Introduction of new project. Help/Ideas needed

Hallo everybody. First i wanna say .... great Forum. ´been reading for a few days now... Now it begin´s that i need help. My name is Michael, 34 years old, from germany. I am guitarist (even Bachelor of music;-)) and "hobby-producer". Well, i hope you understand my english;-) In december I am going to move in a new home (bought a house with my wife). There i want to built a little Studio. Therefore i have a quite small room. 4m x 5.5m x 2.6m. I already made a sketchup floorplan and hope i am allowed to already post it. Now i will try to answer the necessary points. 1. My location is a small town called Lingen in Germany. 2. .... room x feet y feet, what should i do ... i will try not to do. 3. Floorplan has dimension. Is meters okay??? 4. hope dimensions are okay. 5. What di i want to do in there? - mainly i want to mix in there. - I also want to record guitars and vocals. Would be nice if it´s possible to get a small live room in there to record "dry" drums. But drums could be recorded in an external studio. - the control room has to be big enough for me and minimum 2 other people (mainly guitar students) Equipment so far is a macbook pro (the mac pro is planned) with RME fireface 800. DAW is Logic 8. Of course i have several mics, guitars, amps, masterkeyboard etc. 6. Isolation is only needed for the "live-room". beacause my wife sleeps 2rooms further. Neighbours are not directly connected to my house. Mixing has a moderate loudness. For me it´s more important to get a rough room-layout. Details will come later. I am not quite sure if i´ts possible to get 2 rooms into this one. As you can see there is a big window and a glass door (to enter a small terrace), and i would like to keep them somehow. I love daylight while mixing and fresh air is also nice. The terrace is also nice for guest or cigarette-breaks (non-smoking studio of course). Well .... there was no question so far?! Can anybody help me with a floorplan for control-room and a "live-room" or Vocal/Amp-booth? Don´t know where to place it best because of the window-front. Could they be closed with curtains (in control-room) by the way... my budget is around 5000$. Greetz from germany. Hope to get some answers or ideas. Or tell me, what i did wrong or should do on my own. Michael

ups,... just saw, that I posted 2 times the same... sorry,....

If 4m x 5.5m x 2.6m is your total space (room) allocation, then forget about multiple rooms and make yourself a really decent Project studio i.e. mixing room. If recording the live amp is important to you as opposed to DI or Amp simultations (POD etc.) then include an isolation booth/box, not necessarliy on a scale for vocals but just for amping and reamping.

Thanks for answering. hmm... bad. :-( As you can see in the new picture... there is a shed connected to the room. So it would be possible to make an extra Vocal/Amp Room. But i don´t know the exact dimension yet. It is not in the construction drawing from the house. It was build afterwards. Which monitor placement makes most sense? By the way, i own a pair of ADAM P11A. If i knew, i could start planning the rest. Really difficult for me because of the "window-wall" i want to keep. gr Michael

Hallo, me again.... could something like this work? Or should i forget about a "room in room" for example drums? greetz from germany Michael

Hi Michael. Welcome!

Floorplan has dimension. Is meters okay???

Metric is fine. Most of us here understand both metric and imperial, and for those who don't, they can change the settings on SketchUp to show your plans in imperial.

I also want to record guitars and vocals. Would be nice if it´s possible to get a small live room in there to record "dry" drums.

There's a big difference between isolating for acoustic guitar and vocals, and isolating for drums. About 20 dB of TL! That's a lot. So we know how loud you will be: either around 95 dB or around 115 dB, but you didn't say how quiet you need to be: What are the municipal noise regulations for your area? What is the maximum permitted noise level? That will decide how much isolation you need. Call your municipality, and ask for a copy of the regs.

Isolation is only needed for the "live-room". beacause my wife sleeps 2rooms further. Neighbours are not directly connected to my house.

Yes, but that's not a number! You need to put a decibel number to how quite you have to be. "Wife sleeping two rooms away" might be fine at 90 dB if she sleeps heavily, or might be a huge problem at 60 dB if she sleeps lightly. Not a good guide: Get a sound level meter and put a number on that. "Neighbors not connected" is also not a number: the legal limit is, so also get a copy of those regulations, to see what that number says.

Mixing has a moderate loudness.

Once again, that's not a number! :) Measure what you mean by "moderate loudness" on a real sound level meter. But your control room should be calibrated for 85 dB, regardless of how loud or quite you mix: That's pretty much the industry standard.

