New Home Studio in Montana, USA

Hello Everybody, I'm really excited to finally be joining this community with my own studio build! I have read every bit of documentation that is required before posting and have read Rod Gervais' book as well. For several years now, I have scoured this forum for any and all relevant information for successfully building a studio at home. I hope that I cover all of the information necessary for a successful start in this community. I'm trying to wrap my mind around all of this information all at once and so I apologize in advance if there are any details that I leave out unintentionally. I'm a newbie, the info is a lot to take in and I want to do the best job that I can to provide accurate and appropriate information so that I don't waste anybody's time. :D Thank you so much for sacrificing the personal time and energy to help people like myself attempt to build something to make great music in! This place is amazing and invaluable!! Here we go! Overview: I want to build a studio above the garage in my new house. The house is currently under construction. We have a tentative move in date set at about 2 months from now. The garage and the studio space above it have already begun construction. However the studio space is just a shell. My intention is to build rooms within the large room. My builder is willing to wait on finishing the studio until I can get all of the plans and details sorted out concerning the construction of the individual studio rooms. The studio will primarily be used as a recording space but could also be used as a practice space for a full band. The music recorded in the space will primarily be loud rock (guitars, bass, drums, vocals). I am hoping to have two rooms, a control room and a Iive room (as well as potential closet/storage adjacent to staircase). I am hoping to receive some guidance/suggestion for how to layout and design the studio between these two rooms to have a great sounding live room as well as a very balanced and accurate control room. Loudness/Neighbors: The music rehearsed and recorded in this space will be loud. With a full band practicing at one time, there is no question that we will be easily hitting the 110db mark. Fortunately, our property is on 1.5 acres of land and there is quite some distance between our home and any neighbors (more than 200ft). My greater concern is the fact that the studio is attached to my home. I would love to build enough sound isolation to not drive my wife crazy during the day as well as to keep normal life and activity of a home with 2 small children out of the recordings. I recognize that sound proofing is really more of a myth than anything else. But I would love to do the best job I can to really bring the transmission of sound down to a minimum. One other factor to consider is a highway down the road that is moderately trafficked but will occasionally have large semi-trucks driving by. Fortunately, the highway is flat at that spot, so there shouldn't be any jake-braking or accelerating at that point. I would love to try to isolate my studio from that noise as well. The Studio Space: This is a standard home construction type build utilizing 2x4 wood studs for framing, OSB outside, insulated using Cellulose and finished with 1/2" drywall. The studio space is located above my garage and has only been framed and closed using OSB outside. The floor of the studio was built using prefabricated trusses. My builder said that the trusses have been engineered to withstand ungodly amounts of weight because he knew that we would be building more rooms in the space above the garage. The total dimension of the floor space is 23' wide (north/south walls) x 25' deep (east/west walls). The ceiling and roof have also been constructed using prefabricated roof trusses built out of 2x4 wood studs. The ceiling is pitched with the apex of the pitch 11' high from the floor and running down the center of the room from the center of the north wall to the center of the south wall. The height of the ceiling drops to 7' as it connects to the East and West walls. However there are dormers on both the east and west walls. The dormers are centered on each wall. They are both 14' wide and 9' tall. There is a 5' x 4' window at the center of each dormer hung 34" up from the floor. The ceiling from the dormer wall extends 6' out from the wall parallel to the floor at a height of 9' and then joins the pitch and angle of the rest of the ceiling rising from 9' to the 11' apex. The north wall also has a 5' x 4' window hung 34" from the floor in the center of that wall. The stairs come up through the floor along the south wall. The stairs are 4' deep and create a hole in the floor that is centered along the south wall 16' wide leaving a 3.5' space on each side of the stairs for potential storage/closet space. The room is 575 sq ft and 511 sq ft minus the space for the stairs. The Plan: I primarily want to build two rooms. The stairs rise from west to east. I think it would be great if the studio opened at the top of the stairs into the control room. Then you would have access to the live room from the control room. Nobody would accidentally walk in on a recording session at that point. I would love to build the live room as big as possible without compromising on a good sounding control room. I would love to incorporate a pitch to the ceiling in the live room to accomplish something like the 'coffin' effect that Rod Gervais mentioned in his book, getting room mics up into that acoustically charged crazy space. :) It would be awesome to have a window from the control room into the live room as well as a sliding glass door. However, I recognize that I am tight on space and would be willing to settle for just the sliding glass door if there is just no room to work with. I would also like to be able to see out the existing widows in the outside studio shell. However, if incorporating that many windows into the studio would dramatically decrease its potential for quality, then I would be willing to hang some blinds, close um up, build my walls inside and never see the light of day again. :shock: Right now I monitor on Alesis M1 Active MKII speakers that I thought could be soffit mounted. However I also have Eosone RSF 1000 floor standing speakers that are very even and big and was entertaining the thought of using those to monitor instead/as well. It would also be awesome to incorporate an outboard gear rack space for all of my pres, compressors, patch bay etc. I like when those are located behind the mixing chair. It would also be cool to see a space at the rear of the control room for a couch. There is a small 3.5'x 4' nook to the east of the stairs at the corner of the south/east walls that I thought would be a great place to store mics/cable/etc with access from the control room. If the layout doesn't work to have a closet access in the control room then maybe that storage could be accessed from the stair case. There is also another 3.5' x 4' nook on the west side of the stairs at the corner of the south/west walls that could potentially be used as storage access from the live room. Budget: As it stands right now my budget is $6000 and is for construction only. I already have all of the recording gear (mixing console, computer, mics, cables, stands, monitors) I just need a great space to use it all in. Question: Can you help me figure out a good layout for what I am trying to accomplish? Thanks so much! SketchUp: I tried jumping into sketch up to put together a basic layout of the room. Pictures: Here are some photos to help communicate what the space looks like.

