Building new studio in the Philippines

Hi everyone, I have been lurking on this forum for some time and our company has just rented a space in our building for a new studio. A brief backgound first. We are the top audio post production house for advertising sound in the Philippines with 6 Audio Post suites running on ProTools HD and 7 midi writing rooms running on Logic or Digital Performer. We have a small music overdub booth which we use to record jingles and live insturment overdubs. When we build the new room next year we will convert our current overdub suite to another audio post room and move the music studio over to that room. If anyone wants to check out what we do and how some of our current studios are built, you can go to www.hitproductions.net. I have un-officially asked John if he'd like to come on board as one of our consultants (hope he accepts), but would like to get others involved as well. We plan to build mid or late 2007 and are saving up the funds (capped around $100K) to build and equip the room. So between now and then we'll have lots of fun working out a design that would go into that space. Little background on our market and studios . . . being sort of a third world country, most studios here look nothing like the big budget SSL rooms you see in the magazines. Almost all of them, ours included resemble more project studios. Our rates are around US$70 an hour including editor (many studios charge as low as $20 an hour for fully equipped ProTools HD room), so that should give you an idea of the kind of studio we can build around here and still stay in business. This is our big studio project, most rooms we built have costs us from $30K (for Midi rooms) to $60K (post rooms) to build and equip. So the $100K (though tight) buget is really pushing it for us. Still those limitations have not stopped us from doing over 1500 TV and radio commercials a year and winning several international awards. OK enough of an intro here is the space . . . The unit is on the top floor of an office condo where the rest of our studios are located. It overhangs a driveway so there are no floors below which is great for isolation and only one tenant on the left wall. So far structural low freqency vibrations seem easily controllable and I do not see any major problems with isolation. Not being on the ground floor would limit the kind of load the sturcture can hold, still the building is cast concrete and pretty solidly built.

Here is what I have come up with as a basic layout . . . already I have planned some changes in the wall consturction, but all that can be done much later. Right now we just want to find the best layout for the space. The control room shell measures 20' 3" L x 14' 5" W x 9' 6" H. This dimension was suggested to me by Bob Hodas who is probably the top studio monitor tuner in the world. This is all a scratch pad idea for now and there will be dozens of revisions till this is all done. Feel free to comment . . . I will upload a few more jpgs of ideas for the group to look at . . .

We have two options to mount monitors. The first is to soffit mount a pair of Genelec 1038As which we bought a few years back at a nice discount. We were saving them for an occasion like this. Have not had the greatest experience with soffit mounting speakers and will look to the members of this forum for their kind suggestions and help.

The next alternative is to use Thomas Barefoot's new MicroMain 27 monitors. I got the opprotunity to listen to them in SF and really like them. These were meant to be free standing and used near field. Personally I have always stand mounted my speakers since this allows me to move them around if I find a better placement after the room is constructed. This is something I cannot do with soffit mounted speakers which you need to get right the first time. The downside to Thomas speakers is that I'll have to add extra to our budget to buy them. Still if it works out, it should be worth it. In the back you see home made QRD 7 diffusors mounted as part of the corner traps. I got that idea from Francis Manzella's website in some of his older room designs. So what do you guys suggest . . . stand mount or soffit?

Here is the detail of the control room design. I plan to splay side walls with slatted bass absorbers and put bass trapping in all the four corners. The ceiling not shown would have hanging clouds that are a combination of absorbers and diffusors. In the back I have two QRD 17 diffusors which are around 18" deep and have 17 wells each. According to my diffusor calculator that should diffuse from 350Hz to 6KHz. Smaller slat diffusors on the side wall would diffuse the higher frequencies.

Here a close up of the recording space. Basic rule of thumb was to put a more reflective wall (slatted bass absorbers) opposite a more absorptive but diffuse wall. The ceiling would be a little more dead towards the control room to do vocals and very diffuse and bright in the back for horns drums and stings. Looking more for a tight but live sound in this area. The carpeted area under the drums is acutally an isolated drum riser built into the floating floor (yup both the control room and studio will be floated ). This portion would be decoupled from the main studio floor and carpeted to keep the spiked drums legs from ruining a wood floor and keep the drums from sliding. I have found that isolating the drum mics by placing their stands outside the riser helps tighten the sound a bit.

