:[kjip:]records studio build

Hi all, my first post on this forum.

14.3.2012: I edited this first post with a clearer description of what I aim for: Where am I located: On the west coast of Norway, on a small island with 11000 habitants. What do I want to do: Mainly a control room for mixing and song writing, but also a recording facility where I can record both single musicians and bands. In addition to the recording room, I plan to use the car room on ground floor for this. What and where is the facility: It is the loft on my newly built car garage. As the simple drawing below shows, I plan to divide the loft space in two. How loud am I: I believe not more than 80dB during mixing. Probably around 100dB while recording band. Rough guesses though...

I have had a small home recording studio for many years, but never a proper location. Now I´m finally getting to a point where I have the possibility to build something i always have wanted to do. On the loft of my garage, the new studio will become a reality, hopefully before the summer... The following picture shows the space. No walls yet, I´m still in planning mode. The only thing in place is the stairs. I´ll hope to keep you updated on the progress, and I will most likely have some questions along the way... The main use for the studio will be on a moderate demo level. Friends, familiy and local musicians who want to showcase their creativity. Now I need to read some more on studio construction, design, acoustics, etc... :D And of course, any comments looking at the above drawing is welcome... :D

The following is some real life pictures of the available space. The biggest room will also work as a general fun and play room for the youth of the house, so it is a multi purpose building I would say.

Before posting on this forum I have tried to find information related to the design and layout of typical loft studios. I have found very litle relevant information. Or it could also be that I don't quite know what to look or search for... But it seems that rectangular rooms are more documented. Anyhow, I have been thinking to modify the control room with inner walls something like the below picture (orange lines). Acoustically, will I gain from a setup like this (to prevent the parallell walls)? Also, should I go for a flat roof at 2,4m up, or should I have the beams visible and have the roof go all the way to the top? The control room will be the most important room with the aim to be a good mixing room. I am thinking to use plasterboard as wall material, any reason not to use such material? Or maybe, what would be the recommended material on the walls and the ceiling? The floor will be regular wood based. I will not bother with floating floor, since there is no big need to isolate the loft from the ground floor of the garage. Also the distance to neighbors are ok. I'm guessing 10m to the closest neighbor. Any comments and proposals are very welcome :D

I started to build my studio above the garage. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8426 But after finding out how difficult it is to isolate sound with a floating wood deck, I moved to the basement. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10347 My final project is here. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14136&start=105 It seemed to me it would have been very tough to get good isolation with the walls, ceiling, and floor of a second floor loft. It can probably be done, but might require a lot of money and inventiveness to do. The walls and ceiling may be difficult to make a true sealed 2 leaf structure without getting to be too heavy. And the floor could resonate like a drum. Most of the loft studios I have watched on this forum over the years never get reported as finished on this forum. I don't know if folks don't publish their results or just bail out all together. I hope you are successful, and I look forward to seeing your solution. Maybe you will figure out an affordable way to do this. Best of luck!

I don't have a basement so my garage loft is my only option... What are the difficulties I will meet with a loft studio:

Isolating to prevent sound leakage (neighbors)? Not the biggest problem... Avoiding resonance from the floor? Could be a problem...

This is probably basic for those into acoustics, but if you should list the main challenges with a loft like this, how would that list look? And what are the possible solutions...? To build a true sealed 2 leaf structure on the loft, what would I benefit from that? Would I avoid resonance problems from the floor? Would it limit the sound leakage? The floor structure on the loft is like this: --- 25mm chipboard --- 200mm wooden beam (part of the roof truss construction you see in the above pictures) --- 12mm gypsum board (plasterboard, I don't know what is the correct english word to use) --- I was planning to put 14mm wooden floor above the chipboard. It's true what you mention with the other loft studios, I have also struggled to find good success stories to look at.

LEV wrote:

What are the difficulties I will meet with a loft studio:

Isolating to prevent sound leakage (neighbors)? Not the biggest problem... Avoiding resonance from the floor? Could be a problem...

This is probably basic for those into acoustics, but if you should list the main challenges with a loft like this, how would that list look? And what are the possible solutions...? To build a true sealed 2 leaf structure on the loft, what would I benefit from that? Would I avoid resonance problems from the floor? Would it limit the sound leakage?