Hi Kevin, and welcome to the forum! :) Great first post, by the way! :) :)

I want to build a studio above the garage in my new house.

Well, you are probably already aware of this, but unfortunately, that is the first and biggest problem. Building on a second or higher floor is much harder than building on the ground floor, for several reasons. Primarily, you don't have a large, massive, thick, dense, rigid, concrete slab under you, that is in turn directly damped by the entire Planet Earth, so isolating is a lot harder, and second you don't have the structural support that you need for all the huge amount of mass that you will have to add, in order to even get reasonable isolation. That's why you frequently see recommendations here to ONLY build on the ground. It is so much cheaper, so much easier, and so much better, all around. Isolation requires mass. That's the fundamental truth about sound and "soundproofing". Without substantial mass there simply is no way to get high levels of isolation. There is no such thing as "lightweight soundproofing", despite the marketing hype you sometimes see on questionable web-sites from questionable companies about their questionable products. Adding snake-oil to a product does not make it more soundproof! :) You cannot bypass the laws of physics. So my first and most fundamental suggestion to you would be: build it on the ground, next to the garage. In the long run, it will be cheaper to do that than to do what you are trying to do. Building in the second floor is more expensive for two main reasons: To get to the same level of isolation as a ground floor studio, you will need much more mass since you have to do a major beef-up of the floor just to get something resembling the isolation of a slab-on-grade. And secondly, all that extra mass requires extra structural support, which the garage itself was never designed to handle. So you'll spend a lot of money just on beefing up the garage structure to the point where it can handle the huge load that you'll be placing on it. So your choices are these: - Build within the exiting structural limits, on the second floor, and just live with the poor isolation. - Spend a lot of money to beef up and isolate that second floor to get the level you need. - Spend less money, and get more isolation, by building something separate, on it's own slab.

The music recorded in the space will primarily be loud rock (guitars, bass, drums, vocals).

