The making of Forest Studios (hopefully)

[danshky]

Hello...first time blogger (if this is what it's called), I have recently made the move from suburbia to the country and now have a 53 Acre pine forest to be loud as I want within reason (need to stay married). I am a drummer that's too old to be serious but too young to let go, have a company band that does some work here and there. My objective is to build a recording studio in the barn that will sound as good as possible based upon the budget. I want to use the studio primarily for recording live bands and rehearsal room with utopia being that I can retire soon and record bands for some pocket money. I would like a control room and a live room and my budget for the build excluding any hardware/software is 10k. I do have the possibility of spending more in the future but for now I have been allowed to spend 10k. I don't mind completing the project in stages but need stage one to accommodate my drum kit as I am hanging to play again!

My questions are:

I want the room to sound great, is there a resource out there that can guide me on what design would work best based on the shape of my room and what I want to use it for?

I don't really have to consider neighbours but do have to consider our main house which is about 50mtrs away, what level of sound isolation and construction method would be recommended?

Is it wise to have the control room floor raised so it sits higher than the live room?

Would you recommend including a vocal booth in the design?

Any other advice for this project would be well received.

I have loaded pics of sketch and barn

[Soundman2020]

Hi there " danshky", and welcome to the forum!

I want to use the studio primarily for recording live bands and rehearsal room with utopia being that I can retire soon and record bands for some pocket money. I would like a control room and a live room

So it seems that the number one priority here is to have a live room big enough to fit in a full band comfortably, and the second priority is to have a control room capable of tracking and mixing professionally. Is that correct? I know you already said that, but I'm just re-stating the goals to make sure I understand them the same way you do...

my budget for the build excluding any hardware/software is 10k

This is the part that you probably don't want to hear, but that just isn't enough for what you have in mind. Your space measures nearly 550 square feet, meaning that you are assigning just 18 dollars per square foot. You could easily blow one third of that just on cheap laminated flooring to cover that area. Another third (at least) for the HVAC system. Leaving you with maybe 3,500 to build all the walls, the ceiling, the doors, the windows, the acoustic treatment, the electrical system, and everything else. You probably should re-think your budget.

While 550 square feet is a very nice size for what you have in mind, the existing structure is in poor shape, not much use acoustically and will need quiet a bit of renovation to make it usable.

I don't mind completing the project in stages but need stage one to accommodate my drum kit as I am hanging to play again!

If that's the number one, biggest, most important issue, then I'd suggest re-thinking the overall plans a little: How about starting with just a drum isolation booth? Then add the live room later ("Stage 2") so you can have the rest of the band rehearse along with you, then finally add the control room ("Stage 3") when you have the funds to do so. It should be possible to build a reasonably sized drum booth for around 10k.

I want the room to sound great, is there a resource out there that can guide me on what design would work best based on the shape of my room and what I want to use it for?

That depends on which of the "rooms" you are talking about, and what you mean by "sound great"! The foremost design goal for a control room, for example, is that it has no sound at all! It must not "sound" like anything. It must be neutral. It must not add anything of its own to the sound coming from the speakers, and it must not subtract anything from their sound either. It must do nothing at all, except allow the engineer to hear the pure, clean, unadulterated sound coming from the speakers. That's easy to say, but not so easy to do! First, how do you define what "neutral" is? Second, how do you accomplish that? Third, what size room is best for that? Fourth, what shape and dimensions of the room are optimum for that? Fifth, what's the optimum location for the speakers, engineer, desk, console, and everything else in the room, to accomplish that? There have been a number of studies done on that, and there are some pretty good guidelines on how to do that, with specifications on what is needed in terms of frequency response, time domain response, room volume, speaker locations, etc. The most common publications are ITU BS.1116-2, EBU Tech.3276, and the AES TD1001.1.01-10. Dolby has also put out some guidelines, and so has Genelec. Many others too. But they are all pretty much in agreement on the basics. You could use any of those as the basis for your control room design.

But that's the control room: Live rooms are very different. Live rooms in general are NOT supposed to be neutral. If they were, then they would be called "neutral rooms", not "live rooms"! A live room is supposed to have some character of its own: it is supposed to be "warm" or "zingy" or "muted" or "smooth" or "bright" or whatever other word you want to use, personally. It is supposed to sound the way the owner wants it to sound. It is supposed to have a sound that musicians like, and feel comfortable playing in. That means different things to different people. Some live rooms have variable acoustics, meaning that certain aspects of the room can be changed to adjust the sound for different scenarios, such as sliding or folding panels that open or close to reveal different types of treatment. Other rooms have different "ends", where one part of the room is treated to give a drier sound while another part gives a warmer sound. Many rooms have "gobos" on wheels that can be re-arranged, both to reduce bleed between instruments while tracking and also to change the acoustics in small areas of the room.

