Basement studio in Boston Massachusetts USA

Hi Everyone. Thanks in advance for all the advice! This forum has been a great source of information for me. hopefully the answers to my questions can help some other people as well. I'm currently working out the design for a basement studio in my 110 year old house in Boston. I'll be starting construction in a few months. The studio will be used for my guitar teaching practice, recording bands (mostly indie rock) and for working on my own projects. There will be no dedicated control room. I've decided to have it all be one room so the engineer can be right in it. I don't mind using phones when tracking. The exterior walls are fieldstone with only about 2 feet of the wall above the ground. The current ceiling is 7'7" above the concrete floor. Except for 3 structural brick pillars there are currently no interior walls. My budget is around $50,000, but there is a great deal of construction to be done before even thinking about acoustics. The walls will be repointed, the current slab will be removed and replaced (level slab, polished concrete finish, radiant floor heating, insulated from the ground with rigid foam, adequate drainage system, vapor barrier and a radon removal system), the exterior entrance has to be excavated to get a landing and new stairs, and new interior walls and a small bathroom put in. The current heating system and pipes will all need to be replaced as well. The studio will occupy about 3/4 of the total basement. The exterior walls will remain stone. The ceiling will be open to the upstairs floor with hardwood sleeves over the 10" tall joists for looks and to support 4 inch panels of upholstered owens corning 703. (see the detail in the sketchup file) The wall closest to the interior stairs will be constructed exactly like the ceiling and the wall next to it will be hardwood. All the rest of the interior wall space will be taken up by the doors to the upstairs, bathroom and workshop. Windows in the studio area will be framed out and then have 2 panels of thermal glass permanently installed. The main outdoor entry will be a door with as much glass as possible. The main goal of the design will be a comfortable room that's fun to record in. I've worked out a floor plan with my architect friend that we're pretty happy with in terms of space and flow. The second goal is to make it sound amazing when you play inside of it. Third will be to have the monitors be as accurate as possible for mixing given the first two goals. Fourth would be to minimize sound leakage to the outside and upstairs without building double walls or ceilings. Space is at too much of a premium to lose any. My questions are as follows: Will the room sound good to play in? Will the 4 inch 703 between the joists be enough to balance out the relatively low ceiling? Is the one wall of 703 and the ceiling enough for bass trapping and stopping the room from being too reverberant? I've heard that stone is pretty bright. There's not too much info on stone in the forum already except for the studio built in a castle. I don't mind a live sounding room, but I don't want an echo chamber. I'll likely be putting plastic over the 703 to stop particles from floating around. The last place the studio was installed was an old house with some funky shaped rooms. It wasn't great for mixing but it was fun finding little places all over the rooms with unique sounds. I'm hoping with the mix of different wall materials (stone, brick, 703, and hardwood) and angles that I'll be able to get a lot of different sounds here too. How's polished concrete for a floor? Will monitoring be at all accurate? The desk in the corner is where I anticipate liking to have my monitors. They'll fire diagonally out into the room. Aside from some absorption panels on the wall to minimize close reflections am I on the right track at all for an accurate mix? Or the best possible in this space? A symmetrical arrangement is just not possible. I feel like the diagonal walls with all the different angles of surfaces might save me some standing waves. The maximum distance to the rear walls can't hurt either right? Can I play drums at 3am without offending neighbors? or my wife upstairs? My neighbors are on all sides ranging from 10-30 feet away. Most of the walls are underground so I feel like leakage there is not a worry. Will the two panes in the studio windows stop leakage? Is a big glass door a big problem for leakage? Will the 703 on the ceiling do much to stop sound from going through to the upstairs? Would putting a layer of sheetrock above the 703 make a difference if it was mounted right on the sub floor? I own the whole house and there's no bedrooms on the first floor. I've included a sketchup file with the basement as well as a detail of the ceiling off to the side here: http://www.machinegunstudios.com/transf ... tudios.skp I also added some pics of the basement as is so you can see the stone and some screenshots of the model for those of you who don't use sketchup. Thanks very much for commenting! Feel free to offer ideas for things outside of my questions as well. Any help at all is well appreciated. -mike