So you will have the loudest, hardest-to-isolate instruments in there. Bass and drums are the two hardest things to isolate, due not just to the very high levels, but also to the very low frequencies. Both bass and drums put out a large amount of energy in the low frequencies, and the lows are exactly the most difficult to isolate, requiring even more mass and larger air gaps.

I am hoping to receive some guidance/suggestion for how to layout and design the studio between these two rooms to have a great sounding live room as well as a very balanced and accurate control room.

There are specifications that you can follow from the ITU, EBU and AES about how a control room should sound. Each organization has its own set of specs, but they are very similar in general, with very little difference. So base your goals on those, and you will be fine. The problem is, they only tell you "what" you should aim for, not "how" to get there! :)

there is no question that we will be easily hitting the 110db mark.

Probably closer to 120. Drums alone played hard can hit 115 dBC.

I would love to build enough sound isolation to not drive my wife crazy during the day as well as to keep normal life and activity of a home with 2 small children out of the recordings.

It would be good to put actual objective numbers on those subjective levels: Get a sound level meter (they are not expensive), and measure what your wife considers to be "not driven crazy" by setting up your sound system in your present house, and playing the typical music that you will be tracking/mixing, then keep adjusting the level of that until she says she is "not crazy". Also measure the level that you think is comfortable for your kids, when they are doing important things like studying, homework or sleeping. OK maybe they aren0t old enough for having homework or studying right now, but in a couple of years... ? You'll then have two numbers: the big one is "How loud am I?", which is around 115 to 120 dBC, and the other is "How quiet do I need to be?". Subtract the little one from the big one: that's how much isolation you need. Then take a look at IR-761, IR-832, IR-766, IR-169 and IR-811, find a set of construction technique and set of materials that provides the level of isolation you need and fits your budget, then build that. That's the normal procedure that you should use, since it is based on actual, objective numbers, not "guesstimates". Those documents contain lists of hundreds of ways of building walls, floors and ceilings, and show the isolation achieved by each one, as tested in independent acoustic laboratories. They tell the truth about what you can expect foe each method and each type of material.

One other factor to consider is a highway down the road that is moderately trafficked but will occasionally have large semi-trucks driving by.

Then you might also need to look at isolating very low frequency vibration, which makes things a bit harder still. Can you feel vibration in the building right now, when truck go past? If you touch the floor or walls gently with your fingertips, or even better, listen to them with a doctor's stethoscope, is there any vibration or sound in the structure as cars/trucks/busses go by?

This is a standard home construction type build utilizing 2x4 wood studs for framing, OSB outside, insulated using Cellulose and finished with 1/2" drywall. The studio space is located above my garage and has only been framed and closed using OSB outside.

OK, this is the time to get a structural engineer involved. After you do the basic calculations about how much mass you will need to isolate at the levels you want, get him to come in, examine the existing structure, examine your rough plans, and give you his professional qualified opinion on if you can do it or not, and if not, then what do you need to do to beef up the structure sufficiently that it can handle the huge load.

The floor of the studio was built using prefabricated trusses. My builder said that the trusses have been engineered to withstand ungodly amounts of weight because he knew that we would be building more rooms in the space above the garage.

"Ungodly amount" is not really a good, accurate, objective measurement of how much load it can handle! :) You need to know what the design parameters are for live load and dead load of both the floor trusses and the ceiling trusses, as well as the load-bearing capacity of the overall ground floor structure. To give you an idea, your walls and ceiling will probably weigh in excess of 40 kg/m3 (aprox 8 PSF), IN ADDITION to the existing walls, floor, roof and ceiling, and your new floor will weigh much more than that. So figure out your total wall area, multiply by 40, and that will give you a very rough estimate of the ADDITIONAL dead load you are adding. Rough guess: you have about 160 square meters of wall, floor and ceiling area to get two rooms in there, fully isolated, which implies about 6400 kilograms of mass. That's roughly 14,000 pounds of materials, WITHOUT considering the new floor. :shock: So the question is: Did your builder make that strong enough so that you can park four or five cars up there, or a couple of small trucks? That's what we are talking about, in terms of mass. That's roughly the weight of THREE standard 20' shipping containers! Did your guy build your room to that level? can you really shove three shipping container in there, without it collapsing? Besides, regardless of what your builder says, you still need the professional opinion of a qualified structural engineer, in writing. (Note that the above weight estimate does not consider the weight of the new floor, nor of additional mass that might be needed on the existing outer leaf.)

