VJ here.
This will be my first major post to the forum, and let me start by saying how much joy I’ve found reading through the pages of this site. As a musician and a songwriter (and closet knob-tweaker), I’m always thrilled to discover new and better ways to help the creative flow. You, and I suppose now “we,” will never know how much of a difference this forum makes, and just how much beauty it brings into the world in terms of helping creatives create higher levels of their art.
Thank you all for taking the time to participate as you do. Hopefully I, too, can in some way lend a hand.
So… let me begin by sharing the very early stages of my latest studio project with you, and maybe have the opportunity to ask some questions.
General Project Information:
I’m an American singer/songwriter/recording artist with long-term residency in the Czech Republic. I’m in the process of setting up a project/songwriting/mixing studio in a cottage at the edge of a village, in the Czech countryside. I’ve attached photos and SketchUp layouts (with detailed dimensions) for your later review. I’ll be undertaking this project with my own two hands, so I’m looking forward to it, and I’m looking forward to sharing the progress with you all. Hopefully it will be an inspiration. I’m hoping to gather the information I need, and then begin and complete the build within 30-days. The budget for the project is flexible, and will conform as dictated by the eventual design parameters.
The cottage has a two-car garage, and over the garage is a loft space. The cottage is stone and block walls, finished with a lime render (as is common in this part of Europe), and roofed with a modern interlocking ceramic tile system. The only wood found in this building are the roof rafters and roof sheeting, the floor joists, and the finishes. All walls are stone or heavy block. The entire structure is built on a thick concrete slab. The roof of the garage (upon which the studio space sits) consists of spans of steel-reinforced concrete, which are hard-joined to the stone and block walls (see photos).
The cottage was thoroughly gutted and refurbished in the late 1990’s, and has been updated to the very high energy efficiency standards existing in Europe at that time. Everything is built to be energy efficient, so the building is very tight, with very good insulation and acoustic techniques throughout. The transmission of noise to the interior is very low, and the transmission of interior noise to the exterior (even when I crank up the speakers to 80db in the loft space in the middle of the dead of a quiet night), is barely a whisper outside. It is very low (“turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening” certainly doesn’t apply here).
The nearest neighbors are not very near, and they all have some form of structural barrier between me and them, not to mention the fact that they are all inside stone houses with very good energy efficient closures.The new studio space is clad with drywall, which is attached to the roofing joists via Resilient Channels. It has a cork floor (which seems to also have some sort of acoustic decoupling system in place). At each end of the space is a short bench running the entire width of the space. Each of these benches is enclosed. I have been told they contain insulation. I may already have some ready-made panel resonators there.
The front wall of the space is all thermal vinyl windows. The rear wall is thick stone, rendered in plaster.The space is accessed through one door at the back of the space.
The space will be used mainly for recording my own albums (acoustic based, blues & gospel influenced folk-rock), my pre-productions for prepping studio sessions at larger studios, for songwriting collaborations, for small folk and folk-rock production of other combos, for film, television, theater music composition, and for mixing, including my own releases, artists I produce, and a downtempo groove project I collaborate on.
The studio will be based around a ProTools/Logic X rig consisting of a i7 Mac mini running Yosemite, a Univeral Audio Apollo interface, an array of AKG and Neumann mics, a V-Drum kit, and Mackie HR825 Mk II’s.
The footprint of the listening position will be very small, and weigh very little. These Czech homes are built to hold full sets of HUGE hardwood furniture pieces inherited from the “First Republic.”
The listening position will have a slant-top pine desk (the edge closest to me is a 12 degree slope down from the edge closest to the monitors) which holds nothing more than a wireless mac keyboard, a Wacom tablet and the accompanying stylus. (An occasional notebook or lead sheet as well).
The dimensions of the desk are 100cm x 36cm x 2cm for the top, held up by four 2cm x 4.5cm legs rising to ergonomic height. I have two flat screen monitors to choose from. One is a 42” Panasonic Viera, and the other is 32” Acer. Depending on where the design dictates the listening position to be, that will determine how much monitor space I need to give to the tiny writing in ProTools. The monitor will either fit into a recess between the monitors, or, if there isn’t enough space there, due to the height of the ceiling (see design brief below), it will be built into a low-profile stand which puts the top of the monitor at the same height as the desk, slanting back to make it easy to see from the listening position, and out of the path of the monitors.
