Hi there Carolyn, and welcome to the forum!
I see you are already in good hands with Steve, but I wanted to add some additional comments to what he already said.
We divorced our initial acoustic designer,
Would you mind mentioning why? Not all the gritty details, of course; just the general reasons.
and are working with an architect.
You will need an architect, for sure, to walk you through all the local red tape, and prepare the drawings and other documents that you will need in order to get your permits, authorizations and inspections. But an architect is
not the right person to do the actual design for a studio, any more than an electrician is the right guy to design your plumbing... Unless your architect has been fully trained in acoustics (not just the tiny smattering of half a dozen hours of basic acoustics that most architects seem to get), and has a track record of designing successful studios, then he's probably not the right person. Looking at the current plans confirms that. You should have a studio designer working with your architect to do this. Contact John himself, or one of the other designers here on the forum about that.
And we're about 1/3 mile from a 2 lane road, which around here is sort of a big road.
Is that road a problem? Does it carry heavy traffic, such as trucks, buses, farm equipment, etc? Can you hear the traffic at the location where you plan to build the studio?
We do have lots of crickets, and nearby cows.
What about other sounds of nature? Wind, rain, hail, thunder, etc.? What about other rural sounds nearby? There's a lot of sounds outside that can trash your husband's "best recording I ever did" if they get into his mics inside the studio.
The studio will be used by my husband who records one-man demos using a drum machine or Acid loops for his percussion, and plays most of his parts via guitar modeling devices such as Roland’s VG-88 and VG-99, and synthesizers.
So there will be no acoustic drums or other loud instruments? If he works mostly with electronic sources, then your isolation needs will be much lower than if he wants to record live acoustic drums, or even worse, a full rock band.
The acoustics of the room are important for recording acoustic guitar, small electric guitar amps, live percussion, live vocals, and mixing down the audio.
When you say "room" here, are you referring to the control room, or to the isolation booth? There's a set of very specific acoustic parameters that a quality control room should meet, but those aren't necessarily what you need for recording acoustic guitar, vocals, guitar amps, and definitely not live percussion. That's two different acoustic environments. There are ways of dealing with that (such as having variable acoustic devices in the room, so you can change the acoustic response as needed for different situations), but that adds cost and complexity.
Below is the whole building and then a closer up picture of the music part.
There are several ways that could be improved. One of those is to waste less space by not splaying the side walls for the rear half of the control room: it is not necessary acoustically, and tends to waste space in adjacent rooms. There are also issues with your isolation plan, and the booth needs to be quite a bit bigger if you want to track live percussion or some genres of acoustic guitar in there.
We're not looking for professional quality - just not worrying about disturbing me or other people in the main house; and reasonable acoustics for a serious hobbyist.
Fair enough, but "serious hobbyist" isn't far short of "professional", in terms of the acoustic response needed in the control room. And if you are planning to spend all of that money to get to what you are showing in the drawings so far, then spending the little bit extra you'd need to go from "merely good hobby studio" to "really great almost-pro studio" doesn't seem to be a huge leap. You also say that right now the plan is that this will be a one-man studio, but from experience I'd bet good money that once your husband's buddies see the place, they'll be begging him to record them too... It won't be long before the place has musicians arriving and leaving regularly, either for their own recordings, are just helping to add extra stuff to what your husband is doing himself. Musicians and studios are like moths and candles....
I'm not including a budget at this point because we really only want to know if this is a reasonable enough starting point to have the architect start doing a 3-d renderings and putting in some details in the non-music part.
It is certainly a reasonably good starting point, but there's a LOT wrong with it too, that put it in the class of "not even merely good hobby studio". This is why I mentioned at the top that you shouldn't be letting your architect do this: you are paying him for a service that he doesn't know much about, as is evident from what he has given you so far. But this is not his fault!!!! I have no doubt he's a great architect, but you are asking him to do something that is not in his realm of expertise. I'm sure he did his best with that layout, but it is an ARCHITECTURAL layout, not an ACOUSTIC layout. It looks nice, but it isn't functional as a studio, because he doesn't understand studios, since it isn't his job to understand studios. His job is to understand houses, and I'm betting he does that really well, but studios are a very different thing.
Your current design is based on a number of common mistakes, myths and misconceptions about acoustics, and a serious designer with strong acoustic knowledge would not have done it like that. As Steve already pointed out, there are several issues that need dealing with (windows, doors, booth size, CR acoustics, etc.). Architects have a major job to do in getting the studio built, but designing for acoustics is not part of it. In the exact same sense, a studio designer has no business designing your kitchen or bedroom, nor the plumbing for your bathroom, so too the architect has no business designing acoustic spaces. Getting him to do a 3D rendering would be a wast of his time and your money.
1) do you see any immediate red flags with this preliminary drawing
Several yes. First, the isolation plan won't be isolating too well: there's no MSM system there (or only a partial one). Second, the control room acoustics won't be good. Part of control room design is making sure that the "modal response" of the room is decent, with the room modes (standing wave patterns for various frequencies in the low end of the spectrum) being spread as evenly and smoothly as possible. Yours aren't. Third, the isolation booth is too small to be useful for anything but basic voice-overs and perhaps tracking electric guitar cabinets, but certainly not much use for percussion or some types of acoustic guitar. Fourth, there's no direct path from the control room to the iso-booth: right now, your poor husband will be running back and for through the storage room and a whole series of doors when he's trying to set up mics on acoustic instruments: that just isn't practical. There's also no direct path into either room from the outside. Right now, when your husband's buddies come round for a jamming session or to record something, they will have to drag their instruments, equipment, and accessories out of their cars, through the foyer, through the sound lock, through the control room, through the storage room, and finally into the iso booth, going through numerous doors and a four 90° turns... I'd hazard a guess here, and suggest that your architect has never had to do that while lugging a bass cab and along behind him with a six-string bass in a hard-shell case strung over his shoulder (or even worse, dragging in an entire drum kit), but from the design I'd say he never even considered that. A studio designer woudl know that, and design accordingly. Your husband and his buddies won't be thanking your architect for that torturous path! The same happens when someone in the iso booth needs to go to the toilet, or go outside to get some fresh air, or answer the phone, or have a smoke, or get something that he forget in his car... Fifth, there's no provision for HVAC in this diagram, and HVAC is a critical part of studios. (I'm guessing your hubby would like to breath well enough to stay alive while he's having fun pursuing his hobby in there...). Etc. There are other issues too.
