need advice for small recording studio

Hello, my studio partner and me are planning to build a little music recording studio in Bissingen-Ochsenwang, a small village in southern Germany, and would be glad if you could give us your advice. 1. Goals The studio will be used as a pop/rock music recording, production and mixing facility. It contains two working places for my studio partner and me, only the control room working place will be used for mixing. Heart of the studio is a Mackie 32.8-Bus console that’s fed by an Apple computer and offers the possibility of analogue mixdown. The second working place uses either another Mac or a PC. As sequencer we’re using Logic Pro and/or Cubase SX. 2. Location The studio rooms are in the cellar of a detached house in a really small and quiet village – outdoor noise probably won't be a problem. The cellar also contains a little apartment where the grandmother of the house owner lives. She's not too sensitive to noise as she says, but we don't want to risk it, so sound insulation will be an important issue here. The next neighbours are about 5-10 meters away and are not too picky, but as the surrounding environment is very quiet, insulation to the outside should be as good as possible too. 3. How loud we are We will use the studio room as a rehearsal room for our band, so that's probably the loudest situation that will occur. Unfortunately we haven't bought a sound level meter yet so I can't give you exact numbers; just imagine a typical rock band. ;-) 4. Where we are right now At the moment we’re still in the planning phase, but our aim is to finish it this summer, so it won’t take too long until we get started. Budget is up to 3000, maybe 4000 $ (but we hope we wont’t reach that … ;-). 5. Plans I hope you don’t mind that all measurements are in centimeter – if you do, please tell me and I’ll change them into inches. The pictures are not perfectly to scale, but the numbers are correct. I've also attached a SketchUp file for better understanding. 5.1 Current situation The first picture shows the current situation. Except the position of the stairs and the walls between control room and studio you can apply the side view to it. At the moment there is only a thin metal/glass wall between both rooms. Some concrete stairs are leading into the studio. As I already said, the control room shares some walls with the grandmother's apartment. The “northern” walls to the apartment are made of brick and gypsum drywall, but the “eastern” wall consists of only two layers of gypsum drywall with some isolation material in between. The side view shows that only the control room is directly under the house. Over the recording room there is a two-car garage. I don't know the thickness of the ceiling, but you can't hear the car down in the cellar. An advantage of the construction is that there is no direct connection of the foundations of the garage and the house, so the recording and the control room have no direct connection too – at their junction there is a thin gap filled with isolation material. Direct connection to the outer world is through the left door of the control room (“Exit”) and the windows that are “underground” but have light wells in front. Doors and windows are of a simple kind and need to be replaced by better sound insulating types. On the southern side of the studio room there is a big aquarium made of concrete and glass that has to stay in there. The wall standing in the midst of the control room is made of bricks and can be taken out to a certain extent (about 40 cm should stay for not getting the statics in danger). All other walls and the floors are made of concrete. On the ceiling of the studio room there is a layer of polystyrene that has to be taken out. 5.2 Studio plan a) Control room After thinking about different possibilites, we decided to set “symmetry first”. So we put the entrance to the studio in the middle of the control room window. It will consist of two not parallel glass doors with additional windows left and right of it for better communication. The wall between studio and control room will be a double wall (brick and gypsum drywall with insulation in between). To the left and to the right of the entrance we've put some bass traps that should also offer the possibility of setting up a second pair of monitors. The right nearfield monitor will be mounted on a swivel arm (green) and can be turned aside. The “machine room” containing computer, A/D-converters and other noisy stuff will be in a cavity under the floor behind the left nearfield monitor. In this picture, we've solved the problem of the disturbing wall with a steal beam through the control desk, but probably we will replace it by a 40 cm piece of wall as mentioned before. In this case we'll have to shorten the desk a little bit. As the walls to the apartement are too thin, we will put a second layer of gypsum drywall on them. At the rear wall of the control room a window (south) and some tubes in the upper corner under the ceiling (north) end the dream of perfect symmetry. Instead of putting in one heavy door, we try to use two thinner doors at the entrance to the apartment. b) Studio room In the studio we have to leave a washbasin in the northeast corner. Probably we'll build a cupboard around it to hide it when it's not needed. Left of it we will put the second working place. We haven't decided its final look yet, the idea in the picture was to build it into a cupboard that reaches to the ceiling and can contain some studio equipment. Maybe this would help a little bit to avoid total room symmetry, too. The desk for keyboard and mouse can be pulled out or hidden if not needed. At the moment the room geometry is quite symmetrical. We thought about putting some sort of bass trap on top of the aquarium to avoid parallel walls at least to a certain extent. On the floor we will put some OSB and maybe some gum pad under it. 6. Our questions - What's your opinion about our plan? Especially for the control room - is it a good solution to put in two glass doors, or should we better give up symmetry and put the entrance on the northern side with an additional sound lock in the studio room, for example? - What's your advice for additional acoustical steps in the control room? - What do you think about the still quite symmetrical shape of the studio room? - Would you treat the (concrete) ceiling of the studio room? - What's your advice for additional acoustical steps in the studio room? I hope I haven't forgotten anything. If you need additional information just let me know, I'll try to update this post as soon as possible. Thank you very much for your time and effort! thrawn

