Just looking for guidance: Not so much Recording Studio as.. | John Sayers’ Recording Studio Design Forum archive

Hi Jack, and welcome! But please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :)

Is there a site somewhere dedicated to Electronic Music Production Studio Builds,

You have already found it! :) You won't find a better place than this on the internet (believe me: I've looked). What you are planning to do is exactly what a large percentage of the members here want to do: move up from a simple, basic studio to something a little more professional, that will allow them to concentrate more on what they love to do (make music), and get higher quality results. So here you are! You found what you were looking for.

I am hoping that someone here will understand my needs and perhaps help me out a little bit.

I hear exactly what you are saying, and you can count on getting that type of help here.

I am considering getting a *small* studio built outside in the back garden of my house.

Do you have an existing building out there that you could use, or are you planning to build something from the ground up?

I understand as in any studio, sound should be treated, not blocked.

Most home studios need both: you need to block annoying sounds coming in from outside (neighbors, cars, planes, helicopters, wind, rain, thunder, dogs, etc.), and you probably also need to block sound going out, to avoid your family and/or neighbors coming to visit you with a baseball bat in one hand and a grim look on their faces... Or even worse (maybe) having the cops come in to give you a fine or shut you down, due to contravening your local noise regulations. "Blocking sound" is normally called "isolation" around here, sometimes incorrectly referred to as "soundproofing". So blocking is a part of studio building, but as you mention, the big part is getting the treatment right. The very fact of isolating the room implies that you keep your sound inside, and don't let it out. If it didn't get out, the obviously it stayed in, bouncing around and making the place sound terrible. So the room needs the right treatment to make it sound good again.

Sound should have room to develop, to get a clean mix.

Well, yes, but that applies more to recording voices and live acoustic instruments, not so much to just mixing. Do you plan to do both?

So I am a little unsure how small a small studio really is,

The ITU and EBU recommend a floor area of around 20 to 60 square meters for an normal two-channel (stereo) control room, or 30 to 70 square meters for a multichannel (5.1, 7.1, etc) control room. However, that does not mean that you cannot have a successful smaller room! Those are just optimum sizes. Many forum members here have built studios much smaller than those, with very good results. John has even built a great studio inside a shipping container! If he can fit one inside a container, then there is hope for really small rooms. Of course, as you mention, a larger space will always sound better, and if you also need a "live room" to record things like acoustic drums, bass guitar amps, and other things that need space, then the rule is "the bigger the better". Drums, in particular, need a lot of space to sound really good, and high ceilings to be recorded at their best.

and even more unsure on how much it would cost.

For a really professional place that you hire someone to build, the general rule of thumb is that it will cost you about the same per square meter as building an upscale house in your area. So the easiest thing to do is to call some local contractors and ask what their basic flat rate is for building houses, per square meter. Of course, if you do all the work yourself, it will be MUCH cheaper, since a very large part of construction is labor. You can also save on materials by looking around carefully, buying stuff that is on sale, or damaged materials that you can work around, etc. There are ways of saving money. And if you have an existing space that just needs converting (a two car garage, for example), then it will also be much less expensive than starting from an empty piece of lawn.

My brother is an architect who would happily design the plans, and even build it I'm sure,

Great! But also: "beware". Designing and building a home studio is not the same as designing and building a house, office or shop. The basic concepts are similar, but there are many things that are very different, and are not normally given much importance in architectural schools. For example, the methods used to design walls that isolate sound are rather different from designing ordinary walls, since acoustic walls have to be tuned to certain frequencies in order to work. That is something that 99.9% of architects never need to worry about, so it is rather different. Also, the placement of doors and windows needs to be done with acoustic performance and treatment in mind, and even the design of the electrical and HVAC systems needs to take into account the acoustic aspects of the build. Even the most basic things, like room shape and dimensions, can have serious acoustic consequences, and need to be calculated carefully. Some room shapes are terrible for studios, others are really good. So your brother will probably need to learn a lot of new stuff before he can design your place successfully.

To be clear, I don't use a console, nor do I have a lot of hardware, however do want to start constructing an Analog Modular System. Most of my equipment is Midi running into an Ableton > Reason set up.

Cool! Sounds like you are similar to a lot of folks around here! :) Your style of making music is often referred to as "ITB", meaning "In The Box". In other words, you do the vast majority of your recording/mixing/mastering inside your computer, very little outside. So please tell us more about what you have in mind, and I'm sure folks here will try to help you out. But do check those forum rules... :) - Stuart -