As you can see there is a big window and a glass door (to enter a small terrace), and i would like to keep them somehow

Depending on what your isolation requirements are (not your guesses! :) your actual numbers), you might be able to keep the window just like it is, or you might need to build another identical window, a few inches away. By the way, the "movable curtain absorbers" over that window will do nothing at all to help isolate the room. They MIGHT do something to help treat the room, but that depends on many things... Your SketchUp also shows a "floating floor" in the live room: Why do you need that? You didn't say what the existing floor is made of, but I'm guessing it is concrete, since you seem to be on the ground floor. So if that's the case, why do you want to float your floor? Especially considering that you only have 2.6m of ceiling height! You'd lose a lot of that if you try to float. And you also don't have enough budget to float a room properly. - Stuart -

Hallo Stuart, thanks for your reply. I will try to answer as good as possible and give some actual numbers. the maximum permitted soundlevels are: 50db from 6am -10pm 35db from 10pm - 6am Controlroom: I won´t go louder than 85db. Recording: Drums would be around 115db. Guitars ... i don´t know, sorry. My wife has no problems with some noise. She is used to it. 60db is good. The "floating room": The room is tiled now. But i want to have laminate floor in it. looks much better. I would like to put a floating timber floor on it. Is it so expensive? With a ceiling i will stay round about 2.20m - 2.30meters height? The biggest problem is, that i am not in the house, yet. We will move there in december. But i want to start planning and see what is possible. Very important is the layout of the room and what makes sense at all there. This room cost 3500$ and loos pretty good for drums, doesn´t it? http://www.drummerforum.de/forum/44356-drumkabine-schallschutzkabine-foto-dokumentation/thread5.html For information... the "outside walls" of the house are made of 17,5cm lime-sand brick, 4cm Rock wool and 11,5cm facing brick. With some air between rock wool and facing brick it has a total thickness of 36,5cm. gr, Michael

milliman wrote:

- mainly i want to mix in there. - I also want to record guitars and vocals. Would be nice if it´s possible to get a small live room in there to record "dry" drums. But drums could be recorded in an external studio. - the control room has to be big enough for me and minimum 2 other people (mainly guitar students)

"mainly i want to mix in there. - I also want to record guitars and vocals" The Projekt Studio I mentioned in my post would cover this. Vocals and guitars can be recorded right in the room (as is often done in large pro studio control rooms!) - no need for a booth. An Isolation booth or box could be considered for Amping and the small shed would be a good candidate for this. Drum recording is not a realistic goal for the size of the room nor the budget. You said these can be recorded in a separate studio - go with that. Consider whether you can move the door (the one in the inside wall at the top) to the other end or maybe 2/3rd of the way down the wall toward the right. I would orient your desk and speakers on the left wall (re: your sketch) and fire the speakers down the length, the glass door will be your rear wall. Absorbers and traps could be hinged or hung on tracking if necessary.

Thank you Brian, well... after playing around with sketchup and the answers in here i already tending to say goodbye to a 2-room solution. I saw some small solutions in here and was hoping, that someone would have a designing idea, for me, too (but has to make sense) But the control room get´s too small then, i think. I am recording drums once or twice a year.... so... a nice antmosphere with some space is more important. Problem is, the door can´t be really moved. perhaps 80cm. There is another wall on the other side i didn´t draw. I already turned the door to open to the outside of the room,... that´s possible. I have no idea how to put a nice big control room in there (speaker position) to get easy into the room (because of the damn door). I think, the door is too close to the left wall to make it easy getting in the control room. I am thankful for any idea. Michael perhaps sth. like this???

There is another wall on the other side i didn´t draw.

Always new surprises. :lol: What about closing off the existing door and putting the entrance (new door) from the other room shown. Otherwise, I'd just make the partition wall (you've drawn on an angle) 1 meter away from and parallel to the existing wall. No need to angle the walls as you've done. You can add angled slat resonators on either side of the listening position such as those you will find in John Sayers' Components.SKP http://johnlsayers.com/Stuff/components.skp and see also the Recording Manual http://johnlsayers.com/Recmanual/index.htm. This will give you an adequate 3 m (roughly) wide space for your desk (I assume you're not running a big Neve console :wink: ) - less of course what you'll need for treatments -oh and don't forget any additional width added to the existing wall to beef up the isolation. Your speaker wall(s) can also be constructed as shown in the Recording Manual.

the maximum permitted soundlevels are: 50db from 6am -10pm 35db from 10pm - 6am

OK, so to not break the law, your levels need to be down to 35dB, which most likely means measured at the location of the person complaining. So if your level outside your wall is around 40-something, you should be OK. Call it 40, for safety. On the other end of the scale, your monitoring will be 85 dB, vocals can hit over 100 dB, and drums can hit over 115db. Assuming that you drop the idea of the drum booth, your loudest problem is vocals. Call it 105, to be safe. 105 - 40 = 65 That should be your goal for isolation of the vocal booth. 85 - 40 = 45. That should be the goal for your control room. HOWEVER! Those are just rough estimates: you can't base a build on rough estimates! You need to actually get a meter and actually measure how loud your monitoring is, how loud your vocals and guitars are, and how quiet you have to be outside your walls in order to get 35 dB at your neighbor's property line.