A studio designer would never make basic mistakes like the above: it shows that whoever did this layout has never actually worked in a studio, and doesn't understand the dynamics of how recording sessions or even just plain jamming sessions, are done.
2) do you have any suggestions to make this better.
Yes, many! But it would probably be to your advantage to just hire a studio designer to re-do the whole thing, rather than try to fix it yourself (or get your architect to fix it) by asking questions on the forum. We can do it that way if you want! No problem! But you and/or your architect would waste so much time just learning the basics of acoustics (realistically, several months) and then the basics of studio design (realistically, several more months) that it would probably not be worth it. Cheaper, faster, better, more efficient, more effective to just hire someone who specializes in studio design, who will then give that design to your architect, who in turn will incorporate it into the drawings for the rest of the house, fore presentation to the relevant authorities. That's the more common way for studios to be designed. Even though you'd be paying the studio designer to do this, you'd save at least as much as his fee (and probably a lot more) by not making the typical mistakes that first-time studio builders always make.
That's something we were struggling with. And we may opt for two narrow windows, just so the hubster can see the outside world a little with heavy shades or curtains for when he is recording or mixing.
As Steve already mentioned, you CAN have windows if you want them, and they can be big if you want that: many creative people really need natural light and pretty views in order to be inspired and do their best work. So it can happen: but it does cost extra money to do that properly, and it does require proper design. Windows are large, flat, acoustically reflective surfaces, so they need to be placed correctly for acoustic reasons, not just for aesthetic reasons.
Space, not a problem. Money, a problem. Every square foot of foundation ads money.
Which is actually why you need to make sure that every square foot is optimized to the maximum!
It doesn't make much sense to waste space the way you are doing it right now in the current layout. that space could be put to much better effect, and used more efficiently, as well as more effectively.
To be honest the equipment room was sort of "what the heck do we do with this space" and I had wanted more storage for household stuff so I thought... storage.
I hate to harp on the same point over and over, but an acoustic designer would have made MUCH better use of that space!
The windows are looking like more trouble than they are worth.
I'd check with your hubby on that point! He's an artist, and you guys are building this so that he can express his artistic creative side to the fullest, as a "serious hobby". If he needs natural light and the view to do that properly, then he needs windows! As Steve pointed out, you can have them if your hubby needs them, but they need to be designed to do the job, and they need to be designed by someone who understand the acoustic implications of where they should be located, and how they should be built, not just regarding the aesthetic aspects of "They'd look nice about here, and if they were about this big...". The purpose of these rooms is to be a studio: form follows function. The "function" here is "acoustic space", so the "form" should follow that. Not the other way around.
We're at about $200,000 (not including after-construction treatments) which is a little over budget. So while it might be a small increase we already have pushed the budget.
OK, let me put this bluntly (I seem to have a habit of doing that!
) : Steve is making a great suggestion about how you can turn your isolation booth from "Not usable lousy dull honky claustrophobic micro-closet" into "Wow! This is a cool room for both jamming and tracking pretty much anything, and it sounds great too!". That's the basic concept. Small rooms sound lousy, acoustically, and aren't usable for recording, jamming, rehearsing, or anything else. The bigger the room, the better it sounds.
So basically you are planning to spend a lot of money on something that won't be usable for what you want, rather than spending a bit more on making it usable. That's basically what it boils down to. The extra few thousand that it would cost you to get the place done right is the difference between "Ughh! Useless!" and "Fantastic! I really like working in here!"
so he really does do it all in 84 sq ft. and he doesn't feel like the space is his problem. His problems are: poor acoustic quality; outside noise; having to clean up his stuff when we have company; and tripping over cables.
So with the current plan, the only issue he solves is "having to clean up his stuff when we have company": The others are all still there... And a few ore too, that he doesn't have right now.. Once again, I hate to be harsh, but if you are going to spend all that money to exchange one set of major limitations for another set of major limitations that are pretty much the same, then why bother?
My suggestion here would be: hire a studio designer, and give him free reign to take that basic space and your criteria, then turn it into a studio that makes sense. Then give that design to your architect, so he can add it into the drawings and walk it through the procedures that it needs to go through, to actually make it happen.
Once again, sorry to be so blunt, harsh, and "in your face", but I've gone through this exact same conversation enough times with my own customers to know that it is what you NEED to hear, even though it isn't what you WANT to hear.
Hopefully, that's why you came to the forum in the first place: to find out what you NEED to know, not what you want to know. Which sort of leads right back to my very first question: Why did you get rid of your original acoustic designer?
- Stuart -
If the outside of the building is brick, then your outer leaf of glass is going to need to match the surface density of brick. I'd have to look up the density's but you'll need more than 11mm that's for sure. That's where windows get pretty expensive, the glass itself.