The ceiling and roof have also been constructed using prefabricated roof trusses built out of 2x4 wood studs.

How is that roof ventilated, and what are the code requirements for that? Isolation is a complete "envelope", including the room. The entire envelope must be sealed air-tight in order to get isolation, but a roof needs ventilation. So there is a potential issue there: you may need to use three-leaf construction for your ceiling, which reduces low frequency isolation.

I think it would be great if the studio opened at the top of the stairs into the control room. Then you would have access to the live room from the control room.

That is one possibility, yes, but it does mean that load-in and load-out for each session require dragging all the equipment and instruments back and forth through the CR into the LR. And since you are on the second floor, it also means lugging all of that up and down stairs all the time.... so make the stairs very wide, not to steep, and with easy access paths at the top and bottom. No sudden, tight turns, or low rafters overhead, or low/narrow doorways.

It would be awesome to have a window from the control room into the live room as well as a sliding glass door. However, I recognize that I am tight on space and would be willing to settle for just the sliding glass door if there is just no room to work with. ... As it stands right now my budget is $6000

A pair of sliding glass doors will eat up a heavy chunk of your budget. HVAC will eat up most of the rest. To be very honest, your budget is unrealistically low. You are talking about an area of about 600 square feet, and a budget of US$ 6000. That works out to just US$ 10 per square foot. That's about enough to do just the finish flooring in good quality laminate, including labor and underlay... You are already building a house at present, so you know roughly what it costs per square foot to build. Apply that same "per square foot" rate to the studio, but add about 25% to it: that's roughly what it will cost, in realistic terms, to build a studio. Put it another way: a 4'x8' sheet of 5/8" drywall will cost you something in the region of US$ 10, and it covers 32 square feet. You need to cover about 1650 square feet, with at least two layers, so total of 3300 square feet. That's about 110 sheets (allowing for some waste). There goes US$ 1,100, just on drywall. Green Glue costs roughly US$ 0.75 per square foot. There goes another US$ 1,200. 2x4 studs are something like US$ 4.00 each. You need about 250 of those, so there goes another grand (and that's making the rather unlikely assumption that you can do your ceiling joists with 2x4's! More likely to be 2x8's...) So after spending more than half your budget, all you have done is purchase studs, drywall and green glue. Still to go: labor (that's a biggie!), HVAC system (another biggie), doors, windows, insulation, caulk, nails, screws, bolts, electrical system (another biggie), lights, acoustic treatment, surface finishes, etc. I'm not trying to be a wet blanket here, or to discourage you from doing this: I'm just pointing out the cold, hard reality of what it costs to build a studio, in objective terms. And we still have not considered the new isolation floor in any of the above. I would seriously re-think your budget, and also seriously think about doing this as a separate out building, on its own slab. If you cannot do either or those, then the space and budget you have are "usable", but be aware that you will not be able achieve good levels of isolation. - Stuart -

