting, bass trapping etc and the pillars etc will be encased to reduce any noise going in/out.

maybe something like this?