welcome! any option to lower the floor when you redo it? going down another foot or so could completely change the acoustics. as far as isolation - if the ceiling joists remain open, then no you're not going to even be close. that said, having sound escape helps a lot with the treatment since you don't have to deal with it as when its trapped in the room. you will need some treatment though because the ceiling will be part of it but having some scattered absorption around the walls will help get things down to the right level. the alcoves focus so you'll want to consider absorption placed at their "peak" to break that. from a CR perspective, i'd get the "CR" out of that alcove - put the drums there with some treatment, perhaps a drum riser. this also puts all the musicians into pretty much the same space. use gobos as needed. put the CR into the dryer section on the wall by the stairs and consider using gobos to create symmetry there without enclosing things. it may be, after a while, you decide to enclose the CR to get more accuracy and that would seem to be a decent location to do it. add large windows into the live space to keep visual communications as a prominent feature.

Thanks for the response Glenn. I had a structural engineer look at lowering the floor before I bought the house. Unfortunately it would increase the cost by over $100,000 because it's difficult to maintain the structural integrity of the fieldstone walls. I did plan on a 4 inch layer of 703 suspended about 2 inches from the top of the joists (near the floorboards of the first floor). Should I still consider the ceiling joists open? The alcoves aren't anywhere near as perfect of a curve as in the drawing. The stone makes them very irregular. Would I still need the treatment at the peak? The architect will be happy about where you recommended I put the desk. We've been back and forth about that for a while now. I may be coming around to that idea. I'll probably not build a permanent desk until I get a chance to try a bunch of different layouts anyway.

the insulation will not add isolation (or very little which is effectively none at the low frequencies which are problematic) so if you actually need the isolation, i'd put in a decoupled ceiling. on the curved walls - my thinking is a strip or two of 1'w x 6'h x 4"d cloth covered rigid insulation in the center of the alcove but if its not actually acting in a bad way then skip it.

The only option for a decoupled ceiling would be 2 inches below the floorboards and only between the joists. To me that seems like a waste of time and $, the joists will still transmit sound and a 2 inch gap isn't worth the effort. Am I wrong? how about that double window idea, will that make a difference in outside transmission? Isolation aside, would anyone care to guess how the room will sound for tracking? thanks!

the drywall will be decoupled from the joists and the 2x w/ GG or 3x layers plus beefing up between the joists will give you considerable isolation in that location and then flanking via infrastructure (pipes, ducts), openings (windows), walls, and floors becomes the dominant source upstairs or outside. doubling up windows can help although it's probably some risk of triple/quad leaf effects using normal double glazed windows. the room without treatment will have a lot of reverberation/slap echoes. scattered absorption can tame that and keep the room nice and lively. having some gobos with hard and soft surfaces could be used to change up the room to make it deader or lively.

What about suspending some drywall between the joists about 2 inches below the floorboards? That's probably the best I can do without losing the headroom I need for a pleasant space to be in. I'd do some blocks with RC holding 2 sheets of 5/8 drywall between the joists and then caulk the gaps between the floating drywall and the joists and insulate between the floor and drywall. I attached a sketchup drawing to explain. Any benefit to making the interior walls at slight angles? Still no symmetry but there'd be almost no parallel walls. Thanks!

i think if you don't put the decoupled mass layer over the joists that you're going to be disappointed with the isolation. adding some angled walls to break up flutter echoes is a good idea but you need (reasonably) 9-12° to be effective. given the ceiling height and desire to keep it live plus balanced, you could build some slat resonators to get the angles and absorption. in combination with the flat absorbers on the ceiling and scattered carpets, you could get it just right. if you go with your isolation plan, then you could put the scattered absorption between the joists.