I have attached a (very crude) Sketchup file that is fairly accurate in dimensions of the lofted area and should be close in slope for the ceiling...obviously an in progress effort, my photos are too large to post directly to the site, so here is an album I started.
http://smg.beta.photobucket.com/user/ks ... 20Building
The John Sayers' Small Studio in 3D design seems to somewhat resemble the starting point of what we want to accomplish...the drum room and the control room. http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5457
The dimensions of the existing floor is 13' 6" wide, 33' long, and the ceiling has a slope, with the far end of the room at 9' 6" and the area where the loft starts at 14' 6". Obviously the rails will be replaced with wall...
The goal of the studio is more as a private space for our remix, composition, mixing, mastering, and film work, but there will be loud drums and guitar/bass amps being utilized and there are neighbors on the other side of the warehouse that we do not want to disturb(multi-unit building), and one of the neighbors has trucks in the parking lot so we will want to keep their noise out as much as possible as well. Budget is "as little as possible to get the job done right and efficiently" but realistically hoping to keep the construction $10k-20k. In keeping with the budget and just for our personal preference, we do not wish to use control room glass, sliding glass doors, etc, instead opting for cameras and monitors. There is an area in the photos where we will be building up to add a space for a small iso booth as well.
The control room needs to be large enough to house a desk (currently Control 24), monitors, a couple racks of outboard, a couple tape machines, 1 engineer, 1 producer, and maybe 1 other...does not need to have room for a full band, but we do have lots of outboard. So one consideration might be to have a small machine room...the tape machines in question are a 1" 16 track (potential concern) and a 1/4" 8 track (not a big concern).
One of my biggest concerns is what to do with the floor...as it is a lofted space, currently merely walking on the floor generates a lot of noise in the office below (which is our office), and I'm afraid of it causing problems with the neighbors once we get some drums/amps going.
Also we need to figure out what to do with heating and cooling the studio portion of this space (there is already HVAC for the main warehouse space).
I do have Rod Gervais' book and have read it a couple of times, I am just trying to assemble my ideas and get some professional help (ha!) in coming up with a feasible final design. We are planning on beginning framing in the next week or two.
Looking for Design Advice - Warehouse Loft in Iowa, USA
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 17944.
Hi "kslight", and welcome! :)
Actually, it is one of the forum rules that all photos should be posted here on the forum, rather than off-site. The reason is simply that in the past some threads became useless and meaningless when the off-site hosting disappeared or changed structure, so the photos are no longer accessible. So please re-post those photos here. If your photos are too large, then just re-size the, before posting.my photos are too large to post directly to the site, so here is an album I started.
So your studio is going to be a two-room studio, with one control room and one drum booth?The John Sayers' Small Studio in 3D design seems to somewhat resemble the starting point of what we want to accomplish...the drum room and the control room.
ah, OK, so it is a three-room studio: CR, drum booth and iso booth?There is an area in the photos where we will be building up to add a space for a small iso booth as well.
Honestly, I would seriously consider putting your tape machines somewhere else, outside of the CR. Those things are noisy, and you probably don't want that inside the CR. Your comment about a small machine room seems to be the way to go.The control room needs to be large enough to house a desk (currently Control 24), monitors, a couple racks of outboard, a couple tape machines,
Yes. That's why the general recommendation is to NOT build a studio on anything but the ground floor. Upper floor builds introduce a set of problems that you just don't have if you build on the ground floor. You should probably increase your budget by a large amount if you want to build on an upper floor, especially seeing that you ant to isolate drums and bass. Those are the hardest things to isolate anyway, as so much of the energy is in the low frequency end of the spectrum, but trying to do so on the second floor makes it much harder.One of my biggest concerns is what to do with the floor...as it is a lofted space, currently merely walking on the floor generates a lot of noise in the office below (which is our office), and I'm afraid of it causing problems with the neighbors once we get some drums/amps going.
You will probably need a separate small HVAC system for the studio. It might bot be wise to try to tap into the main system, if that can be avoided.Also we need to figure out what to do with heating and cooling the studio portion of this space (there is already HVAC for the main warehouse space).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but you are no where near ready to start framing. That would be a really, really, REALLY bad idea. You do not have any plans at all, and don't even understand the major issue implied by trying to isolate your floor for drums. Nor do you have any isolation design, room layout, room geometry or acoustic treatment design, nor HVAC design, nor electrical system design. At a guess, I'd say that you are MONTHS away from being able to frame anything, if you want this to be successful. It is simply not possible to design a studio overnight. Even if you take John's design exactly as it is, it would still need extensive modification to meet YOUR needs and to fit into YOUR space. That takes a lot of work, a lot of careful calculation, a lot of thought and a lot of planning. I would strongly urge you to stop right here, before you do anything more, and think this through very carefully. - Stuart -We are planning on beginning framing in the next week or two.
