Studio / Rehearsal Room Design

[CSD000]

Hi Guy's

I am planning to build a rehearsal/Recording room. The room is stand alone in a quiet street. It will be used for band rehearsal with as many as 7 people. Also wanting to do some recording, live band, jingle's and ad's.

The room as attached will roughly be 5m x 6m 2.7 ceiling, although I can stretch either a little if necessary. I haven't planned for windows. I need Double doors for load in/out. I have not started construction as yet. I will be having a concrete floor, Timber frame/frames. I was thinking of having a larger than normal top and bottom plate to accommodate an inside and outside frame. Flat ceiling to start, with plenty of room for insulation/ Sound proofing. I'm not sure on external cladding as yet.

I have attached a drawing to show where the new building is situated among the surrounding area.

Area.jpg

5.sdr

Basically I am after help with design for now. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Clayton Denson

[Soundman2020]

Hi Clayton.

Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things!

- Stuart -

[CSD000]

Hi SoundMan,

Have have amended my previous post. Please view.

Regards
Clayton

[Soundman2020]

Have have amended my previous post. Please view.

That's better!

It will be used for band rehearsal with as many as 7 people. Also wanting to do some recording, live band, jingle's and ad's.

What genre? It's one thing to have a 7-man acapella choir, and quite a different thing to have a 7-man heavy metal rock band that thinks Led Zeppelin concerts were always way too quite!

Also, you mention rehearsal and tracking but no mixing, so this wont be used as a control room? In other words, you will be doing the actual mixing elsewhere, in a separate control room?

The room as attached will roughly be 5m x 6m 2.7 ceiling, although I can stretch either a little if necessary.

That's a decent size, although more height would be good if you plan to track drums in there. Any chance the ceiling could go up a bit? 2.7m is fine like it is (and much better than most home studios), but "more is better"...

I need Double doors for load in/out.

Are you sure you "need" them? Or would you just "like" them? Double doors create a major issue for sound isolation: It is very, very hard to get a good seal down the middle, where the doors meet, since there is no fixed jamb there for them to butt up against. So if you absolutely insist on double doors, then your chances of achieving good isolation will not be good. It would be much better to have a single wider-than-normal door. That introduces another set of problems (mainly involving the huge weight, and how to support it), but it is still preferable to trying to do double doors.

Of course, if you don't need much isolation, then double doors would be fine.

Also regarding doors: you only show the inner-leaf doors on your diagram, but you will also need the mating set of double doors on the outer leaf too.

Timber frame/frames. I was thinking of having a larger than normal top and bottom plate to accommodate an inside and outside frame.

If you go with a staggered.stud design for your walls, as you describe, then you are also limiting total achievable isolation, since the common top plate and common sole plate create flanking paths. Once again, if you don't need much isolation then that's fine, but seeing that you have the possibility of building this from the ground up, and guessing that you probably do need good isolation, it would probably be better to not limit your options before you even start. The cost difference of separate stud vs. staggered stud is minimal, as a percentage of the entire build, and the difference in potential isolation is large.

Flat ceiling to start, with plenty of room for insulation/ Sound proofing.

Why do you need so much insulation in the ceiling? Does it get very hot where you live? I'm not sure where Tumut is, but when I lived in Wollongong many years ago, I don't recall it getting hot enough to need excessive amounts of roof insulation.

You also mention "soundproofing", but acousticians prefer not to use that terms since in reality there is no such thing! It is impossible to totally "soundproof" something: Any sufficiently loud sound will penetrate any conceivable barrier that man can build. The loudest sound that ever happened on planet earth cracked concrete hundreds of miles away, and was heard on the other side of the world. Also "soundproofing" means different things to different people, and there's no technical definition for it, or way of measuring it. "Isolation" is a much better term: "attenuation" is also good. Both refer to how much you reduce the sound level for sound traveling between point "A" and point "B". This can be measured easily by simply seeing how loud the sound is at "A" (in decibels) using a sound level meter, then seeing how loud that same sound registers at "B". The difference between those to is the "transmission loss", or the "isolation"

So that's the key issue here: How much isolation do you need? That should be the basis for your entire studio design: You need to know how much the building has to isolate (in decibels) so that you can decide on the building materials and techniques that you will use. Isolating to 20 dB is one thing, and isolating to 80 dB is a major different matter.... So this should be the very first order of business: get out your sound level meter and make some measurements of "How loud are you?" in a typical rehearsing session, then also measure the ambient levels around your property late at night on a quite day. That represents the answer to "How quite do you have to be?" The difference between them two is how much isolation you need. But you should also check that against your local municipal noise regulations, to find out what your legal requirements are: It would be sad to spend all those thousands of dollars on building a great little rehearsal studio, only to have the cops come knocking on the door to shut you down, the very first time you use it...

I'm not sure on external cladding as yet.

That is important, as it can potentially affect the level of isolation that your walls can attain. If it turns out that your choice of cladding creates a third-leaf on the wall, that can actually reduce the total isolation for low frequencies. So it's best to decide on that now.

I have attached a drawing ...

That seems to be in SmartDraw format, but we suggest using SketchUp for everything here on the forum: it's very powerful package for designing your studio, and the home-use version is free!

Basically I am after help with design for now. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Firstly, what are your goals for this studio? The single biggest question is the one I already mentioned: How much isolation do you need? Everything else depends on that, quite literally form the ground up. Second, what is your budget? Some people start out with realistic expectations and a good budget, and manage to achieve their goals. Others start out with no real budget in mind, and then run into "sticker shock" when they start doing the math and see how much it will actually cost to do what they want. To give you an idea, building a studio costs about the same as building a comparably sized house, so the best you can do to get a realistic idea of costs, is to call up a couple of local contractors and ask for their basic "per square meter" rate for building a "granny flat" in your back yard. Multiply by 30 (since your studio will cover about 30 m2), then add about 20% to that (studios are a bit more complex), and that will give you a good estimate of the total cost. For most places in the world, it works out to somewhere between about US$ 400 and US$ 1400 per square meter when starting as you are, from the ground up. Perhaps less, if you can do most of the work yourself, or if you have access to discounts on building materials.

To help you get the concepts in place for your design, I'd suggest two books: "Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest (that's sort of the Bible for acoustics), and "Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros", by Rod Gervais. Between them, they teach you most of what you need to know to design and build your studio. The first one teaches you the theory, the second one teaches you the practicalities of how to go about actually building it.

And of course, this forum itself is a major resource! There is a vast wealth of information here on how to build a home studio. It's a gold mine, with numerous threads by people who have actually done it, so you can learn from them: so the problems they ran into and how we helped them solve those, so you can avoid the same issues in your build. etc.

So please add the information above about your goals and isolation requirements, and also update your design with more complete details for isolation (hopefully in SketchUp format!), so we can help you advance.


- Stuart -

[CSD000]

Hi Stuart,

Thanks very much for your reply.

I am onto your request and will get back to you next week.

Regards
Clayton