Hi guys,
So I recently posted a thread about possibly being able to rent out a dedicated studio space to record in. From the information I was given, the space seemed like it was going to be very large, with plenty of space to expand, should I need to, but after having met with the realtor yesterday, it doesn't seem like this is going to be the case...
Original plans were to rent a 25x10' space, split into two rooms, but after much debate, this still seemed too small to be worth it. After assessing finances, I was planning to bump up to a space that would allow for a 17x13' live room and a 13x12' control room. Still, not the greatest size, but I didn't want to go too big, until I was sure the business would be sustainable. Plans were to eventually turn the live room into the control room, the control room into a vocal booth and build a larger 3rd room as a new live room. After assessing the space yesterday, this is definitely not possible, if the building owners plan to rent out the unused space to other tenants, mostly due to the location of the bathroom.
The only workable space I seem to have is a 21x15' area. I'd be able to extend to ~18', but the building has an electrical box at one edge, and moving it would cost too much money. Two existing walls are exposed brick and a 3rd wall has studs up, but with just some grid sheeting with holes through it, that was used to hang merchandise (these actually look like they'd do really well just hung on a flat wall to counteract reflections...). The wall isn't insulated and there is no sheetrock hung, so it'll obviously need to be finished. There's no existing 4th wall, and it'll need to be built. The ceiling is also not finished and the trusses are exposed, which will need to be built, as well. Thankfully, they're decently high (10'), so that makes up a little for the other constraints... Also, HVAC is already ran to the center of the area, and will be easily tapped into, if a second vent is needed.
Attached is a general layout of what's happening in the room... My question is - Would cutting this up into 2 rooms even make sense? Assuming I add nothing to the brick, other than acoustic paneling, build a second stud over the 3rd existing wall and build a double-stud wall as the 4th, with another in the interior to separate the rooms... I'm looking at decreasing the square footage by ~1' on the short side, and ~1.5' on the long side. That means one room would be ~10x14' and the other 9.5x14', which is still bigger than the single room I'm in now... but not by much.
I'm thinking a single-room setup would be preferable here, as far as acoustics are concerned... but my excitement was mostly based around the idea of having two separate rooms, which would add a lot of credibility to my business, and bring in more clients. Honestly, I hate having to track drums and instruments in a single room. Is there any way to build this that would be much better than recording in the single 10x13' room I'm in now?
Budget is really not a huge issue - my dad is a contractor and has most of the wall materials on-hand and is willing to do the work for free. Aside from HVAC and electrical parts, as well as whatever I decide to put on the floors (it's a concrete slab now), most everything is already taken care of.
Is this space even worth building in?
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 18759.
Have you considered using a layout with a corner control room? Something along these lines:
viewtopic.php?t=4206
http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... 6&start=12
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1218&hilit=corner+control+room&start=20
That would probably be a good way to fit in both rooms in a smallish space. But you are talking about roughly 315 square feet: That's not too bad. You should be able to fit two reasonable rooms in there. I did a design for a guy in Canada a couple of years ago for a space of about 400 square feet, and we managed to get four rooms in there! LR, CR, drum booth, and vocal booth. So it can be done.