Wow Stuart, You are such an incredible resource of information. Thanks so much for your time. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. After reading your reply, I think it would be good to clarify my priorities for this project before we dive any further in. First off, my greatest priority is to build a couple great sounding rooms. I need to be able to work in a control room that is accurate for mixing and I desperately need help in trying to layout that space in conjunction with a live room that has life and excitement and energy. I recognize that life, excitement and energy are very generic terms and that is because I am trying to describe what I want from a musical perspective (being that I am primarily a songwriter/musician). I say life, but you probably hear ratios, reflections and other super amazing technical things like that. So, that is my first priority in this. My second priority is isolation and this is why: 1. I don't have much money 2. This is space is all I have to work with. We recorded our first project in a two story home with separate living spaces on each floor. We were given the space upstairs to track our songs while a family lived in the first story. The house was never designed to record music or do anything like this. Everything we recorded upstairs was heard downstairs clear as day. So we needed to work with each other to pull it all off successfully. Because there was no isolation, we needed to respect certain times for recording. We wouldn't start tracking till after 10am and we would try to finish off before 5pm. It was not easy but it was possible (in fact you can hear the results of that partiular project here :) : http://itunes.apple.com/album/when-darkness-shakes/id573991748 I imagine that this studio space will operate in very much the same way as that house that we recorded in. If it is loud, then it will be loud and I will simply need to work with my own family to figure out ways to make it work. The studio will only be used for full length recording projects once, maybe twice, a year. The rest of the time will be spent mixing or putting ideas together at random times so finding that balance should not be too difficult.

So your choices are these: - Build within the exiting structural limits, on the second floor, and just live with the poor isolation. - Spend a lot of money to beef up and isolate that second floor to get the level you need. - Spend less money, and get more isolation, by building something separate, on it's own slab.

Of these three options, I am going to have to go with the first. I don't have the option of building somewhere separate on a slab and I don't have enough of a budget to beef up the floor. What I would like to do is take what I do have and create the best possible recording space that I can, knowing very well that it will not be perfect. If you could help me get there, I would be forever grateful! :D I found out from my builder that the load capacity of the studio floor is 40 PSF. I was wondering if that at least gives us a little bit to work with concerning the idea of building mass into the floor. I assume doing something for the floor, even if it isn't perfect, is better than doing nothing. I would love to hear what you think. Here is a photo of the floor truss: As far as my budget is concerned, I have quite a bit of materials on hand. I already have a couple of doors, piles of lumber, rock wool insulation and lots of sheetrock. All of my labor will be free and done by friends who are professional builders and are donating their time to see this project completed and will purchase the materials and equipment that I need for me in order to drive cost down as much as possible. I think that we are going to be able to stretch that $6000 a lot further than we might expect. This studio space does not need to be pretty by any means, just functional. So for example, maybe instead of doing a nice laminate floor, what if we just did sheets of plywood stained a cool color? I have incorporated that idea into spaces before. Here is an example of my office: Based on the measurements, diagram and project file included in my first post, what do you think would be the most effective way to lay out this studio space to accommodate the two rooms well? Is is worth trying to build up the floor with a load capacity rating of 40 PSF and how would I go about doing that if so? Thanks so much for your help and wisdom Stuart!

I need to be able to work in a control room that is accurate for mixing

OK, good layout and good treatment are certainly possible in that space! It is the isolation aspect that is "iffy"...

and I desperately need help in trying to layout that space in conjunction with a live room that has life and excitement and energy.

If you want the two to work together as a balanced set of rooms, then the total volume of the live room needs to be at least twice the volume of the control room, and more like 5 times the volume. There are reasons for, that I can explain if yo need the details, but that's the basic guideline: The live room should be substantially bigger than the control room.

I recognize that life, excitement and energy are very generic terms and that is because I am trying to describe what I want from a musical perspective (being that I am primarily a songwriter/musician). I say life, but you probably hear ratios, reflections and other super amazing technical things like that

Not really! :) I'm a live sound engineer too, as well as recording engineer, so I do get what you are saying. The problem is to translate those subject terms into objective numbers that can actually be used to design the space.... That's where the "art" of studio design meets with the "science" of studio design. Both matter, equally.

My second priority is isolation and this is why: 1. I don't have much money 2. This is space is all I have to work with.