Lastly . . . here is the sound lock detail. I plan to put the computers in this area to keep the noise in the control room down. On the side is an idea of a small guitar amp overdub room where you can put the speaker cab and have the amps in the control room. In the end this guitar overdub room may end up being a storage closet since most of the guitar players I work with prefer to plug their modelling amps direct or use the amp modelling plug ins in our ProTools. Such is the life in a jingle studio. You need to be fast and come up with "sound alike" riffs with little time to fiddle with amp settings. Still thought it would be a nice touch . . . lets see how much of this original plan stays when we finally build the studio next year :)

Ok just made a small donation to the forum, since I think I will be using up lots of server space in future posts. I have exceed the the 150KB maximum with a many of my files. So sorry John. Lastly here is the SketchUp file for the original empty space in my first post for anyone who wants to work on it. If anyone wants the SketchUp files of the fully renedered studio studies I can email them to you to play with . . . your also free to use any of the component models I have modeled in your own designs. The files are a bit big at 7MB each, so email me if anyone wants a copy. OK . . . everyone let me know what you think and lets build a great little studio! BTW will be off to AES/SF in a few weeks. Hoping to catch some of you there, will try to sign up and get on the tour of Lucasfilm's new Presidio studios, hopefully they'll let me take some pics. I am sure when I get back the design of this room will be very different. Cheers! :wink:

Hi dennis. good to hear about your project. although I have no immediate comments and suggestions, I would like to express my appreciation on the fact that there are production studios in our country such as yours which strives for international quality. Rest assure that I'll give suggestions accordingly if I feel that I can be of assistance. For the mean time, I'll follow your post and hope that everything goes well for your project. Good luck! mon

Thanks a lot Mon, This is a big step for our company. Thanks to our very talented staff who we are lucky to have and to the local advertising industry (that has been very good to us) we have a chance to build something like this. Let's see what our friends on the forum come up with. We really want to raise the bar for a small studio here in the Philippines hopefully in a year or two we can do it. I appreciate your support! :lol:

Hmmm surprising no one has chimed in so far . . . anyways came up with a slightly different front wall for the soffit mounted design. Put wooden slats top and bottom as a low frequency absorber to trap bass. I also opened up the side walls with wide mid band absorption. What do you guys think? Comments? Suggestions?

Just a quick word to congratulate you on a terrific start to your project. 8) You've got a beautiful plan from what I can see and it's very well documented/introduced in this thread. I'm sure you'll get some action on it here. It's just that folks are really busy right now. --Keith :mrgreen:

Thanks a lot Keith, I guess when you are planning a project you sort of think it is the most important thing in the world. You forget others are busy. Any way I'll be more patient. Also, I dropped all my .jpgs to under the legal limit of 150KB. Should have done it in the first place instead of posting everything at "best quality". Sorry everyone . . . my bad! :) Cheers!

Here is another option to the front wall design, removing the slats and using more broad band style corner trapping and adding slats (in a 1" , 2", 3" alternating pattern with 1/2" open in between) backed by fiberglass as a trap for the side walls like John uses in his designs. BTW the side walls are angled 6 degrees. Is this slope enough to control (deflect?) the early reflections from the mix position? Another detail is that I nixed the ProControl for a desk with a smaller foot print and a simple Command 8. Most of my friends who do mastering tell me that less reflection from the desk the better the sound . . . I could also use the savings to buy other things :D Any ideas on this? Anyway I'll have some more changes after AES next month.

Back again . . . after talking with my partners, they decided they want to move a Yamaha C3 grand piano from one of our older rooms into the new studio. So I had to retink the layouts. They also wanted to use the Genelec 1038As in a flush mounted setup. Here is a revised layout . . . control rooms is smaller 15' x 12 ' x 8' with a vocal booth in between.

Here is a close up of the new control room and the acoustic treatments used. The sliding glass door used all the way thoughout would allow natural sunlight into the space.Tried to keep the space as symmetrical all the way and have the walls splayed enough to minimize reflections at mix position. The mixer is seated at 6 3/4' from the front wall to avoid a dips in the room mode and the acoustic axis of the Genelecs are also placed to avoid dips in modes as well.

