pole barn studio

I am considering building a pole barn and building out the inside with stud walls for a studio. I am looking at a either a 20x24 or 24x32. I have a couple of layout ideas but would be greatly pleased to someones idea on one of your fancy drawings. Good size control room with a couple tracking rooms (drums in one). One question: It is much more expensive to pour a concrete floor than it is just build a raised floor on joyces above the dirt. Any thoughts on that?

maybe you could give us some more info? check the read this before posting stickie as it gives you a list of things to post...

I have settled on a 20X24 pole barn. This will be totally dedicated to studio. I was renting a studio but kicked out and am now about to be kicked out of my home office-converted-to-studio because my wife want sto use it as a home office for some reason. A small pole barn seemed like the cheapest way. The barn will have a concrete floor and 8' walls. I am going to go around the perimeter of the barn with 1/2" OSD and drywall. I have not settled on a layout for the interior walls. That is what I would like some ideas on. Using the optimum room dimension for 8' ceilings I can not really get a control room larger than appr. 10X12. I would like to go a little larger if I can without screwing accoustics up to bad. I do alot of recording on my own and would like a decent sized control room. One layout I have has it about 10X16 another 11X15, somewhere in that neighborhood. I would like to have a tracking room that is just large for drums amd another that could double as a rehearsal space (large enough for drums and a couple of guitarists, etc.) also a small iso booth. I have a rough drawing made up on Visio. I am going to try to duplicate it your drawing program and post it. I am looking for ideas and treatment plans. As well as what to do with the concrete floor and ceiling etc. Assume that the pole barn is already paid for I have $4-5000 to finish up interior.

digiblue wrote:

I am going to go around the perimeter of the barn with 1/2" OSD and drywall.

Is the osb (oriented strand board) going to be part of the inside or outside? I wouldn't get in too much of a rush as your outside perimeter walls can have as much or more of a say in how well you can contain sound as the interior wall configuration can. Brien

what type of roof would you have? could you use those ceilings to improve the height of your rooms? for instance if you had a 16' high ridge you could probably get 12' ceilings in your CR and live rooms...

That is a great idea Glenn! I never even questioned my mind when I was thinking that trusses would be part of the structure. Opens up so many possibilities. Brien

sure, then line the walls and ceilings with 3 layers of drywall you'll have a huge open space to play in... :? then comes the details ;-) like HVAC, room layouts, false ceilings, treatments, electric, etc.... :shock:

good idea but.... The material package for the barn inlcudes premade roof trusses. However, I have decided to go to 10' ceilings. So the bottom of the roof trusses will be 10' AFF. The roof will be typical shingled roof. I have reviewed many of the archived posts and recomended reading (and just ordered the book with acrued mastercard Amazon points, bonus) however I have not found much on what to do with a poured concrete floor. I was thinking of a combination of laminate and carpet in differerent areas. As for the layout, I have a couple. Sorry, I still haven;t learned Sketchup. I use visio and autocad regularily and I haven;t got a chance to get into sketchup yet. I will though. Both of my layouts consists of a control room about 19X12'.

the 10' ceiling will be nice. go with a 19x14 control room... 1:1.4:1.9 ratio.... you can stain and polish the concrete floor which is then durable and nice looking. add throw rugs as needed.

2 more questions, thank for the suggestions thus far. 1.) A 19X14 control will not allow me to size the other rooms accordingly. So I was wondering... would it be better to maintain the 10' ceiling but deviate from the magic dimensions, say 19X12 max. or lower the ceiling to 9' but maintain the ratio with a 12.6 X 17 control room. 2.) I was origianlly planning on building out the space between the 6X4 posts on the exterior wall so OSB and drywall could be hung flush. However, I am now leaning towards putting 2" stryofoam insulation and OSB between each post and then installing the drywall so that each post is wrapped. So I will end with a 3"deep by 4" wide column protruding out from the wall (wrapped in drywall) every 8'. This will save me quite a bit a valuable real estate and money not having to build out the exterior walls. any thoughts on what this would mean for sound?

