Basement studio planning

Hey guys! I posted this on Gearlutz and got very little interest, so I figured I'd bug you guys. :-) I'm going to be setting up a space in a basement for composing, writing, mixing, producing, etc. Its sort of a small, weird space (LA Indie Rock guy, so its par for the course, haha), and I'm trying to figure out the best way to utilize it. I've attached a crude diagram. The darker grey area is 2ft higher than the lighter gray area and can't be reasonably altered since its foundation for the house. Both these areas are wide open with no walls and just a post in the middle of the room. A couple steps will be put somewhere to go from the lower area to the higher area. My current plan is to put a half bath in the northwest corner and a simple kitchen on the northmost wall, but its all flexible at this point. The crawl space will be walled up and used for storage. The house is built into a hill so this area is tiny. How would you guys set this up? Where would you set up the desk/monitors? I've kicked around some ideas for putting up a wall or for making a simple iso space (I do some VO work, and ISO can be handy for some stuff in my work), but nothing has struck me as the perfect solution. I'd love to hear any ideas no matter how weird they area, haha. I'll post a couple of my other idea below. Thanks! Mike

Here's one idea: Build walls 2 feet into the raised area and crawlspace (crawl space is about 4' above the floor so this creates a shelf area but widens the room a bit above 4 feet). Make a 7x5 foot ISO. This makes a roughly 11.5ft x 21ft. Use the remaining space for a bathroom, little kitchen, and a work/storage area.

Another idea: This makes a larger ISO and opens up the room more. It's more of a bi-level feel like this and more open in general, though perhaps not as good acoustically. Could be better creatively. The room set that way is about 25' deep which would put my chair right in the corner of the raised section(38%). The question is, does sitting forward more create enough acoustic issues in this non-perfect environment to warrant a different setup? FYI: I don't HAVE to have an ISO, but it seems like I need to build a wall somewhere to make a more appropriate mix space and making an ISO seems to solve this issue.

Here's a variation on Version 1 but opening the wall into the kitchen area. This gives me a little more open space and maybe gives me somewhat more symmetrical first reflections. Trying to find the balance between proper mix space without feeling like a tiny little cave...perhaps thats a mistake.

Hi there "mds", and welcome! :)

Its sort of a small, weird space

Agreed! That's an "interesting" situation...

How would you guys set this up?

This is just for a control room, right? Just for mixing/mastering?

(I do some VO work, and ISO can be handy for some stuff in my work),

So the idea is to have a large CR (Control Room), and a small iso booth? Clearly, the studio has to go in the area with the 9 foot ceiling: 7 feet is just too low to be good. So that takes care of one decision... The first thing that comes to my mind, is to have your mix position facing towards the right (East wall), so that you can get decent symmetry, which is critical for a control room. The iso booth could then go in the 7' wide niche at the top left (north west), in the region defined by the "L" shaped raised floor. That would give you a long, narrow control room, and a nearly square iso booth... You'd have to check the dimensions on a room ratio calculator to see it that would work for a CR... try these: http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm http://amroc.andymel.eu/ I have a feeling that the CR is too long for the width and height, so one option might be to take off a small section from the rear of the control room, and either add that to the iso booth or use it for storage. But don't shrink the CR too much in the search for the impossible "best ratio"! There is no such thing, and it isn't life-or-death anyway. Just get away from the bad ratios, close to the good ones, and that's fine. You also want the floor area to be as large as possible (ideally 215 ft2 or more), and the room volume to be decent (ideally over 1500 ft3). Small rooms are hard to treat, and the smaller they are, the harder it is to get it good. Yours is a decent size, so don't kill it by shrinking it to much. Another option would be to flip the CR around so it faces west (similar to your first option), then you could have a window into the iso booth for good sight lines and visual communication with the VO talent. That would limit your iso booth width, though. Or you could splay the front part of the CR walls a little, to help out the iso booth, then use the "wasted" space on the other side of the CR (south west corner of the building) for one of your HVAC silencers, and take some space off the rear of the CR (East wall in this case) for your storage. Those would be my two preferred layouts. There are options, but the key points to keep in mind if you want to play around more: 1) Symmetry is king. Make sure that the front half of the CR is totally symmetrical, with the left side being a mirror image of the right side. This is to ensure that your left ear hears the exact same acoustic "signature" as your right ear, so you don't end up with a skewed sound stage or off-center stereo image. 2) Rectangle is king: OK, we already have a king (symmetry) so lets make the rectangle the queen. In other words, keep your room rectangular as far as possible. It just makes things so much easier to predict, and to design, an to build. If you do need to splay the side walls at the front as I mentioned, make the splayed section as short as you can, in order to not remove too much air volume from the room. 3) Speakers go on a short wall, firing down the longest dimension of the room. I could give you all the reasons for that, but there are quite a few, and they are all powerful reasons. 4) Ideally, speakers are flush mounted in angled modules at the front of the room, to get the best possible acoustic response out of the speakers and the room, minimizing the unwanted artifacts you get from having speakers inside the room. 5) The rear wall should be as far behind your head as you can get it, within reason, and hopefully more than ten feet behind your head. That doesn't seem to be a problem in your room. 6) Do not put doors or windows in the corners of the room, nor within about three or four feet of the corners, because corners are sacred places in a control room: they are reserved for the deep bass treatment that all small rooms need. 7) Mix position goes about 1/3 of the distance from front wall to rear wall. Theory says 38%, but most engineers seem to prefer a spot a little further forward. Do not put the mix position at 25% or 50% of the room length. 8) Many more guidelines, but those should be enough to get you on the right track, initially. Play round, post an updated design that takes them into account, then we can tear it apart and give you more "rules".... :) - Stuart -

