Designing a one room studio with crates

[Jason April]

• Location: 1,600 sq. ft. loft apartment with cement floor, 14' ceiling, and soundproof walls. It's one big room.
• Reasons: The apartment is an echo chamber. General sound blocking to reduce environmental noise. And I prefer to record late at night, sometimes when my girlfriend is sleeping, so I don't want to wake her.
• Size: Interior dimensions are approximately 6' wide, 12' deep, and 7' tall. The exterior is about 8' x 16' x 7' 5".
• Contents: Just a 6' x 2.5' desk with a quiet computer (thanks to help from the folks at silentpcreview.com), a chair, monitors, an audio interface, headphones, a couple of mikes with stands, and that's about it. Pretty minimal. I'm a one-man band, so it'll mostly be just me and an acoustic guitar in there.
• Budget: Under $2,000 would be nice. I already have the crates.

Here's my initial design idea. The big wall is the existing soundproof wall in the apartment. Obviously there's no door, ventilation, or acoustic treatment yet. I'll put more work into this when I'm more confident it will actually work.



Minus the drywall. The ceiling will be constructed in two 8' pieces. Note the double stud along the back for extra support. The 16' wall is facing the living room, so it doubles as the living room wall.



I'm building it out of crates because I have a lot of crates (1/2" pine, approx. 24" x 21" x 24"), and the wall construction is simple: mostly just stacking. I'll probably stuff the crates with fiberglass insulation. Also, in keeping with a modular, easy-to-disassemble design, I'll be using screws instead of nails.

X-ray view.


Seem structurally and acoustically sound so far? I've never built anything unless you count computers or lego spaceships.

[Jason April]

Added some stuff to the interior for a better sense of scale.

[Jason April]

I wonder... To minimize resonance in the crates, I could make them into diffusers instead of insulated walls covered in drywall. Then I could double the 5/8" drywall on the exterior using green glue. Thoughts?

[Jason April]

For example:

[Jason April]

Rethinking this again... I think it would be better to build a control room with a separate iso booth. The booth is the only thing that really needs to be soundproof, and if it's smaller, then it will be cheaper and easier to build. Dealing with the acoustics of the control room will be another project.

The iso booth only needs to fit me and an acoustic guitar, so it can be fairly small. How much should I expect to spend to build a small (say, 4' x 6' interior) room with an STC rating of 50?

[Jason April]

I've definitely scrapped the crate idea and am going for two rooms: A control room and an ISO booth. Maybe I can use the crates to tame the acoustics in the control room or to reinforce the booth, but as the main structure? No. I've posted this to several forums and there are a lot of concerns about structural integrity. I'm not taking that chance. I want a recording space, but not one that will kill me.

Since this has been such a headache, I've considered just buying a ready-made portable booth like the 4x6 standard version sold here: http://www.whisperroom.com/

Maybe my confidence levels are just low because I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, and I'm afraid of spending lots of time designing and building something that I won't be happy with. Or maybe I need to work on music, not a construction project.