The "floating room": The room is tiled now. But i want to have laminate floor in it. looks much better. I would like to put a floating timber floor on it. Is it so expensive? With a ceiling i will stay round about 2.20m - 2.30meters height?

Well, which is it? Is it "floating timber floor" or is it "laminate floor"? That's two very different things! If you want laminate flooring, then it is very simple: take off the existing tiles, level the floor below, and put down laminate flooring. Done! But that's not a floating floor. A "floating timber floor" means that you have to build a mechanically isolated structure, supported on some type of spring system, with a large air gap underneath and a very large amount of mass on the floor itself. You do all the calculations to tune the resonance of that floor to a frequency well below the lowest frequency that you need to isolate. It is not easy to do, and is very expensive.

This room cost 3500$ and loos pretty good for drums, doesn´t it?

Ummmm.... actually, no it doesn't look good for drums at all! It looks very nice, aesthetically, yes! But the treatment is a disaster! It looks more like an anechoic chamber than a drum booth. That room would be unpleasant for recording drums. There's no live surfaces at all, except for the window and door, and no broadband treatment. I don't speak much German, but it seems that the only actual treatment in there is 30m2 of 7cm acoustic wedge foam glued on all of the wall surfaces, and carpet on the floor, to make it even worse! The room must sound very "honky" if all it has is 100% coverage of 7cm foam wedges and carpet on the floor. Not to mention that the walls are pure panel traps, tuned to somewhere around 200 Hz, apparently... :shock: And there's no bass trapping at all in there! It is rather interesting that immediately after finishing the room, the very first comment he makes is that he needs to install bass traps! Maybe that should have been part of the DESIGN, rather than an AFTERTHOUGHT? :shock: It's also interesting that he spent so much effort trying to isolate the room, but only succeeding in getting "about 25 - 30 dB" of isolation. That's NOTHING! That's about the same as from a normal house wall, 2x4 studs with drywall on each side... Oh but wait a sec! That's exactly what he did build... ! Perhaps that sand-filled floor might have something to do with that, too :shock: At least he dropped the idea of floating it on tennis balls! But leaving the sand out and floating it properly would have gotten him much better isolation. In fact, forgetting the entire idea of floating the floor, and just building that booth directly on teh concrete floor would have gotten him better isolation! Interesting that the kick drum can still be heard clearly in the rest of the house. The MSM of the isolation system is obviously tuned way too high: Perhaps the very thin 65mm air gap in the walls might have something to do with that? :shock: Perhaps the very thin 12.5mm drywall on each side of the studs might have something to do with that? :shock: Perhaps the even thinner 25mm air gap in the floor might have something to do with that? :shock: Perhaps the still thinner air gap in the ceiling, with no damping at all in it, might have something to do with that? :shock: Perhaps the excellent double glazing plan, but built with Plexiglass mounted on the same COUPLED frame might have something to do with that? :shock: Maybe the fact that he built a 3-leaf system :shock: without decoupling :shock: and without any damping between two of the leaves might have something to do with that? There's just so many things done wrong in that design, that I'm surprised it even gets 30 dB of isolation. The workmanship, however, is excellent! Very nicely built.... just on a very flawed design. For the same price, he could have built a booth that would have gotten 50 dB of isolation, by just building it correctly, as a fully decoupled MSM system with only two leaves. Sorry, but that was just a waste of time, money and effort. I feel sorry for the guy, who tried so hard, and I hope he never reads my comments here, as he'd be very discouraged to know how much better it could have been, for the same money and same effort, if only he would have done it right. The sand-filled floor is a total waste, and is doing nothing at all. It most likely isn't even floating. So sad. But back to your plan: at least you are in the right place, on the right forum for learning how to do it right! Your's can be so much better.

For information... the "outside walls" of the house are made of 17,5cm lime-sand brick, 4cm Rock wool and 11,5cm facing brick. With some air between rock wool and facing brick it has a total thickness of 36,5cm.

