Questions about coverting industrial space to studio.

Hello, Overview: I'm about to rent a 400 square ft(20 ft high 20 ft wide and 15 ft high industrial office and make it a recording studio. This studio was rented before by previous tenants and they started to construct a booth but they left. What I want to know is exactly where you would recommend me to play acoustic treatment in this space. I was going to make a bunch of 2x4 2 inch 703 boards around the main room and place wedge foam inside the small vocal booth to stop reflections. My question is do you all have recommendation to the amount of acoustic board that i'll need for the walls around the control room. Also is there a reccommend place that i should place my control desk and speakers. The room floor is made of concrete(but I will install carpet). The walls are made of painted bricks. My budget is lowest amount to get the job done right so I can create accurate mixes. I've attached a jpg of the studio.

This is a loaded question my friend. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to design rooms that will translate accurate mixes! That being said, most of us work with what we have. Each room is unique and needs to be treated differently. There is software available to help you gauge the trouble frequencies. Unfortunately there is no "go to" amount but your dimensions are not favorable. Best is to find the software, gather readings and take it from there. Your next move might to be building walls/ceiling with favorable dimensions Regards Ralph

Hi there "truemusic", and welcome to the forum! :) Ralph is absolutely right here, and is speaking from personal experience, too: He has "been there and done that" with his own studio. There isn't a "one size fits all" plan for studios, since as Ralph points out, all studios are different, and not just in size: there are different purposes, different needs, different legal requirements, different materials, different techniques, and different budgets. One guy might decide to spend US$ 3,000 on turning a space identical to yours into a great studio that meets all his needs, while another guy with another identical space might spend US$ 300,000 and still not have something that works for him. There's a lot of "relativity" in studio design and construction, with a huge amount of variability.

This studio was rented before by previous tenants and they started to construct a booth but they left.

That might be a red flag, right there! Do you know why they gave up and left? Since they started building, obviously they invested some money in design, materials and labor, so you have to wonder why they would abandon that: was it an issue with the studio space itself? The landlord? Their design? Their budget? It would be very useful if you could find out what went wrong...

I was going to make a bunch of 2x4 2 inch 703 boards around the main room and place wedge foam inside the small vocal booth to stop reflections.

It's a lot more complicated than that, unfortunately. To start with, as Ralph already mentioned, the dimensions of that booth are pretty bad. Nearly as bad as you can get, but not quite. The length is exactly twice the width, and the height is related to both of them mathematically: three times the height is twice the length and four times the width. So there is a major problem with modal response: Pretty much all of the modes will line up with each other in tight groups, creating major issues at some frequencies. It would be in your best interests to tear down that booth and rebuild it properly, based on a different set of dimensions that are more favorable. The fact that your predecessors built it like that indicates that they didn't have much of a clue about acoustics at all! Nobody who understands the basics of acoustics would build a room that shape and size, and what they did cannot be undone with treatment: it is a fundamental failure.

My question is do you all have recommendation to the amount of acoustic board that i'll need for the walls around the control room.

That depends on many, many factors, not least of which are the purpose of your studio, and the budget that you have assigned to it. Another major factor is how much isolation you need, and yet another is what basic design philosophy you'd like to follow: LEDE, RFZ, NER, CID, MR, etc. There's a bunch to choose from! The treatment you need to put in the room depends heavily on the design philosophy.

Also is there a reccommend place that i should place my control desk and speakers.

Yes: The desk should be set up so that your ears are roughly 38% of the distance from the front wall to the back wall, and 1.2m above the floor. Your speakers should be set up such that the acoustic axis of each speaker is also 1.2m above the floor, they are angled inwards at roughly 30°, the acoustic axes meet at a point about a foot or two behind your head at an angle of about 60°, the speakers are exactly the same distance from your ears, the speakers are roughly as far apart as they are from your ears, the speakers are located at about 28% of the room width, and all of the above is set up perfectly on the room center-line, with the room being perfectly symmetrical about that line, such that the left half is a mirror image of the right half. That's the basic idea, but once again it's a bit more complicated than just following a set of rules like that. You might need to make major adjustments to that layout, as dictated by the room itself, and your needs, and your budget. For example if by following the above rules you find that your speakers are between 1 foot and 4 feet from the front wall, then you need to modify the entire geometry to fix that. If you plan to soffit-mount your speakers (highly recommended!) then that changes things quite a bit too. etc. Unfortunately, studio design entails a lot more than just hanging a few panels of 703.

(but I will install carpet)

That would be a really bad idea. Carpet does the exact opposite of what a small room needs. Carpet is good at absorbing a lot of high frequencies, some mids, and no lows at all. What you need for a small studio, is the other way around: absorb lots of lows, a little bit of mids, and don't touch the highs. So putting carpet on the floor would make your studio even worse than it already is. Look around the forum, and look at photos of top studios in magazines, web sites, etc. How many of them do you see with carpet on the entire control room floor? Answer: zero. There's a reason for that: it wrecks the room acoustics! :)

My budget is lowest amount to get the job done right so I can create accurate mixes.

That's excellent! With an unlimited budget, you can definitely turn that place into a world-class studio that will allow you to produce accurate mixes.

The room floor is made of concrete ... The walls are made of painted bricks.

That is very, very good on both counts. Good for isolation, and good as a starting point for your acoustic treatment. Concrete floor is great! The best you can hope for. So leave it just like it is (assuming it is in good condition), or install laminate flooring on top, if you don't like concrete or if it is not in good shape. - Stuart -

Thank You Both For The Valuable Information.