In other words, your live room should be designed so that it sounds the way you like it best, perhaps with some variability in case you might need to handle different scenarios. For example, the acoustics that make a heavily distorted rock guitar solo sound great, probably won't do much for a soft classical violin solo, and neither of those acoustic spaces would work well for a fast Spanish Flamenco guitar piece...

Here too there are some very general guidelines about what decay times might be desirable, but there's a lot more field to play around with than for a control room. In general, most instruments sound better when recorded in spacious surroundings with high ceilings. Very few sound good when recorded in a tiny padded closet. Drums especially seem to like a space with a long but diffuse decay, and high ceilings, with some early absorption close by but not so much as to kill the "snap" of the snare or the attack of the cymbals.

Designing a control room is mostly science, and only partly artistic. Designing a live room is much more artistic preference, and much less science.

what level of sound isolation and construction method would be recommended?

You say that you aren't worried about sound getting out, but what about sound coming the other way? You live out in nature, which is wonderful, but nature has things like wind, rain, thunder, hail, rivers, streams, animals and many other sounds that you probably don't want captured by your mics while recording. And even living way out in nature does not provide total immunity from things like aircraft and helicopters flying overhead, cars and trucks on roads, perhaps even lawnmowers, radios, people taking loudly, phones ringing, vacuum cleaner, chain saws, boat traffic on rivers, trains, etc. There are any number of similar sounds that you would likely want to isolate. Then there's the even more simple matter of: "how much isolation do you want between the live room and control room?". Personally, when I'm setting up mics and tracking, I want to be able to hear just the sound from one single mic on my control room speakers, without also hearing the same sound coming through the wall. Drums, for example, are major problem here: When I'm trying to hear how the snare mic sounds all by itself, I can't do that if I can also hear the snare itself coming through the wall...

So you should take all of those into account when you decide on how much isolation you need. Get out your sound level meter, and do some tests. First see how loud things are in the location where you plan to build at various times of day, when various noises are going on. Then also measure your level while playing the drums in a typical session.
Then measure how quite you need things to be so you can track and mix comfortably. The difference between those two extremes is how many dB of isolation you need.

Is it wise to have the control room floor raised so it sits higher than the live room?

Most definitely not. Ever. Raising the floor of any room creates a tuned resonant cavity below it. That can wreak havoc in any of several ways. The best possible floor you can have for any room, in any studio, is a nice thick, solid, concrete slab. Period.

Would you recommend including a vocal booth in the design?

Do you need one? If so, then by all means add one. If not, then don't! Many project studios these days record vocals in the control room. Of course, that does mean that the control room is quiet enough to make that possible...

Any other advice for this project would be well received.

You asked for advice in terms of books: 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. The first will give you the basics of acoustics in general, and some simple concepts you can use when designing your room. The second is more about how to actually implement the structures, materials, methods and techniques for building the place. They compliment each other.

I have loaded pics of sketch and barn

It's a good sized space, it seems to have a good slab, and a high roof, but it's going to need a lot of work to be usable as your outer-leaf. Then you can build your actual inner-leaf rooms within it, once you are done. That's the basic procedure.

But before doing any of that, the single most important advice I can give you is "plan". Don't by a single stud or pick up any hammer until you have the ENTIRE plan fully completed, in all aspects. About 80% of the work of building a studio is planning, and only about 20% is actual studs, nails, drywall and insulation. People who don't agree with that "rule" are the ones who rush into things enthusiastically... then waste a lot of time and money when they later have to backtrack, tear down something they just built, and build it a different way because they encountered something "unexpected". It is no exaggeration to say that you can save yourself thousands of dollars and many dozens of hours of construction by simply creating a complete, detailed plan that includes everything, before you start. If you look through the build diaries of many forum members, you'll see countless cases where people had to go back and re-do things... and you'll also see countless cases that ran very smoothly, when there was a clear, complete, detailed plan in evidence, right from the start.

So that should be your first priority: Make a detailed, complete plan. Most of us here use SketchUp for that. It's free, and an excellent tool for modelling studios (among many other things).

Best regards,




Stuart

[danshky]

Thanks Soundman.....If I wanted to commission someone to design the studio, how would I find out the cost involved?