3,000 Sq.Ft. - Home Studio Design and Build - HELP!!!

Hello John and everyone! I’ve been following this forum for quite a while but am now in need of some specific inspiration/advise. (I’m going through the ‘Before You Post...’ thread to make sure I answer all necessary questions, so sorry if anything seems random or out of order.) I’m in the planning and designing stages of my new studio. The space I am working with is a 50‘ x 60‘ metal shop with concrete floors. There are metal beams that are unmovable - shown in the picture as red squares. The two interior (blue) walls are metal. Wall ‘1’ (running North/South) is structural but can be removed if replaced with another wall built into the studio design. Wall ‘2’ (running East/West) is not structurally needed. The picture posted is to scale with each small (light grey) square being 1 sq. ft. in size. The larger slightly darker squares are 10‘ x 10‘ areas. The letters are just for specific area references but can be taking off the picture if they are messing up design ideas. I can also post a picture without certain elements if anything is getting in the way. My current budget is $15,000 - $20,000 so I will probably need to build this in phases, but am hoping not to compromise the final design by building it that way. WISH LIST FOR DESIGN: - I would like to keep section ‘B’ pretty much a big open room for larger ensembles as well as a nice space for drum tracking with natural room mics. - In a perfect world the lobby would be in area ‘A’ and the main (or only) control room would be in area ‘E’ to utilize the two existing doors as private entry points. - I would like a small restroom with a stand up shower in or near the lobby area. OTHER DETAILS: - The concrete foundation in area ‘B’ is slightly raised (2 inches). - There is power already run all over the shop (175 amps). - The shop roll up doors (represented on the picture by green lines) can be used for loading/unloading of equipment or can be disregarded and framed in. - One idea I had was to frame in a double french door entry for the lobby (in area 'A') where that shop roll up door is, that way I could roll it down over the real entry after hours of operation. - The actual roof heights are about a foot taller than I noted if including the overhead beams. (So I measured up to the beam and wrote down that height, to be on the safe side) - If the space I am working with is big enough (in your opinion) I wouldn’t mind there being a second (maybe a little smaller) control room to rent out or to have two sessions running concurrently, as long as it doesn’t feel like a design afterthought. But it’s not necessary to have. - I’ve been told there is an option for a second floor above area ‘A’ and ‘C’ (due to the higher ceiling there) for maybe something like a viewing room into area ‘B’ - not sure if that is truly possible. THANK YOU in advance for any/all floor plan and design help!! JRH

Hey JRH! just as a quick heads up! I think some of the guys who really know their stuff, tend to help the most when you're doing a design yourself, researching the basics, etc. Then you bring your plan to the forum, and they'll often (very generously) help us amateurs with places where we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot and not know it. I dunno, maybe you'll get lucky, but I don't think they'll generally do a plan for you from the ground up. Some of the guys actually do that for a living as a paid for service. I've seen them make comments on this forum several times... the more effort you're putting in, the more effort they will tend to expend helping you out. You mentioned you've been here a while, so you probably have seen it too. if you already know it, sorry for preaching to the choir. You've got a lot of space there which is nice. The low budget to space issue will probably hurt, but staging your plan will help if you're careful with the planning. (I'm gonna have to do the same personally) Have you thought about putting a basic floor plan together in sketchup and then asking for suggestions on how to improve it?

Hey Johnnie! Thanks so much for the reply and for setting me straight so kindly! You are totally right, I need to post my designs! I totally didn't want to sway anybody's first creative thoughts by looking at mine - but that just sounds silly now (who has time to give that kind of open ended free advise!). :D Here is the latest design that I feel pretty confident will suite all my needs. So, the question is… What about this design could I later shoot myself in the foot for doing, or NOT doing?! Thanks again!

Here's a little more detail. Anyone have any thoughts?

JRH - a quick calculation tells me you have a 3,000 sqft space which @$100/sqft is going to cost at least $300K and you arrive here expecting the forum to design you a multi room studio? You might as well turn up with 4 wheels and ask for a car design.

Lol. Hi John! Thanks for the reply. :) I realize my first post seems terribly needy. That was not my intension. I just wanted some untainted first impressions from anyone generous and interested enough to advise - not a full on design like it apparently came across as. Sorry about that. I've actually been working on designs for a while and should have posted one right off the bat. I was hoping to build the control room first with my current limited budget ($20,000) but don't know yet if that is even possible. I know how important it is to conceptualize the finished studio design to make sure 'phase 1' building fits perfectly into the final goal. I'm leaning towards the floor plan I posted (as it is roughly the 24th design we've done and seems to fit my needs the best). I was hoping to come here and get any 'you're gonna kick yourself later' advise before I commit to the floor plan and work up the 3D model of it. I'm grateful for any advise for this newbie, but am not expected much anymore. Thanks again for any thoughts. :) JRH