At present, the two “panel radiators” which were heating the space originally (see the blank spot on the rear wall and the two white posts sticking up below the windows), have been removed due to the horrendous ringing/resonating problem they were introducing to the space whenever I hummed anything around an “A” flat. Heating will now be provided by an oil radiator in winter, and I am exploring different possibilities for air conditioning in the summer (will probably go with a split-mini vented to the front of the building. Not sure yet). Am open to suggestions.
Design Brief:
I am looking for ways to make this as minimally invasive as possible to the existing structure and finish of the space. I’d like to make everything removable later. Of greatest concern to me is the cork floor, so I’m definitely looking for ways to preserve that floor. When and if I move to a new location, any walls which are erected, will be coming down, and I’m trying not to leave nail/screw, or bolt holes in the cork floor. I am definitely open to creative and functional ways of avoiding this.
Any walls which are constructed, will be constructed using metal studs of the European standard configuration, which include acoustic isolation elements in their design. They are lightweight, and here in the Czech Republic, they are much less expensive than their wood counterpart.
The studio needn’t be a hermetically sealed space, since the noise levels here are very low (and the occasional passing farm tractor which finds its way onto my recordings will be my version of Buddy Holly’s “crickets.”) Oh yeah… and then there’s the air-raid siren test every first Wednesday at Noon, just in case the Nazi’s or Putin decide to pay us a visit.
The goal for the space is good, tight, control room acoustics. I already have a very quiet, but much smaller space at the other end of the attic, behind the studio space, which is perfect for live tracking of acoustic instruments and the V Drum kit (and I re-amp guitars and basses “in the box”), so the new space is definitely more of a control room/ mix room/ DI overdub room/ Sonwriting incubator.
What I’m hoping to achieve is a fairly quiet space with a very tight control on the low mids and lows, a sort of “inner room,” where I can mix with the knobs at “living room” volume, and trust that the mixes will translate, or a space where I can simply sit in relative quiet, and create, either alone, or with other artists I’m working with.
The initial design for the space had the listening position simply facing the wall of windows, and making the rear of the room as dead as possible by building a huge absorber back there (this may still be the recommended option). However, inspired by John’s designs, I’ve decided to try and “drop in” one of his “small studio” configurations sideways into the loft space, having the monitors positioned at one of the low side walls, and firing up the slanted ceiling toward an ever widening rear dead area (please review my attached SketchUp layout to see a rough mock-up of this idea). One thing I’ve learned from watching John’s designs, is to think outside the box. Positioning a control room sideways across an attic space is certainly thinking outside the box (for me anyway). I see this configuration really ticking all the boxes for my needs if it can be done.
So here are my initial questions:
1.) Based on my attached SketchUp layout with the “small studio” sitting laterally across the loft space, is this layout configuration an option.
2.) If so, is there a way to do it so that I preserve the cork floor? (Maybe I could overlay the cork with MDF over carpet padding and attach the new walls to it the MDF? Kind of create my own version of a “whisper room”)? Would that option create the dreaded “triple-leaf transmission loss” problem? Any other ideas for how to achieve this? I mentioned compression poles in a discussion I was having with Soundman2020. Maybe I could attach the wall to industrial-strength compression poles specially built for this purpose. Your thoughts?
3.) Since I’m not that concerned with dead-quiet isolation, can I build single stud walls which are drywall on the exterior, 4” of insulation inside, and slat walls toward the interior? (Along with hangers in rear traps, and slat walled hangers in the soffits.)
4.) Does the “small studio” configuration going sideways across the space, give me enough space to implement soffit mounting?
5.) Mackie HR824 Mk II’s — After several people here on the forum have flush/soffit mounted HR824 Mk II’s and have had time to live with it, what is the final verdict? I’d love to hear from Giles and others who have had success (or failure) with this setup (the “flash burn” I now suffer from, due to all the intensive reading of the forums here, is definitely worth the pain).
6.) Finally, if the “small studio” sideways configuration is not a possibility given the dimensions of the space or other considerations, are there any recommendations for how to implement the same configuration running long-ways, either facing the wall of windows, or facing the entry door with some sort of entry door positioned between the monitors? Again, I’m open to any and all suggestions and comments. I’ve been told that firing the monitors toward the windows would actually help since glass absorbs low and low mid frequencies. Again… I’m open to all ideas.
Thank you for reading this rather long description. I have tried to give you all the information you’ve requested in the forum rules. Please ask for more if I’ve left anything out that you feel would be helpful to the brainstorming session.
I look forward to your replies, and I appreciate you taking the time with me on this new journey.
Na zdraví!
- VJ -
With any luck Stuart or one of the other more experienced guys will be along soon with some more mathematical and scientific answers for you, but hopefully I've given you a bit of a start with what to expect.