I did see the rule, I also saw it was written 6 years ago when file sizes were smaller.. I thought it would be understood when my files are 10x larger than the forum allows... Will try to resize when I get home...Actually, it is one of the forum rules that all photos should be posted here on the forum, rather than off-site. The reason is simply that in the past some threads became useless and meaningless when the off-site hosting disappeared or changed structure, so the photos are no longer accessible. So please re-post those photos here. If your photos are too large, then just re-size the, before posting.
This is the goal.ah, OK, so it is a three-room studio: CR, drum booth and iso booth?
The 1" 16 track is not going to be a workhorse machine, just a toy for occasional use, the vast majority of what we will do will be direct to Pro Tools. Its not a huge machine either, or make a huge amount of noise. The 1/4" machine doesn't produce a substantial amount of noise. Neither of these have remote transports so I can't put them too far away..Honestly, I would seriously consider putting your tape machines somewhere else, outside of the CR. Those things are noisy, and you probably don't want that inside the CR. Your comment about a small machine room seems to be the way to go.
Can you point me in the right direction of where to look for suggestions on upper floor builds? And are you saying even with our construction budget of $10-20k we will not achieve usable results? The vast majority of our hours of recording would not coincide with the neighboring unit, so if perhaps complete isolation is unrealistic as it stands, what is the next best thing?Yes. That's why the general recommendation is to NOT build a studio on anything but the ground floor. Upper floor builds introduce a set of problems that you just don't have if you build on the ground floor. You should probably increase your budget by a large amount if you want to build on an upper floor, especially seeing that you ant to isolate drums and bass. Those are the hardest things to isolate anyway, as so much of the energy is in the low frequency end of the spectrum, but trying to do so on the second floor makes it much harder.
Oh I'm just saying that this project upon design will be ready to build, not one of those that get posted here and sit for years before anything is started. So if things are not ready in two weeks the world will not come to an end :-).Please don't take this the wrong way, but you are no where near ready to start framing. That would be a really, really, REALLY bad idea
This is what we were thinking. Thanks.You will probably need a separate small HVAC system for the studio. It might bot be wise to try to tap into the main system, if that can be avoided.
If it is completely impractical to build as I suggested on the loft within the budget, it may be conceivably possible (this is not my space, though I will be working there) to build the live room on the main floor as most of this space is wide open and much larger than the lofted area. Is it reasonable to assume that a control room and vocal booth is still do-able on the lofted space? Due to the layout and intended purpose of the main floor (storage) it may still be preferable to build the control room on the upper level and just run tie lines from the control room....and the leftover space on the upper level be converted to storage. Regarding the main floor space, I don't have dimensions at this time, as I am a couple hundred miles from the location...but if that is the main suggestion then I will obtain them. That area is a bit of a mess at the moment (huge amount of storage totes/etc) that would have to be cleaned up to get good photos and start work.. Here are resized photos of the lofted space. If the general consensus is that building a live room on the loft is not practical then we will have to plan for utilizing the ground floor, so before I go real crazy into learning Sketchup I guess we need to determine what can and cannot be done within the budget. In the meantime can someone point me in the direction of relevant builds? I realize that this is not a one size fits all type of thing, but I am finding that its difficult to find studio builds that are really start to finish from design to construction to finish.Yes. That's why the general recommendation is to NOT build a studio on anything but the ground floor. Upper floor builds introduce a set of problems that you just don't have if you build on the ground floor. You should probably increase your budget by a large amount if you want to build on an upper floor, especially seeing that you ant to isolate drums and bass. Those are the hardest things to isolate anyway, as so much of the energy is in the low frequency end of the spectrum, but trying to do so on the second floor makes it much harder.
SO just thinking about the flooring only, and assuming I just want to make it the best I can expect it to be, what is the most practical and cost effective solution going to be? I am guessing that the existing structure will not support a sand-filled deck, so that is most likely out. Would the following solution (borrowed from another thread) be reasonably effective? I guess what I'm asking, is what can be expected?
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: Quote: 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: Quote: 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: Quote: 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: Quote: 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 -
I'm really not sure what can be said about the possibilities for your floor. In order to isolate, you need mass and decoupling. You'll have to hire a structural engineer to tell you how much extra mass (load) you can put on the structure that is supporting that floor, then calculate how much of that you'll need for the walls, ceiling, treatment, furniture, equipment, HVAC and people: What is left over is how much extra mass you can put on the floor. My guess is that there won't be much margin available for adding mass, but the only guy who can tell you for sure is a local structural engineer.
If all you are concerned about is impact noise, then you might be able to use the concept of the drum riser: put down a layer of 703 and put a couple of layers of 3/4 plywood or OSB on top of that, making sure that it does not touche the walls. But whether or not that will be enough isolation for you, is questionable.
- Stuart -