Thanks, Soundsman2020!

Soundman2020 wrote:

This is just for a control room, right? Just for mixing/mastering?

Mixing, composing, song writing, and producing/recording. Basically whatever I can make happen in there. I wear a lot of hats, haha.

So the idea is to have a large CR (Control Room), and a small iso booth?

Yeah, I think so. The ISO isn't 100% necessary but I do some VO work where it'd be helpful, and it'd also be great to throw a guitar amp in there. Probably use it for singers too. If I could fit drums, great, but doing drums in the main room would be fine. I'd rarely record drums, but I play so it'd be cool if I could, even if its a simple setup. Also sounds like I need to build some walls to establish a rectangle and symmetry, so using the space I'm cutting out for an ISO would solve this. If there's some great setup I'm not seeing that doesn't get me an ISO, I'd consider that as well. ... Looking at the room ratio calculators it seems difficult to make the 21ft/11.5ft space from my Version 1 work very well. My Version 2, the one the rotates the CR 180° so it faces south and has an ISO on the eastern side, could be right around 14x17x9 if I continue the wall from the bathroom to make it square. This puts me right in the middle of Bolt-area on AMROC, gets me about 240sqft of floor area, and about 2050cuft of volume. That setup is a little weird though because the raised area makes up about 20% of the room. Not sure how the NE corner of the room being a 7ft ceiling would impact things acoustically, but it'd be a little odd ergonomically. I've attached a sketch of this idea. Thanks SOOOO much!! Mike

Great job, it's one hell of a plan you have there! What software are you using for the 3d designs? Because so far, I don't have a place to put a studio in (not in 65 square meters), but I was considering buying a home in Greece, preferably one with a basement, so that I could play and record music. So, I'd like to know how to do such designs, so that I can practice with the appropriate software while the house isn't mine yet :mrgreen: And then, I'll come back to the forum with the measurements of the basement, the composition of the band that'll play and the specs of the amps, and with potential studio plans, to ask if I did things right and if I should do like this or in another way!

An important piece of information has been left out here. Where is your exterior access? Door or stairs to the upper level? That may dictate what you final arrangement is also.

Tanker_5455 wrote:

Great job, it's one hell of a plan you have there! What software are you using for the 3d designs?

Thanks! Most people around here use SketchUp, but I find it a little cumbersome for simple sketching. I’m using Sweet Home 3D which is really simple but functional.

JCBigler wrote:

An important piece of information has been left out here. Where is your exterior access? Door or stairs to the upper level? That may dictate what you final arrangement is also.

The exterior access comes via a door on the southern wall. It’s near the drum set in the last version I posted. This door will run into a little storage area that then leads outside into the back yard.

Most people around here use SketchUp, but I find it a little cumbersome for simple sketching. I’m using Sweet Home 3D which is really simple but functional.

Can you use Sweet Home 3D to draw details like studs, threaded bolts, conduit, hinges, etc? These are all things you will probably need to draw in your design. Greg

mds wrote:

Thanks! Most people around here use SketchUp, but I find it a little cumbersome for simple sketching. I’m using Sweet Home 3D which is really simple but functional.

Thanks, I'll give it a try then. And as Gregwor asked, how deep in detail can you go with it?

Gregwor wrote:

Most people around here use SketchUp, but I find it a little cumbersome for simple sketching. I’m using Sweet Home 3D which is really simple but functional.

Can you use Sweet Home 3D to draw details like studs, threaded bolts, conduit, hinges, etc? These are all things you will probably need to draw in your design. Greg

I don't think it does that level of detail. I'm using it for rough sketches at this point to figure out how I want to lay it all out. Details like that will come later, I think.