Hey JRH! You take criticism well! Good job. I see what your intent was, and am glad you can see how it came across. It sounds like you definitely have enough budget to get something functional working, and you've already mentioned that you are thinking of staging the design. Let's lower the scope a bit and revise to a goal achievable with the current budget. If you've got 20k available, you've definitely got enough to do a reasonable control room and recording area with iso booths. I'm thinking is that the plan is a little complex at the moment. I'm definitely NOT a professional designer, but I have recorded in a number of different studios, and I remember some components that made things awkward, so I'm looking at it from that perspective. I'm a big believer in keeping pathways for access to rooms simple. It's also awfully nice to have a place for people to congregate that ISN"T the control room. You've got an entry to the building in the upper left hand corner. I don't think you want your entry to go into a live recording room. That seems likely to end up with an eventual intrusion into a recording. It's also going to be tough if there's no access to the control room except by going into the recording areas. It's probably also not up to code. Most places I can think of are going to require at least 2 entries and exits. That ended up being an issue with my own initial plan. What if you come into a small lobby/gathering area in that upper left hand corner. (sort the second exit out later) What if you Re-orient your control room plan so that it's symmetrically reversed. It's up on top instead of being on the bottom. This would give you a traffic pattern where people come in, enter a lobby area, and then can enter the control room. They can also step out of the control room into a lobby. It's also nice to be able to get to recording areas without passing through the (often crowded) control room. (the goal here would be that while you're "staging", you wouldn't have people walking through unbuilt areas. They'd enter right into function spaces, and you could just expand into the unbuilt stuff later. Keep your centralized control room plan, but I'd reduce the doors into/out of it. Right now your control room is your major center of traffic flow, and I don't think that's really necessary. It seems more logical to me to have the doors on the iso booths open into the live room, rather than daisy chain back into the control room. If I'm a singer having just finished a take and wanting to relax with a musician, it's nicer to just step directly into the live room. It'd feel frustrating to have to do a big U traffic pattern back to the control room, and then back to the live room. It'd make me feel that much more disconnected from my band mates. So along the top, we'd have lobby on the upper left, control room on upper middle, now place your current bottom left corner into the new upper right corner. Treat your "piano room" as the primary recording area until you can afford to do the whole space. I don't think you need so many entrances and exits into that recording area. As an example, the current piano room has 2 separate double door entries to the eventual drum room. I'm willing to bet that only one is really going to be used much. Why not just do one, and if you want the extra visibility, put a window in on the other space? Also, do you really need so many different individual booths? I note that all your doors are single doors and all your walls are single walls. If you want isolation, you're going to need to plan on decoupling those spaces from each other, which is going to mean double walls/ceiling with air gaps. If you want single doors, they'll need to be specially designed for that... might be easier to double the doors though they'll still need the usual stuff (closing mechanisms, air seals, etc). Also, have you looked at the sizing on your booths once you do that? are they still ok? Do you really need so many booths? As a quick caution, I haven't really thought about what those changes would do to your eventual other half of the building, so it's good to think through that bit too, even if it's not happening right now. It does look there's some room to spare there though :)