You should be getting pretty good isolation from that already! So the window is your weak point. Once you make the measurements with a real sound level meter, and come up with real numbers, we can figure out how to fix that. And I'm with Brian on dropping the idea of the drum booth: the space is too small to have two rooms, and your "shed" can probably be upgraded to act as a vocal booth / iso booth. Like Brian also said: you don't need to splay the side walls, unless you understand why you are doing it and how to do it right. If you are just doing it for flutter echo, then forget it: treatment will take care of that. If you are doing it for RFZ, then that angle isn't big enough. If you are doing it because it looks cool, then that's the wrong reason! :) So I'd just go with a rectangular room, and maybe use angled slot walls to deal with the flutter (although that won't give you an RFZ). But to help us help you, please post an ACCURATE SketchUp model of the exact space that you have available, showing all existing walls, doors, windows, pillars, ceiling, and everything else that could get in the way. As Brian mentioned, its always a problem when someone posts a diagram, gets good suggestions on what to do, then comes back and says, "Oh, I can't do that because there's a wall there that I didn't put on the diagram!!! :shock: - Stuart -

Thanks Stuart and Brian, very good answers. I think the best is, when i wait until i am in there. I will be able to make measurments of how loud it is in and outside there. It´s really difficult to understand all terms;-) But i still have 6 - 8 weeks until i am in there... so getting used to all of it will be no problem. I also have to learn much more with Sketchup, to be able to make an understandable readable accurate 3D room. My thoughts or results so far are, that i need one control good room. A vocal booth could be built in the shed. i didn´t know, that it is not necessary to float the floor for good isolation. Also i understood, that it is better to make an rectangle room and the rest will be done with slut walls (will even give me more space, i guess). Also the listening position as Brain told me would be the best. But the room really is as i have drawn it. No pillars no extra doors nothing. It is 4x5.5meters. I will play with sketchup and post it sometime if its no problem for you to take a look at it, if it goes into the right direction. For now i will be just able to find a good shape for the room without loosing too much space. That was my first idea... Where do the walls i build in there have to be. One more question ;-) Is it better to use timber or steal for plasterboard walls? Always see timber in here, but i read, that steel construction isolate better?! Is it true? Thanks for the patience and good answers. Michael

I also have to learn much more with Sketchup, to be able to make an understandable readable accurate 3D room.

There are many tutorials on the internet that teach you how to use SketchUp. Google "SketchUp Tutorial". There are probably some in German, too.

i didn´t know, that it is not necessary to float the floor for good isolation.

That's OK! Many people who come here do not know that. I was one of them... :) It took me a while to figure out that floating a floor is not necessary 90% of the time: there really aren't many cases where a home studio needs to be floated. In fact, there aren't that many cases where a large professional studio needs to be floated! If the studio is built on top of a concrete slab on the ground, then that 0s usually fine. Only if you need very high levels of isolation, only then do you need to float. Doing it right is not easy, and expensive, and if you do it wrong then it does not isolate at all! In fact, doing it wrong can the situation worse than not doing anything. They German guy with the drum booth is a classic case: there was no need at all to float that room, and it is done so wrong that it just isn't working. That's obvious, since he himself admits that his $3,500 "floated" booth is only getting about 25 to 30 dB of isolation.

I will play with sketchup and post it sometime if its no problem for you to take a look at it, if it goes into the right direction.

Sure! No problem! :)

One more question: Is it better to use timber or steal for plasterboard walls? Always see timber in here, but i read, that steel construction isolate better?! Is it true?

There is a slight advantage to using metal studs, yes. But wood works just fine too, and has been used very successfully. There is plenty of research on both, and metal is a bit better, in most cases, provided that you use the correct type. - Stuart -

Aloha Michael, Is it possible to move and/or reorient your doors to open outward from the room? Aloha 8)

Aloah;-) The "inner" door can be "turned" ... and i want to turn it. ALso draw it like theat with sketchup. It Could also be moved 1meter to the right. The shedars door opens to the other side (I saw on Saturday) .... wrong sketchup ;-(. The door to te terrace can´t be flipped i think. Well, everything is possible, but to turn the "glass-door" would be quite expensive i think. greatz, Michael

Aloha, Something like this? Aloha 8)

wow, thank you. Looks great. Only thing, that doesn´t really work is the "backside" or window side. I want to keep that door to get outside. Could you perhaps send post that sketchup-file? I can play with it then. But first i will follow Stuarts tips to make measurements. I can move there in january, so ... then it will begin. Just getting in that "naked room" and make measurments inside and outside. Then i will see how to make that kind of Layout and isolation. gr Michael