Your most recent layout is better, but it isn't symmetrical. You have an upright piano on one wall, roughly in line with the mix position, the couch is offset to one side (also leaving no space in that corner for the treatment), and you have the other rear half of the room 2 feet higher, due to the floor issue. To fix that, I would suggest raising the lower side as well, so you have a platform across the entire room at the back, as a sort of "sofa riser", which would allow you to center the sofa and the rear wall treatment. That would probably also allow you to move the piano further back, and find something to put on the opposite wall, to help balance that. Or just move the piano to the live room.... - Stuart -

Thanks, Stuart. Thats a very interesting solution. Here's a mockup with the whole back half at the same height with stairs integrated into the new landing. I also changed the bathroom to a smaller size as the city permit office had some issues with the pervious layout (they afraid i'm going to put an illegal shower in). This gives me a mostly symmetrical setup and gives me a good place to put the steps. I realized you may have only meant to create enough space for the couch, but this seemed logical to me. Thanks so much! Mike

Just thought I'd give this a little bump to see if anyone had any thoughts about my last mockup. Thanks guys!

This should work. You just need to plan for a crazy thick rear wall of treatment. Obviously we push for soffit mounting speakers too. So basically just treatment planning is what you need to do. Greg

Gregwor wrote:

This should work. You just need to plan for a crazy thick rear wall of treatment. Obviously we push for soffit mounting speakers too. So basically just treatment planning is what you need to do. Greg

Thanks Greg! How crazy thick for the rear wall? Is this a necessity just due to the size of the room or just general good practice? Curious how to implement this around the doorway into the little kitchen area and around the couch. Is there a way to integrate the walled off kitchen area into some sort of bass trap (just a random thought, haha). I'm a little hesitant to do the soffit mounting, though i know its well regarded here. Aside from the cost and complexity of building the walls themselves, I'm not sure I want to shrink my room anymore than I have to. I'm a producer/songwriter and composer and have lots of instruments to litter the place with, haha. Thanks!

You are afraid to loose space by flush mounting. What are you going to put between the monitors?

mds wrote:

How crazy thick for the rear wall?

How usable to you want your room to be? :) Usually, the rear wall has very large bass traps in all three corners, and the rest of the wall has at least 6" of suitable insulation on it, or perhaps 4" of insulation with an air gap of another few inches behind it. Professional studios, and even good home studios, often have two of three feet (or more) of treatment on the rear wall. Often, there are several "layers" of treatment in there, such as panel traps up against the rear wall, then hangers or plain thick insulation in front of that, sometimes in different densities and with air gaps between them, then usually fabric to hide all that ugly stuff, and often wood slats or perhaps diffusers in front of that. Here's an example of a forum member's studio that is currently under construction, and nearly complete: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21767&start=30 Take a look at the rear wall treatment: it is 21" deep in the middle, expanding out to 35" in the corners. I'd go out on a limb here, and say that, after soffit mounting your speakers, then next most wonderfully effective thing you can do for your studio is to treat the rear wall massively. If you want a room that doesn't sound good and doesn't translate well, then leave the rear wall untreated and only treat the side walls and ceiling.... :) If you want a room that has good acoustics and where your mixes do translate well, start by treating the hell out of the rear wall, then add some more minor stuff to the side walls and ceiling

Is this a necessity just due to the size of the room or just general good practice?

Its necessary of you want good acoustics. Take a look at professional control rooms, or even the numerous well-built home studios you see all over the forum, and you'll get an idea about how important the rear wall is.

I'm a little hesitant to do the soffit mounting, though i know its well regarded here. Aside from the cost and complexity of building the walls themselves, I'm not sure I want to shrink my room anymore than I have to. I'm a producer/songwriter and composer and have lots of instruments to litter the place with, haha.

As Andre already hinted at, you aren't really losing space at all: there's nothing you would normally do with that space between and around your speakers in any case, except to install acoustic treatment, so there's nothing lost... an everything gained! Flush-mounting your speakers is arguably the best single thing you can do for your room, if you want great acoustic response. If your speakers are sitting on stands in the room, they are producing a series of artifacts that are basically impossible to fully treat, simply because they are IN the room. When you flush mount them, they are technically NOT in the room any more, so they cannot create any of those artifacts. That cleans up the sound greatly, and in addition adds other very useful acoustic effects, such as extending the low end response of your speakers, tightening up the bass, creating an RFZ around your head, etc. There really is no down-side to it, except the cost of the materials and the time it takes to build it. But after that, it is pure benefit, in every way. In addition, you have plenty of space! Your room is bigger than most hoe studios, at 20 feet long and 13 feet wide: 260 ft2 is probably about twice the size of many home studios: Your room is the ideal candidate for soffit-mounts, and also for extensive rear wall treatment. Here's a view of the same room as above, towards the front of the room, showing the soffits: Feel free to ask Steve (the owner) about how it is sounding in there right now, compared to how it was before with the old treatment and the speakers on stands.... :) The reason I'm showing you that specific room is because it is very similar in size to your room. About a foot wider, but a little shorter. - Stuart -

AVare wrote:

You are afraid to loose space by flush mounting. What are you going to put between the monitors?