Thrawn - if you extend the control room floor, tuck the basin into a cupboard under the new window, you can fit a reasonable sized control room in there, like this. cheers john

Hey John, thank you very much for your quick reply! We thought about putting the stairs in the studio room too, the only problem is that the ceiling is coming down at this point and you got only about 1.50 m left for the door. So the stairs have to come down in the control room. What do you think about the door into the studio room? Is it enough to put in just one door like you did? Our idea was to have two doors with different glass thickness and a non-parallel space between as a little "sound lock", as the door will surely be the weak point of the wall. Great idea to add two more non-parallel walls to the bass traps in the control room! We'll keep that in mind. ;-) Thanks a lot! Thrawn

Hello, I've made some corrections on my plan and hope it's a little "clearer" now. First of all, I've added your second splayed walls. At the position of the entrance/exit door we're thinking about putting a movable absorber element that can be put in front of the door in situations where room symmetry is important (e.g. mixing). Do you think that's a good solution? Furthermore we've "pulled out" the corner absorbers a little bit to create enough space for the second pair of monitors. We didn't want to injure the main wall - or would this be a better way? Then I've tried to clarify the point where the ceiling is coming down at the end of the control room (the concrete block over the glasses). There's no other way than coming down with the stairs in the control room. At last, I've moved the second working place to the other corner of the studio. Now it doesn't take away that much precious space that can be seen from the control room. Best regards Thrawn

I'm not sure what building codes call for in your part of the world, but I know that in my case, I learned that where stairs meet doors, you have to have a "landing" -- 36" of clearance where there are no steps up or down, regardless of which direction the door swings. There can be exceptions at the top of a stairway if the door swings into the room, away from the stairs. Commercial buildings often have requirements for a larger clearance -- 44" I think. In both versions (John's and Thrawn's), I see points where the stairs would be illegal in my part of the world. This code obstacle played no small part in my deciding to abandon a plan for a floated floor system. I would have lost too much square footage accommodating the landings for just two steps. :( Assuming you need a building permit for this project, I would recommend you check with your local building officials to determine how you might be limited by building codes. And even if you don't require a permit, I would still recommend that you follow the code requirements in this area -- the reason landings are required is that they make the stairs safer, and safer means fewer injuries and less pain! :shock: ;) --Keith :mrgreen:

Hello Keith, thank you for your tip with the stairs, we'll check that. One more problem that came up: It would be difficult to put the computer under the floor in front of the left corner absorber cause the old concrete stairs are coming down there. Breaking them out would be quite an effort ... The nereby rooms should be avoided cause they belong to the grandmother's apartment. Maybe someone here has got a creative idea ... ;-) Best regards Thrawn