Brazilian Studio. From Scratch. Need Advice. Sketchup incl.

Well, My name is Arthur Oliveira, I am from Brasil, and we are planning to expand our studio space. We had the oportunity to buy the room next to the studio and we already broke the walls down. In the process, we are still doing the studio design, we had some ideas, and made a sketchup (link below) from them. We don't have problem with neighbours, cause it's a commercial building and there are just restaurants nearby. The building is very good construted. It's brickwork and concrete. All walls ceiling and floor. We are located at the basement, so no problems with people under us. Here are the dimensions with some ideas we had (the ceiling is 3,50 meters high, by the way): All dimensions are in meters. The two 'blocks' in the middle of the room are colums that can't be destroyed. The 'room' on the left-bottom side is the bathroom (0,9 meters length x 1,3 meter width x 3,5 meters high) Just next, is the entrance (1,20 meters width) Next is the vocal booth. This image represents how the design was made: Here is the Sketchup Project with all proportions (including the insulation), so the size of the room is from the first line. The ceiling is not ok in the setchup, but its high is 3,50 meters. Sketchup Project LINK The budget it's 15,000 dollars, or 25,000 brazilian real. Please guys, opinate, we need serious advice, because our archtect is charging us 2,000 dollars for this project design. The design is just an idea, the layout fo the rooms could be changed. Give us some ideas. Thank you. Arthur Oliveira, http://www.universox.com.br

Hi Arthur, and welcome! A question for you: does that design include ALL of the walls? If so, then I certainly would not do that! There are several issues I see there: Firstly, is symmetry. It is critical that the front half of your control room must be absolutely symmetrical, meaning that the left half must be a mirror image of the right half. If you do not have symmetry, then you cannot get an accurate stereo image, your sound stage will be skewed, and your mixes will sound "lopsided" when you play them elsewhere. The design you show, there is a wall to the right of the mix position, but a huge empty space to the left. That's bad. Second, shape of the front of the control room is poor: those angled corners are a bad idea, as they are taking you the space where your speaker soffits and/or front bass traps should be. You have the space to do that properly, but are wasting it on those unnecessary angles. Third, the shape at the rear of the control room is rather strange: once again, those cut-off corners are wasted space that should be used for bass trapping, and that concave shape will tend to focus sound back at the mix position. You can't even fit the couch in properly with that shape! Fourth, there does not appear to be sufficient isolation between the control room and the live room. Personally, I find it hard to track drums if I can't hear just the pure, clean signal from each mic on the control room speakers, without the direct sound coming through the walls. When I monitor, I want to hear only what the mic hears: it confuses me if I can also hear the sound through the walls, and that's the problem I think you will have with this design: the isolation plan is not good enough to block the drums well. Fifth, the vocal booth is tiny! Barely 1 square meter! You will not even be able to get into that booth, since the door needs to swing across the space where you will be standing! It will be very difficult, and very uncomfortable to try to fit a large person in there with a mic stand, music stand and headphones, even if you can figure a way to actually get him inside in the first place. Such a tiny space will also sound pretty lousy. That's not a booth: it's a closet! Sixth, it appears that there is some attempt to isolate the rooms from the existing structure, but that won't work at all, since it is still fully coupled to both the outer and inner leaves, and the air gap turns on the control room! There are several other details that need fixing, but those were the big issues that I noticed. I would suggest that you re-design that whole layout, as it does not seem to be very good at all, acoustically. I think there are ways to make much better use of that space. - Stuart -

Thank you very much Mr. Soundman2020. I Decided to contract someone to remake the whole thing, so I contracted Mr. Gullfo.

Excellent idea! I'm sure Glenn will do a great job! - Stuart -