Hi there Keijo, and welcome to the forum!
That's a pretty ambitious project you have there, and a nice space to do it in.
Problem is we have a couple of rehearsal rooms above us and there is a little bit of drum bleed from the ceiling as it is....
That's one of the reasons why we never recommend placing studios on upper floors: it is extremely hard to isolate. It can be done, but you need deep pockets and very careful design to achieve it. It is far better to have your entire studio on the ground floor, built directly on a concrete slab on grade. That's the simplest way of getting started for good isolation.
The live room will probably have some bleed-through which we'll have to live with...
It doesn't have to have bleed, and you don't have to live with it... it is possible to get high levels of isolation, if the isolation system is designed properly, and then built carefully, exactly to specs (no shortcuts!).
SInce the boilding is mostly old old limes-stonand bricks I would like to use as little drywall as possible and keep the existing walls as a design element....
That might not be possible. Those brick walls look great, but they are only single-leaf walls, which do not isolate well. Depending on how thick the are, and how well they are built, you might get maybe 40 to 50 dB of isolation from them. That sounds good, but drums can easily put out 115 dB, so 50 dB doesn't go far for isolating those.
The easiest way to get high levels of isolation is with two-leaf walls, where your brick could be one leaf, and the other leaf would be built a short distance away, decoupled, and with a fair amount of mass on it. Materials for that second leaf are typically: drywall, OBS, MDF, plywood, or (drum-roll please!) Glass! Yup, you could have glass walls in front of your brick walls, so you could still see their natural beauty. That would be one option.
This is what I have come up with:
How much of that exists at present, and how much will be built by you? Are there any restrictions on what you can and cannot do in that place? Is it on the ground floor?
This is what we had now: You can see the control room which we hope to move, but make it a little bigger...
Nice! Is that a Wes Lachot design? Or is it maybe based on one of his? It kind of looks like it... Do you want to keep the same style for your new place, or are you thinking of going in a different direction?
You say that you want to make it bigger, but do be careful there! VERY careful!
One thing you should be aware of, is that Wes's designs don't scale well, since they are very much based on musical scales. So a good Wes Lachot room might sound fantastic as built by him, but if you then take the same idea and try to scale it up or down to fit in a room that is, say 20% longer, or 8% higher, or 15% wider, or 17% smaller all around, or whatever, then very likely the result will be
terrible. Not because Wes is a lousy designer! (On the contrary, he's among the best.) But the entire system he uses for designing his rooms works on the basis of musical relationships, and scaling those just does not work. To get an idea of why scaling a Wes Lachot room is a bad idea, try tuning your guitar 15% higher on all strings, and see how it sounds....
Even worse, tune one string 15% higher, and another 20% lower, then play your favorite song...
So if that is one of his designs, then you MUST do it identically again in all aspects, no changes at all, not even one inch. If you wanted a bigger studio, you'd have to have it totally re-designed to fit the new space.
On the other hand, if it is not one of his, then it MIGHT scale OK.... but "caveat emptor"! Studio design is a lot more complex than many people realize, and what looks good on paper might sound terrible in practice, and simply scaling things up or down usually has disastrous results.
You might already be aware of all of the above, but if not, then hopefully you'll take it into account with your new facility.
By the way, your basic plan looks fine, but there might be other, alternative layouts that make sense: Have you tried many different things?
- Stuart -
. There were some issues with room modes when we built it but we had to bite the bullet since we had no more room in the old place.