- Stuart -
Hmm... That's actually not something I'd considered at all. I very much like the idea of this, as it'd allow for much less parallel walls and a direct line-of-site into the live room from the desk. I'd have to build more walls, but this will eat up much less square footage than building a square/rectangular room and then building angled sub-walls inside it later, it's certainly doable... What would the dimensions of the control room be for something like this? The rooms in the examples you linked are square, with a little more square footage than I'd have, so it's hard to scale from those plans, alone. Which corner would be more preferable to have the control room along (since 2 are brick and 2 are drywall)? FWIW: I already have 4 48x24x4" wall panels, 3 96x24x4" bass traps (my current room has a door where one corner would be and I've never really figured out what the hell to do with that :lol: ), plus a 48x48x4' cloud that I can use where ever. Plus, I also have a ton of 48x24" Rockwool left over in 4" and 1" thicknesses and can order more for cheap. Stuart - Saw your reply in my other thread, and I reported it to you, for you to close. Sorry, I didn't realize someone would be commenting in it, as it was already on a different page when I made this one. Figured it'd just be easier to make a new thread with the more concrete (no pun intended :P ) information and title, rather than cluttering the other. In response to what you said there:Have you considered using a layout with a corner control room? Something along these lines: viewtopic.php?t=4206 http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... 6&start=12 viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1218&hilit=corner+control+room&start=20 That would probably be a good way to fit in both rooms in a smallish space. But you are talking about roughly 315 square feet: That's not too bad. You should be able to fit two reasonable rooms in there. I did a design for a guy in Canada a couple of years ago for a space of about 400 square feet, and we managed to get four rooms in there! LR, CR, drum booth, and vocal booth. So it can be done. - Stuart -
Definitely the live room, I don't generally mix very loud, and when I will be mixing, it's probably more unlikely that there will be anyone else in the building, so sound levels at that point aren't very pertinent. I figured the brick wall would be best for most of the live room's isolation. Thanks for confirming!Hi there "MatrixClaw", and sorry about the delayed Welcome! :) Busy with lots of stuff right now... It seems I first answered some of your other questions on a different thread, but I did have this one lined up for a reply too, so here goes:Which room is going to be loudest? My guess is the live room. So that's the one that should go against the brick walls, if possible. Bricks are your friends, for isolation! :)Right now, her grandma was thinking of putting me along the back corner that separates their space from the artist area. This will give me three existing walls, and I'd have to build a 4th (along with any interior walls). Two of the existing walls are brick, which should be nice for sound isolation from the rest of the space, but the other is sheetrock.... i was thinking I'd put the control room up against here, as it should be less noisy than the live room, when tracking drums.
I've seen this suggested here... but short of bringing in a full drum set, placing it in the middle of the room and bashing on it like a gorilla (which I'm sure won't be very appreciated by the building owners), what can I do? The entire front room (which is split up into two sections) is nearly all unfinished. Considering the 3rd existing wall is just studs, with no insulation, and is open to actually see through, plus it is not extended all the way to where a ceiling would be built, I'd think it'd be hard to estimate how much isolation would really be needed? The building is 1 story, so leakage into a top floor or basement isn't an issue, and its brick construction should make it fairly resilient to sound from the outside (it's in the middle of a commercial area, there IS a travel-lodge on the side where my exterior wall would be, but there's a good 30ft between this building and it, and it's kinda old and doesn't get much business, anyway), I'm mostly worried about isolation from the rest of the front room. There IS a finished room across the "hallway" from where my room would be built. I'm sure it's a single-stud construction, though it has built-in cabinetry. Would bringing a loud sound source into this area, instead, be a better way to judge what kind of isolation I'll need? Suggestions would be great! :wink:You first need to answer the question: "How much isolation do you need?". To do that, you need a sound level meter. You can get a decent one for around US$100 on Amazon or e-bay. Avoid the cheap Chinese junk toys that go for around US$ 50 or so.Should I be building a 4th framed wall with sheetrock, or another brick wall, if isolation is needed? Obviously, since there will be other tenants, I don't want to be bothering them by being too loud.
Haha! I forgot to mention - he has actually built a studio before in one of his client's homes, so he's somewhat familiar with the principals. I'm sure the plans were drawn up by someone else, but he did around $50k in work for him and it seemed to have come out really great.:) last words! :) Building a studio is quite a bit more complicated than building a house, office, shop or school. It's good you have a contractor, but he will have to re-learn a lot of stuff, and learn so me new stuff that he has never done before. Same building materials, same tools, but different methods, principles and techniques.Thankfully, my dad is a contractor and him and his partner are willing to help me put up the wall and renovate the space for the cost of materials, so building this shouldn't be too expensive and likely won't take too long, either.
