I've been following this forum for almost two years now and spent countless hours checking out the impressive projects that were developed using help of the board members.
It's about time to present the project I'm currently planning with my friends and partners and I'd be delighted to receive a lot of input and feedback from your guys.
A few words about myself: my name is Marc and I'm running a production company called Mozart & Friends based in Germany. We're about 10 people, mostly songwriters and producers. We work with both major and indie-labels in all big territories. If you want to know more, check out the link in my signature.
We have rented a room in the ground floor of a small building. In the basement of the building right underneath us is a club (discothek) that is making noise from Wed to Sat starting around 10pm (The noise is actually no concern to us. We can hear the club when it's open, but we usually stop working before 10pm. The noise from the club still allows mixing.).
Above us there an office where people work during normal work hours.
The room is roughly 11,50 m x 5,90 m. The ceiling height is 3,10 m. The room has one door leading to the outside, and another one to the entrance hallway of the house. There are two windows on one of the long sides. The floor is solid concrete.
We're planning to build a room in a room with a size of 7,00 m x 5,70 m (average) and a ceiling height of 2,70 m. The room will have two doors and one window to the outside.
The room will be used for mixing and producing as well as vocal recording (no booth required). We're listening at loud levels about 20% of the time, going right to the edge of what our main speakers can deliver.
The center piece of the mix room will be a Solid State Logic SL4048G Inline Mixing Console. We have a small collection of nice outboard incl. AMS RMX16, DMX15-80, Retro Sta-Level and Summit TLA-100A Tube Compressors, some UREI Comps, Lexicon 224 Reverb as well as some Keyboard Stuff including Moog Voyager, Roland Jupiter 6, Roland Fantom X8, Roland V-Synth.
The DAW is a Mac Pro 8-Core running Logic Pro 9. Converters are SSL Alpha-Link (48 Channels AD/DA + 24 Channels AES Digital + 24 Channel ADAT Optical) driven by the SSL MADI Xtreme 128 PCIe Card. We have another pair of A/D in the Neve 1073 Mic Pre that we use to record vocals, mostly with a Sony C800G.
Main monitors are a pair of B&W 802D Diamond Speakers and Dynaudio BM6A / Yamaha HS-50 as Nearfields. We have at this point NOT planned to do Surround Work, although our Console is Capable of LCRS panning and 5.1 / 7.1.
The studio will only be used by our inhouse team of producers and writers and there are no plans to make it available to rent for outside people.
Before we got the room, it was used as a private storage room over many years and we had to obtain a build permission from the city in order to start the project and use the room for a business.
The build permission has recently been granted, we had to hire an architect to fill out all the forms and to draw up a rough plan of what we're going to do.
This is pretty much a DIY-project, me and some of my team of people will do most of the building work. We're trying to not go beyond a budget of 10.000 € for the room in a room construction.
We have a pretty good idea of what we want to do, but we're still at the beginning of working out how to do it exactly.
Next up we'll post some drawings that we've submitted to obtain the building permissions and of course some photos of the room in its current state.
Comments and feedback more than welcome!
UPDATE November 18th, 2010:
We have an announcement to make: we're proud to be working with Studio Designer & Consultant John H. Brandt for our project.
Check out his website:
http://jhbrandt.net/