OK, so reality is that you won't be able to get a huge amount of isolation based on the budget you have. That doesn't mean that the studio will be unusable! Just that it won't be as well isolated as you would like.

I found out from my builder that the load capacity of the studio floor is 40 PSF.

I imagine he is talking about live load? It would be good to know what the dead load is too. There's another factor that comes into play here, and that is the actual location of the load, or point loading. Spreading a 5,000 pound load over 500 square feet of floor is not the same as spread that same 5,000 pound load over just 5 square feet of floor. Since most of the mass will be in your inner-leaf walls, and the walls are basically just thin lines that sit on the floor, you can see why most of the load will be concentrated on a very small area of your floor. That's why you need a structural engineer to check over your plans and sign off on them. He is the only guy who can tell you for sure if that amount of load at that specific location is safe or not.

I assume doing something for the floor, even if it isn't perfect, is better than doing nothing

Absolutely! :) No doubt about that. More mass will help. Mass law says that each time you double the mass of the floor, you get an increase of 6dB in isolation, probably more like 5 dB. So putting four layers of 5/8" OSB down will give you about 10 dB better isolation than a single layer, which means that, subjectively, you have decreased the level to about half of what it was. Four layers of 5/8" OSB is a dead load of about 2.5 PSF, roughly.

I already have a couple of doors, piles of lumber, rock wool insulation and lots of sheetrock.

What type of rockwool, and what thickness of drywall? The typical 1/2" drywall used on many places in houses is not heavy enough for good isolation: Hopefully the drywall you have is 5/8" fire-rated drywall? The rockwool should have a density of about 50 kg/m3 (roughly 3 PCF).

for example, maybe instead of doing a nice laminate floor, what if we just did sheets of plywood stained a cool color? I have incorporated that idea into spaces before. Here is an example of my office:

Looks very nice! That would be fine, acoustically.

Based on the measurements, diagram and project file included in my first post, what do you think would be the most effective way to lay out this studio space to accommodate the two rooms well?

This takes a bit of juggling, trad-offs, hand-banging, and tears. :) There are recommendations in documents from the ITU, EBU, AES and other organizations, on the minimum foot print and room volume that you need for a "critical listening" room: Basically, 20 square meters of floor area for 2.0 or 2.1 rooms, and 30 square meters for multichannel rooms, such as 5.1, 7.1, etc. That does not mean that you cannot have a small room that is still good: it just means that these guys have figured out the optimum size, and that's what it is. So based on the "1 to 5" recommendation for the relationship between CR and LR, the LR therefore needs at least 40 m2 of floor area, and ideally about 100 square meters, or perhaps somewhat less if the ceiling is considerably higher in the LR than the CR. So that's the basic starting point. According to these guidelines, you need about 120 m2 for CR + LR. That works out to roughly 1300 square feet. You don't have that much space, and neither do the vast majority of home studio builders! It just isn't realistic for the average home to have a studio that big! :shock: However, you do have nearly half the area that they say, which is a darn sight better than most studio builders! So you could conceivably shrink things by 50%, and that would be the solution. But that would give you a control room with only 10m2 of floor space (about 107 ft2), which might not be enough if you need to fit in an entire band to listen to the mix, for example. So this is where the juggling starts: How much extra do you want to give to the CR? You could keep it at the recommended 20 m2 (215 ft2), but then it is about the same size as the LR, which is not good, especially if you also need to fit the band and their gear into the LR! Juggle---juggle--juggle.... This is the thing that you need to define for yourself: how much floor space to you want to devote to each of the rooms? You know what your priorities are, and how an average session goes for you, so you are the only person who can figure out this part. Based on your decision, we can then help you refine that further by seeing what arrangement and shape of each room will fit into your space, combined with aspects like room ratio, ceiling heights, etc. So the ball is in your court for this bit: What split of that floor area makes sense for you? How much floor area do you need in each room? How many people / instruments / hangers-on etc.? - Stuart -