Ok here are the recording spaces. The vocal booth in the middle is very dead with 1 live wall just to add some liveness back to the space. While we have carpet in the drawing. . . final will have a wood floor. I have used this design in several of our voiceover booths with great sounding results. This is the iso booth. The big live room will be padded in all sides with 4" 703 and 3/4" wooden slasts of different widths all the way thoughout. This sort of reminded me of the way the Powerstation (now Avatar) has their rooms set up. Also building this way allows me to use the 15' ceiling clearance at this part of my building and allow me to bring the roof in the recording space up to 13'. As you can see there is ample space for drums and the C3 Grand. Commnets suggestiosn . . . anyone?

Did some quick revisions in the live room . . . I remember that in most of the rooms at Avatar, the lower slats had wider spacing and the slat spacing gets narrower at the upper parts of the room. This allows this to have a dryer acoustic at the lower part and brighter at the top. My spacing is 2" between 4" , 6" and 8" slats on the lower portion and 1/2 inch spacing in the upper half. I could increase this to 1" to deaden the space a bit more. Hoping for your suggestions regarding this concept. I was hoping to get a warm diffuse sound to contrast with the deader acoustic of the iso room. Chreerio! :)

Back from mixing an 8 band album comp for a big Cola manufacturer . . . OK, talked to my guys some more and they all like my first design better but wanted the window that allows some daylight in, from the second design and they still wanted the ability to fit our piano and a drumset when needed. So here is revision 3. Same essential control room design but new live room design. Note the large picture window to the right of the grand piano.

Here is the outside view looking in . . . Plan to have triple picture windows (if budget allows). This is the live part of the studio . . . as you go closer to the control room sliding glass doors the room will have lots of broadband absorption and be a lot drier in acoustic for vocal work.

Here is another view of the live area . . . the slat spacing gets narrower as you get closer to the big exterior window, making this area more live. I love the designs of John and others who divide to room up into iso booths, but unfortunately I do not have much space . . . comments and suggestions anyone? BTW . . . door in the upper left hand of the model leads to a small sound lock and fire exit door in the balcony.

Another Isometric view of the control room. Re did the geometry and only have broadband absorption where the speaker's mid range drivers 30 degree axis would cause early reflections back into the mix position. All the rest I treated with slat resonators. May also put resonators on the back wall broadband bass traps.

dennis cham wrote:

. . . Plan to have triple picture windows (if budget allows).

What exactly do you mean by "triple windows?" Do you literally mean three separate windows all lined up? If so, that would be three leaves, which is not good for isolation. You'd be much better with two thick single pane windows. Three dual pane windows would be even worse. --Keith :mrgreen:

Hi there. Some great designs you have there. IMO, the best is the second layout you posted (vox booth between CR & LR), as it seems to optimise your space perfectly, and i bet that LR would sound fantastic for a kit! Just my 2 cents. Good luck with the design/ build and keep us updated with pics!! :lol: oZ

Thanks for your comments guys. Triple windows are 3 panes of glass to keep the noise out of the live space. Three panes two splayed between the outer window and recording space and one to replace the glass window of the current space. I have been getting request from musicians and my partners to put some sunlight in the live space. So these windows from the live room to the outside is what I am thinking installing. BTW, I did not render the windows . . . One the other hand two glass windows are cheaper than three. Getting ready to leave for AES in SFO . . . hey Keith are you making it down to SF for the show? Sacramento is not too far . . . Maybe I will bump into you there. Ozzy, the second design was my favorite too, but my partners wanted a bigger control room. The second design would fit the smaller Genelec 1032s but was a bit too small to hold the bigger 1038As which we have for the room. Many of my singers (especially the rock guys) love to record in the control room with a dynamic mic and the second design was a bit cramp especially with 5-6 people including 3-4 band members in the control room recording. Also the third design has an extra 5 ft which allows me a 10ft distance from mix position to the back wall diffusors. Still everything can change as I agree with you and love the second design as well. Again thanks everyone for chiming in. I am sure to change after talking with people at AES.