I'd ditch the styrofoam in favor of insulation. Styrofoam does keep things cool but there are more useful products that you can incorporate into your project. I would consider the 4X8X 1/2 OR 3/4inch styrofoam panels "underneath" the OSB as this method can develop a clean flat appearance to your exterior siding when it is installed. It doesn't have much of an R rating, like a point zero 5 or something like that. Couldn't you build two walls decoupled one from the other, and maintain a flat surface on the exterior and the interior while increasing your wall depth? I spend it like it's your money!;)

If you still can, consider a "gambrell" style roof for your structure....opens up more headroom in the building, looks more like a traditional barn(if thats something you like the look of...).....in any case..... there is a thread in studio construction about beefing up external walls for reducing sound transmission through the walls.......I'm still working on my project, but so far, I can tell significant improvement where new work has been implemented. Best of luck to you, hope you'll have fun w/ construction ! Bumpy

Ok, so I haven;t posted on this since October. I have a bit of an update and some questions. I am going to give the update and follow with questions/comments on subsequent posts. I built a 32x24 pole barn with a concrete floor, ceiling height from concrete to bottom of roof truss is 10'8". I extended 100amp service into the barn from my house and upgraded my house service to 200amp (from 100amp). This is where I was as of February. Late February we actually started doing the "studio" portion of the build. There is an apprx. 17'x13' control room, 17' x 22 tracking room and a small iso room (plus a utility room that could double as a iso/amp room. These rooms are currently framed in using the double-wall method. We have also gone to great lengths to eliminate any flanking connections. We even cut the 2X10 inside headers that hold up the trusses at the dividing walls. We also installed a furnace above ceiling in the truss work. We are currently finishing this and the cabling and we will start drywall and such. I plan on going into more detail on several things later and also will be posting pictures. But for right now I have one specific HVAC question. One issue we have been dealing with is the air returns. Putting them in the divider double walls seemed an absolute no-no so that left the exterior walls. Even with that, I had real concerns about sound traveling through them between rooms. We had gone to some trouble to properly insulate and isolate supply runs but hadn;t though much about the air return. I have one idea I would like to run by ya. I propose to put the air return inside of a super chunk bass trap. The return would be in the back corner of the trap (say an iscoles triangle with a 10"base). The entire return cavity will be lined with duct liner (see CertainTeed ToughGuard 2 or OC equal). I would place a rigid board (OSB, Drywall) to form the triangle's base and seal the cavity which would also be lined with duct liner. Outside of the board I would start layering with OC 703 until I have apprx. 12" of depth or so and them treat the outside of the trap as your normal super chunk trap. So if you were looking down at the trap it would look like the all seeing eye pyramid on a dollar bill. The tip (part with the eyeball)being air return cavity with OSB sectioning it it off from the trapezoidal base made of 703. Now, I would then cut a 6" or 8" square hole (depending on register size) horizontally through the 703 and OSB into the cavity. This whole would also be lined with duct liner as to not disperse any fibers. The air return register would secured (some how, still working on that part) to the outside of the trap. Now of this description made sense to anyone it would be a miralce but if it did, any thoughts? It seems that the journey through the bass trap and up the cavity lined with duct liner (which is pretty much the same material as 703 just real thin and with a liner facing on one side (check accoustical data for the ToughGuard 2 its pretty impressive for what it is.) Then to our tin above ceiling connections (interior lined with duct liner) and then through flexible insulated duct to the furnace (and then making an identical reverse trip back to another room) should pretty much kick the db crap out of any sound transmission from room to room.

to Xspace, For framing out the perimeter walls we pretty much did what you described altough they are not decoupled. We framed out the perimeter with stud walls 16" oc flush with the post faces, so we have a flush wall around the outside. We installed Tyvek inside the barn (weird) on the inside of the steel siding and sealed all cracks and holes with Great Stuff. ( I have used a case so far). We are going to fill the outside wall cavity with blown insulation (also weird).

couple of thoughts - the wrap and insulation - could be a moisture problem because the wrap normally would be outside to prevent moisture from getting into the insulation space where you're going to have a mixture of temperature and humidity... why not run the HVAC through the ceiling? put access doors outside so you can service the air handler, use large oversized flex duct, and build silencers (mufflers) overhead and maintain equiv isolation mass on areas where the ducts penetrate the ceiling. this should keep the rooms isolated and be easier to install and maintain. keep the bass traps in the corners doing what they're supposed to do...

digiblue wrote:

We installed Tyvek inside the barn (weird) on the inside of the steel siding and sealed all cracks and holes with Great Stuff. ( I have used a case so far). We are going to fill the outside wall cavity with blown insulation (also weird).

That Great stuff really isn't that great for your application. An acoustical sealant or high quality silicone would have produced a better result I'm thinking. Your building this thing literally from the inside out:) Thats weird! You have someone lined up to blow the walls? Your not just going to get something like what Home Depot or Lowes has for attics and have it work for you... it doesn't stick like you might think.

Hi Digiblue I would like to tell that it is good idea about pole barn studio. If you wants to make good studio then you have to use some good material package for building after you complete the structure of building then its looks nice.

Dunno if we can mark this as SPAAAAAAAM

Not spam, but spum!

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