Definitely not expecting world-class recordings here, but I am hoping to at least put out something better than I could recording in the rectangular rooms in my house. Mostly, the purpose of the space is to keep me from having to keep bringing strangers into my home to record, and allow me to record/mix anytime I want, without disturbing others. While many musicians in my area are great guys and girls, there's also some shady ones, and I don't really feel comfortable having them at my house anymore. Recording a 5-person band in my 2-story house, means it's kind of hard to keep track of everyone all the time, who knows what they could be getting into, stealing, etc. This will allow me to bring them to a dedicated area (which, for one, would give me A LOT more credibility and allow me to feel comfortable raising my rates quite a bit) that's in a more controlled environment, allowing me to much more easily keep track of everyone. All the rest of the areas of the building will either be fenced off, or locked, so that they won't be able to go anywhere except for the two studio rooms and the shared bathroom. I found some ratios elsewhere on the forum, for a control room. The smallest workable area seems to be 1:1.14:1.39, which would give me a 10'H x 11.4'W x 13.9'L room... However, all these ratios seem to assume you're building a rectangular room. If I were to go with the corner design you shared above, how do these translate? It seems the corner would be the best, acoustically and it's save more space. Only issue is that, most of these designs seem to be built in a square room, which have equal gaps on both sides of the control room, with the 15' constraint to the width of the room, that makes for a pretty small space on one side. Would this space be better used as a storage area (or vocal booth), or would leaving it open be better for the acoustics of the live room? Also - All of these designs have angled walls off of the corner, but none seem to have specific degrees set. Is there an ideal slant, or should it just be 6* or larger? I worked up a general layout (attached), based off the ones you showed me... would something like this work? Thanks so much for all the help!That depends on what you want to do, and far how you want to go! For example, for optimum critical listening room, the specs from EBU, call for a floor area of not less than 40m2 for a reference room, and 30m2 for a high quality control room. That's about 430 square feet and 320 square feet, respectively. On the other hand ITU specs call for "20 - 60 m2" for a stereo room, and "30 - 70 m2" for a multi-channel room (5.1, 7.1, etc.). 20m2 is about 215 square feet. On the other-other hand, John has built highly successful studios inside a shipping container, and many people here on the forum have built great studios in small spaces. So, if you are aiming for a world-class studio that meets international specs, then you need a floor area of about 250 square feet or more for your control room, and about 5 times that for your live room, for a total of about 1500 ft2 or so. Or if you don't need to go to that level, then you can do a great studio in less than that. It seems you have about about 250 ft2 to work with, so I would try to split that to about 1/3 for the control room, and the other 2/3 for the live room. That would give you about 85 ft2 for the CR and 165 ft2 for the LR. However, I guess the dimensions you show are the absolute limits of your space, and you'll be losing some for that for the isolation walls and other things, so do take that into account. - Stuart -For interior walls - I'm wanting to do a live room, plus control room, as well as a small vocal booth (possibly in the corner of the live room?). What dimensions would be ideal for this?
Say! So YOU are the guy I heard practicing in his bedroom three blocks away last week! 8) :lol: Seriously, just set up a good speaker in the space and play some stuff on that briefly. And maybe warn the neighbors/landlord in advance, so they don't call the cops on you! Or unleash that gorilla on you... It would also be good to just get the meter and measure the typical ambient levels around the building, so you know what you are dealing with in terms of noise coming IN, as well as going OUT.I've seen this suggested here... but short of bringing in a full drum set, placing it in the middle of the room and bashing on it like a gorilla
That is, indeed, a problem! Mode calculations are very simple for rectangular rooms with 3 sets of parallel walls, but as soon as you add extra walls, or angle any of them, then the calculators are no longer accurate. For a slightly skewed rectangle, such as a typical RFZ design, you can use the average dimensions of the room to get a rough idea of how it will perform, but for a five or six or seven sided room with greatly angles walls, that's not going to work too well. On the other hand, there wont be any axial modes at all in such a room (except vertically), only tangentials and obliques, so that takes some problems off the table already. There are ways to predict the modal response of such a room, but they involve FEM/FEA software and an operator who knows how to set up the boundary conditions correctly, and knows how to interpret the results.... Having said all that, if the room is somewhat close to rectangular, then you could just plug in the average dimensions, ignore the length and width axials, and get a very rough idea of modal response... But I would choose a room size / shape that is similar to one of the ones that John or someone else has done successfully, and use that as the basis for yours. Just aim to make it as large as you can, and you should be fine.However, all these ratios seem to assume you're building a rectangular room. If I were to go with the corner design you shared above, how do these translate?
Looks good as a starting point. I would make the sides a bit shorter, and the angled walls behind the soffits a bit larger, and pull the front wall back a bit, to leave more space in the live room. - Stuart -I worked up a general layout (attached), based off the ones you showed me... would something like this work?