If you want to limit the loud drummer and band noise from going to the closest neighbors, that's where you need isolation. To get isolation, most folks need a 2 leaf system with a sealed Mass/Air/Mass system. That first Mass is the inside room (walls, ceiling, floor, door, windows). Then an air gap. This air gap can be between an inch and a couple feet, depending on how you build it. The outer Mass is the outside structure (walls, ceiling, floor, door, windows.) If you start reading on this forum or read books like the Rod Gervais book mentioned all over this forum, you will learn this. The MAM system is hard to do on an elevated wood deck. Your outer walls may have air ventiliation to allow air flow from your soffet to a ridge vent on the roof (Mine did). This keeps the outer leaf from being sealed and sound can easily escape. In effect, there isn't have much of a leaf at all. Building 2 more leaves than the existing one might put quite a load on the structure. Also, many folks will build their studios on a concrete floor that is touching the earth. In those cases, the earth is dampening the concrete, so there isn't a need for a MAM structure for the floor. With an elevated wood deck, to get good isloation, a MAM structure is probably needed. This might involve building another lower ceiling in the garage below. That can be expensive and may put a large load on the structure. You should spend a lot of time reading this forum and books on the subject. Then you will start to understand how to isloate sound and the difficulties that an elevated wood deck create. I'm pretty sure it can be done well. But the cost and work may be great. I think I had a workable plan for mine, but I was not going to pay that price and sacrifice the space and work. If you don't care how much noise gets out to the neighbors, you can use standard construction and all of these issues go away.

Thanks britune, I have started reading me up on these subjects, but it is really a jungle, especially when you start browsing threads. Maybe getting the Rod Gervais book is a good start. Sound leakage to neighbors is actually not my biggest concern. My son plays drums, and the drums are currently located in a room quite similar to the recording room of my garage, and when I'm outside my house I can hear that he plays drums, but it is not very loud and annoying. With that in mind I was thinking that I could try to do some more simple actions to improve sound leakage without spending to much much cost and work. I'll do some more reading and ask when I have questions :shot:

Here is a video (with norwegian text :D ) showing one way of sound isolating the floor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... rhC6F-BRTY

Home Recording Studio by Rod Gervais is now ordered. Just to elaborate a little bit more on what I've been thinking so far. For the control room I am thinking of a room within the room construction. At least partly. I'll get back to that. This will also be the room that needs the most acoustic attention. For the recording room, I am not sure if my planned actions will be worthwhile. Will I gain any soundproofing by mainly treating the floor? I will also treat the walls and the roof, but I was not intending to do this as extensively as I plan for the CR. Mainly by using insulation and gypsum boards. What I've had in mind so far is a solution as shown in the above youtube video giving me the following layers above the existing floor:

Wooden floor (14mm) Gypsum floor board (12mm) Acoustic step and sound dampening plate (22mm, I don't know the english word :D ) Existing floor (as shown in above pictures)

This solution will of course not provide a sound tight room since there will be probably leakage through the jamb walls at both sides of the room (to be used for storage) and also the big windows. So actually my question would then be, should I bother at all with soundproofing activities on this floor if I have openings in to the jamb walls and the windows as they are?

LEV wrote:

For the recording room, I am not sure if my planned actions will be worthwhile. Will I gain any soundproofing by mainly treating the floor? I will also treat the walls and the roof, but I was not intending to do this as extensively as I plan for the CR. Mainly by using insulation and gypsum boards. What I've had in mind so far is a solution as shown in the above youtube video giving me the following layers above the existing floor:

Wooden floor (14mm) Gypsum floor board (12mm) Acoustic step and sound dampening plate (22mm, I don't know the english word :D ) Existing floor (as shown in above pictures)

This solution will of course not provide a sound tight room since there will be probably leakage through the jamb walls at both sides of the room (to be used for storage) and also the big windows. So actually my question would then be, should I bother at all with soundproofing activities on this floor if I have openings in to the jamb walls and the windows as they are?

What youtube video are you talking about? In general, the entire room enclosure (walls, ceiling, floor, windows, doors, HVAC vents, electrical outlets) must be included to get good isolation. You must have the nearly the same level of isloation from all components to get good isolation. Your room isolation will only be as good as your weakest component.

britune wrote:

LEV wrote:

For the recording room, I am not sure if my planned actions will be worthwhile. Will I gain any soundproofing by mainly treating the floor? I will also treat the walls and the roof, but I was not intending to do this as extensively as I plan for the CR. Mainly by using insulation and gypsum boards. What I've had in mind so far is a solution as shown in the above youtube video giving me the following layers above the existing floor:

Wooden floor (14mm) Gypsum floor board (12mm) Acoustic step and sound dampening plate (22mm, I don't know the english word :D ) Existing floor (as shown in above pictures)

This solution will of course not provide a sound tight room since there will be probably leakage through the jamb walls at both sides of the room (to be used for storage) and also the big windows. So actually my question would then be, should I bother at all with soundproofing activities on this floor if I have openings in to the jamb walls and the windows as they are?