Not sure I was thinking it that clearly through, haha. I think I was just generally unsure about shrinking the walls, but I suppose the soffit walls aren't really eating up that much space anyway, which I suppose was your point! :-) While I'm at it, should I also consider splaying my side walls 6 degrees each? This seems like it has less consensus but I'm learning! Thank you all so much!

While I'm at it, should I also consider splaying my side walls 6 degrees each? This seems like it has less consensus but I'm learning!

Not necessary. It wastes space, and doesn't accomplish much anyway. Splaying your side walls is useful for treating flutter echo, but that's about it. However, flutter echo can be treated a lot easier by just putting absorption or diffusion on the walls, which you will need to do anyway! So splaying your walls is an "extra" treatment for a problem that you won't have in any case... If you do go with an RFZ design concept, then you can use "wings" on the soffits to accomplish both purposes: create RFZ and also kill flutter. You can see those in the image above, for Steve's place. The wings are angle far more than 6° to get the RFZ right, so they also kill the flutter. It doesn't look like it from that photo, because of the angle it was taken, but the wings are angled much more than the soffit faces. - Stuart -

Soundman2020 wrote:

mds wrote:

How crazy thick for the rear wall?

How usable to you want your room to be? :) Usually, the rear wall has very large bass traps in all three corners, and the rest of the wall has at least 6" of suitable insulation on it, or perhaps 4" of insulation with an air gap of another few inches behind it. Professional studios, and even good home studios, often have two of three feet (or more) of treatment on the rear wall. Often, there are several "layers" of treatment in there, such as panel traps up against the rear wall, then hangers or plain thick insulation in front of that, sometimes in different densities and with air gaps between them, then usually fabric to hide all that ugly stuff, and often wood slats or perhaps diffusers in front of that. Here's an example of a forum member's studio that is currently under construction, and nearly complete: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21767&start=30 Take a look at the rear wall treatment: it is 21" deep in the middle, expanding out to 35" in the corners. I'd go out on a limb here, and say that, after soffit mounting your speakers, then next most wonderfully effective thing you can do for your studio is to treat the rear wall massively. If you want a room that doesn't sound good and doesn't translate well, then leave the rear wall untreated and only treat the side walls and ceiling.... :) If you want a room that has good acoustics and where your mixes do translate well, start by treating the hell out of the rear wall, then add some more minor stuff to the side walls and ceiling

Is this a necessity just due to the size of the room or just general good practice?

Its necessary of you want good acoustics. Take a look at professional control rooms, or even the numerous well-built home studios you see all over the forum, and you'll get an idea about how important the rear wall is.

I'm a little hesitant to do the soffit mounting, though i know its well regarded here. Aside from the cost and complexity of building the walls themselves, I'm not sure I want to shrink my room anymore than I have to. I'm a producer/songwriter and composer and have lots of instruments to litter the place with, haha.

As Andre already hinted at, you aren't really losing space at all: there's nothing you would normally do with that space between and around your speakers in any case, except to install acoustic treatment, so there's nothing lost... an everything gained! Flush-mounting your speakers is arguably the best single thing you can do for your room, if you want great acoustic response. If your speakers are sitting on stands in the room, they are producing a series of artifacts that are basically impossible to fully treat, simply because they are IN the room. When you flush mount them, they are technically NOT in the room any more, so they cannot create any of those artifacts. That cleans up the sound greatly, and in addition adds other very useful acoustic effects, such as extending the low end response of your speakers, tightening up the bass, creating an RFZ around your head, etc. There really is no down-side to it, except the cost of the materials and the time it takes to build it. But after that, it is pure benefit, in every way. In addition, you have plenty of space! Your room is bigger than most hoe studios, at 20 feet long and 13 feet wide: 260 ft2 is probably about twice the size of many home studios: Your room is the ideal candidate for soffit-mounts, and also for extensive rear wall treatment. Here's a view of the same room as above, towards the front of the room, showing the soffits:

Not preserved: STVNOUS--Room-front--SML-ENH.jpg

Feel free to ask Steve (the owner) about how it is sounding in there right now, compared to how it was before with the old treatment and the speakers on stands.... :) The reason I'm showing you that specific room is because it is very similar in size to your room. About a foot wider, but a little shorter. - Stuart -

Thank you so much for your detailed post! As much as this is a room for me to write and record in, I also do a lot of mixing so getting the best acoustic design I can manage is certainly important. I'd intended to do superchunks in the corners (typical 2' triangle), but it sounds like I should plan for a thicker treatment in the back. Perhaps a 2' square in the corners is a good start. I've alway done RFZ setups in the past with good results and had intended to do this here. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions. Thank you! Mike