HI there JRH, and welcome! I just wanted to add a bit more detail to what John and Johnnie already said: To give you a rough idea of what it would actually cost to get this built by a contractor (not including the actual design, permits, etc.), call up a couple of local contractors and ask them for their standard basic flat rate per square foot for converting a garage into a home theater or living room. Add about 20% to that, and you have a realistic rough idea of the real costs involved, in YOUR area, which might be very different from what it costs someone else who lives in a different area. That's the best way of getting a handle on costs. Based on that, and your available budget, you can figure out how many square feet you can afford to build right now, and how much will have to wait for later, as funds allow. OK, so that's the contractor's rate. If you plan to do all the work yourself, and already have all the tools you'll need (and the expertise to use them), then of course it will be quite a bit less expensive, since a very large a chunk of the cost of hiring a contractor is labor, and another chunk is his markup on materials. So your dollar goes a lot further if you do the build yourself. But the build also goes a LOT slower.... So based on all of the above, you can estimate how many square feet you can reasonably expect to do, then come up with a decision on which room is most important and concentrate on building that. However, that's the build: Regardless of which order you build the studio rooms, you MUST have everything fully designed up front, before you even get your first 2x4 delivered. The entire plan must be totally complete, since all the parts of a studio affect each other, and changing an apparently minor thing in one place really can turn out to have major implications in another place. Believe me, when I'm designing studios, I spend most of my time doing just that: juggling the details of all the rooms at once, to try to come up with an optimal compromise. So I urge you not to make the mistake of designing and building just one room, then trying to design the others around it later. You have a very nice sized space to work with, and a good base, but there's an awful lot of things that need to be taken into account when designing your studio, so I'd suggest that you should take the decision now on if you are going to do it all yourself (design included), or if you are going to hire people to help you. Designing and building yourself is very rewarding, and you can save a lot of money like that, but it is also very slow. Just learning enough about acoustics and design can take you a couple of months (realistically) then actually doing the design can take you a couple more (at least). Then the build process can take you many, many more months on top of that. If you take a look at threads here on the board by people who have already finished their studios then you'll get a better feeling for what is involved, how long it takes, and what you can realistically expect as the out come, form both the DIY approach and also from the contractor approach. One more thing that's very important: Designing and building a studio is nothing at all like designing and building a house. Same materials, same tools, but very different techniques, and many "gotchas" hiding in unexpected places. Many simple procedures that the contractor is used to doing for houses, shops, offices, etc. simply cannot be used for studio construction, so it is important to find a contractor who has build studios before (successfully!), or one who is very willing to learn to do things differently. One other piece of advice: don't rush! It takes time to get it right, and getting it wrong can be frustrating, not too mention expensive. As you work your way around the various build threads on the forum you'll mind more than a few by people who rushed ahead before they were ready, or got contractors who didn't know what they were doing, and then had to stop, dismantle things, take several steps back, and re-do things the right way. Some didn't bother taking advice from the experts here, and curiously their threads sort of fade away long before the place was finished. On the other hand, those who did take the advice generally ended up completing their studios, very successfully. So that's probably the first big decision you need to make: design and build the entire place yourself, or hire someone to do it for you? Or at least to do parts of it for you (the parts that you don't feel confident doing yourself, or don't have the time or expertise to do yourself). That said, I agree with Johnnie that your budget can probably be stretched to do the control room, and maybe a booth or two, but a lot depends on how much isolation you need. That's generally the very first technical question that needs to be answered in numbers: "How loud are you (in decibels)?" and "How quite do you need that to be on the other side?". A very large part of the entire design depends on answering those two questions accurately. The materials and the construction techniques for building the rooms depend on those numbers, to a very large extent. On your layout: I agree with Johnnie here too: the basic concept is OK; but there's a lot that can be done to improve it, from the practical point of view (not just acoustics). For example, I would switch around "booth 2" with the machine room, so you can have a direct line of sight view into the booth: you don't need to make visual contact with the equipment racks, but you very likely do need visual contact with the talent you are recording! Same for booth 3: move it forwards to some place where you can get sight lines. I would also not have one booth leading into another booth: that's a nightmare, both acoustically and practically. Your CR shape is also questionable: there are better ways to shape it, for good acoustics. It's not bad, but could be improved. My other comment is on Doors. You are spending a large fortune on those! As Johnnie pointed out, each door you show there should actually be two doors, back to back, in order to have decent isolation between rooms. Considering that each door will cost you a few hundred dollars to build yourself (or a thousand or so to buy), you are blowing your entire budget on doors! I count 25 doors on your diagram, meaning there will be 50 in total. Even if you can do those for just 200 bucks each (VERY unlikely: just the seals, hinges and closers will cost that), then you'd be spending 10 grand on them. So I would greatly reduce the number of doors. you don't need that many! The other issue with doors is that you are showing several double-doors that meet each other in the middle: that's impractical for a studio, as there is no reliable way to get them to seal properly against each other in the middle, unless you add a center stile: But if you do that, then you defeat the purpose of the double door anyway... So I would definitely get rid of all of those, and replace them with single doors. Make them wider if you need to get equipment in and outs, but don't do double doors. You'll regret it if you do. (That said, it is possible to do double doors for a studio: just really, really hard to get right, and really expensive....)

I was hoping to build the control room first with my current limited budget ($20,000) but don't know yet if that is even possible.

Probably. But the actual cost depends on many factors that have not been defined yet, starting with the two most basic numbers I already mentioned: How loud are you, and how quiet do you need to be. It loos like your control room is about 300-something square feet, so with 20k that works out to roughly just US$ 65 per square foot. That isn't a lot, unless you are doing everything yourself (design and construction). I don't know what materials and labor costs are like in your area, but where I live that would be a very tight budget for doing a 300 square foot control room if hired a designer and a contractor to build it, but doable if I did it all myself.

'you're gonna kick yourself later' advise

We're good at that! :) No problems... That's what we do best, I think: tear apart designs that looked good.... but usually adding advice on how to fix it!

before I commit to the floor plan and work up the 3D model of it

Well, you're gonna kick yourself here, but when you do get it into 3D, that's when you'll realize that you have to "un-commit" several things an re-do them. It really is amazing how many things just leap out at you in 3D that you never even notices in 2D drawings. Plus, when you get down to planning the actual acoustic layout and treatment of the rooms, 3D is an absolute necessity: Sound moves in 3D, not 2D... :) So I'd suggest putting it into 3D already, even though it will take some time and then be slower to change things, but it really is worthwhile doing that, as it gives you an entirely different perspective on things. - Stuart -