What youtube video are you talking about? In general, the entire room enclosure (walls, ceiling, floor, windows, doors, HVAC vents, electrical outlets) must be included to get good isolation. You must have the nearly the same level of isloation from all components to get good isolation. Your room isolation will only be as good as your weakest component.

This youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... rhC6F-BRTY But exactly as you point out, the weakest link... Since the room will have multi purposes I need to think well through where I should put my focus and attention.

Do you have soffit vents and ridge vents to the outside?

No ventilation so far. For the moment I need to keep the loft window open to get som ventilation on the loft. So ventilation is one of the topics I have not concluded how to do yet. Maybe I should take the drums out and test how loud it is before any work is done...?

Did a small dB test yesterday. Measured the drums inhouse, approx 95-100dB. Measured the drums outside, approx 70-75dB. These are the numbers from where the drums are today, the walls are approx 20cm thick, standard house construction, no particular focus on sound isolation. Don´t know if these numbers seems recognizable...? :shot:

"Most of the loft studios I have watched on this forum over the years never get reported as finished on this forum. I don't know if folks don't publish their results or just bail out all together. " :)

xSpace wrote:

"Most of the loft studios I have watched on this forum over the years never get reported as finished on this forum. I don't know if folks don't publish their results or just bail out all together. " :)

He, he....I won't let you down :D A quick loft google of johnlsayers.com gives me 1320 pictures, so there is inspiration to find at least... :D My most important room will be the control room. This is the room I will put the most money into to improve. For the recording room I'm not quite sure how thorough I will be. It will clearly leak sound through the windows, so I am not sure how much effort I will put into for instance the floor. Is it any value in making a floating floor? Or maybe to rephrase, with a room as shown in the above pictures and drawing, where is it most important to do sound isolation efforts? With my small dB test of the drums in our main house, the current construction reduces the noise level with approx 25-30 dB. With your knowledge of typical (garage) lofts, what measures gives the best results. With the least effort. In the cheapest possible way, hence "cheap" records.... :)

Do you have a post(s) in the garage below supporting the loft floor above? Or do your loft floor joists span the entire distance? Where you live, do you have building codes to follow that will get inspected? Or will you be free to build as you please?

"Most of the loft studios I have watched on this forum over the years never get reported as finished on this forum. I don't know if folks don't publish their results or just bail out all together. " I haven't bailed out yet, I cud do with being financially bailed out. My control room and machine room is in a loft with the 3 tracking rooms below, bedroom, toilet, lounge... The advise given to me on this forum before i even bought a single sheet of plasterboard was to study the principles of soundproofing until they became clear. I personally found rods book to be very clear and concise and it was a wonderful reference to me during my build. I am no expert when it comes to studio construction but I am very happy with the results thus far. My drum room is directly below the control room and I can record drums at a comfortable monitoring level with very little bleed from the drum room below. There is no disturbance to my neighbours or to the rest of the residential property. If I can be of any help to you feel free to ask... all the best - hally

Rod's book is arriving tomorrow. I'll do some reading this weekend I think and then post back if I somehow see the light. Or not :D

Rods book isn't going to cover flanking in an upper level wooden framed structure.

xSpace wrote:

Rods book isn't going to cover flanking in an upper level wooden framed structure.

Any suggestions for good reading that can support this type of construction? I´m not expecting that Rod´s book will give me the recipe, but I hope it will give some general good advices...?

After you read Rod's book and start to understand more about isolation, check out my old thread here. I was gonna have drywall/green glue/drywall on all walls hanging by Resilient Channel. My floor was gonna be OSB/green glue/OSB. It was the best design I could find without spending giant dollars. I think in Rod's book he makes a statement of something like, "Reality is that you can't get isolation from a simple elevated wood deck. Period." Now once on this forum when I was warning someone of the difficulties of building in a room above a garage, Rod posted and said it could be done. Rod recommended a layer of 2" 703 under the floor might help.

Now once on this forum when I was warning someone of the difficulties of building in a room above a garage, Rod posted and said it could be done. Rod recommended a layer of 2" 703 under the floor might help.

Yes, but I'm pretty sure that was for a different purpose. That works great for impact noise, and somewhat for airborne noise, but still isn't a substitute for a 6 inch concrete slab on grade, when it comes to isolating! I personally saw a case like this here in Chile, where a drum rehearsal room was built on the second floor of a brick building, and that second floor was indeed a concrete slab! It just wasn't "on grade", and wasn't damped at all. The walls and ceiling around that room were correctly decoupled two-leaf MSM, with three layers of 15mm drywall and an 8" fully insulated air gap, but the isolation from that system not good: The walls and ceiling were working fine, but to no real purpose since there was a lot of flanking going on through the floor. I'd hate to think what that would have been like if the floor would have been a typical wooden deck... The general mantra is that in order to stop sound, you need mass. Lots of mass. A couple of layers of plywood separated by a layer of 703 just doesn't have much mass. If you want to understand floor isolation better, take a look at IR-766, RR-168 and IR-811. You'll get a pretty good understanding of how things work from those. - Stuart -

Here's the link to the actual post. Maybe I don't fully understand it, but he seems to recommend 703 over light concrete. It's really hard to get lots of mass for a garage loft floor without a lot of expense to build the structure to hold up the weight.

britune wrote:

Here's the link to the actual post. Maybe I don't fully understand it, but he seems to recommend 703 over light concrete. It's really hard to get lots of mass for a garage loft floor without a lot of expense to build the structure to hold up the weight.

Exactly! That's pretty much what I recalled. Here's the actual quote form that thread:

One thing that helps with installations on normal floors - above garages - in attics, etc. is to develope a floor above the original floor using a solid mass of 2" 703 for an iso pad (stops dead any drum action effect) with multiple layers of overlapped plywood above that (green glue between layers if it's called for).

That's the impact noise thing I was talking about, and note that he says "multiple layers of plywood". As in: "more than just one or two layers". That's how you get mass. Of course, Rod also makes it very clear, both on the forum and in his book, that you always need to make certain that your structure can handle the load you are going to put on it! Plywood weighs about 60 pounds per sheet. 4 layers in a 16' x 12' room would be nearly 1500 pounds of extra load, plus whatever else is going in the room (isolation, treatment, instruments, equipment, people, HVAC, etc). That might be fine for your floor, or it might not. So you do need to make sure that your existing floor can handle that extra load, and the only guy who can tell you about that for sure is a qualified structural engineer. And Rod was talking about wooden decks, not concrete:

What I did do was point out the problems relating to attempting to build isolation assemblies from elevated wood decks, and this was specificaly related to constructing floating isolated assemblies.

In relation to light concrete, he said this:

But from the view of flanking transmissions - not only will it not help it might actually hurt.

So if flanking is the issue, then light concrete is not the solution. What IS a solution is:

The 703 decouples - the concrete is actually a pretty decent transmitter when looked at from the viewpoint of structurally transmitted sounds..... So no - it is not a suitable replacement - but would indeed enhance the system.

In other words, if you are going to float your floor and use a light concrete deck, then it needs to be properly isolated to avoid flanking. Ted White also added a comment to that thread, saying basically that you could probably do it that way, but on top of an acoustic mat. Then also points out that, like everything else, there's a trade off with that plan too: Concrete is great for isolation, not so great for flanking. The point that was implied here, but not really made clearly, is that getting high levels of isolation for a second floor studio is not easy: floating just with wood by itself is not a good solution (due to the lack of mass), and if you do decide to go with a floated concrete deck, then it MUST be isolated correctly, or that won't work either due to the flanking issue. But the major point Rod was actually making in that post is pretty much: "Live with what you have. If that's what you have, then that's what you have, so just do the best you can with it." So if the ONLY place you have available for a studio is a second floor, then either you give up and do nothing, or you do the best you can with that space, within the limitations of time, budget, space and structural integrity. If you can only get 40 dB of isolation, then that's what you can get, so figure out ways of working around that limitation, and live with it. It's either that, or no studio at all! Given the choice, I'll always go with "something" over "nothing"! That's why I suggested looking at IR-766, RR-168 and IR-811: there's a huge amount of excellent data in there, with dozens of different floor systems that have been tested in laboratories, with full results of the isolation obtained for each one, and the full details of how it was built. Looking through there is an education! I think a good approach is to look through it, see which ones are similar to YOUR situation, and then narrow down the field to ones you can afford, and build easily. - Stuart -