Building a "Tiny" studio.

[Connell5000]

Think "Tiny House Movement"..... I'm part of a project where we are going to build a "Tiny" Studio. Treating it as sort of a challenge, and with the challenge comes a few self imposed restrictions. Such as:

-aiming for a construction budget of $3000 or less (for materials)
-Internal width of room will be 74" (creates a structure small enough to fit out the bay doors of a warehouse, but wide enough inside to fit a double mattress in widthwise - in case the band needs to sleep over!)
-all building materials used will be basic materials available at your local hardware store.
-room will be a basic rectangle shape. Haven't fully decides on length or height of room, although will likely do a standard 8' height for simplicity's sake.
-design must be simple enough for your average person and a couple buddies to build from scratch over the course of a few days.

While obviously the more isolated, the better - I'm not actually necessarily concerned with creating a sound "proof" room - more just decently isolated, with the much higher priority of being a decent room to both track and mix in. Studio will be open concept with no separate tracking and control rooms, likely no vocal booth either.

I'll likely post some regular updates here on the project, but for now I'm looking for any applicable insights, suggestions, resources etc.

Pleased to hear people's thoughts!

MC

[Soundman2020]

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

Think "Tiny House Movement".....

While it might be possible to create a really small house that is functional, it is not possible to create a really small studio that is functional, for a very simple reasons: the laws of physics that govern the way sound waves behave, do not permit that.

There's one absolutely concrete maxim about acoustics that cannot be changed: small rooms sound bad. The smaller the room is, the worse it sounds. The underlying reason is simply the relationship between the size of the room, and the size of the sound waves. The wavelength of the lowest frequency sound that humans can hear, is about 17m long. The wavelength of the lowest note that is typically encountered in contemporary music, is about 10m. Any room that does not have at least one dimension that is 10m long, is "small", acoustically. If your room has no support for usable modal behavior down to low frequencies, then it is pretty much doomed to fail.

That's not to say that you can't build a studio in a small space: You can, for sure:

http://johnlsayers.com/Pages/Spark_1.htm

It's just VERY hard to do. And trying to do it in less than 74" is going to be practically impossible. The one you see above is much wider than that: about 93", internally, and that's already very tight.

-aiming for a construction budget of $3000 or less (for materials)

Whose dollars? Unless you identify the country, we'll never know how much money you are actually talking about...

-room will be a basic rectangle shape

That's not a problem. As long as you choose a good room ratio in order to get a decent modal spread, that can work fine.

Haven't fully decides on length or height of room, although will likely do a standard 8' height for simplicity's sake.

If your width is fixed at 74", and your height is 8', then you don't have vary many options for length. A modal calculator will help you choose the best one. It should be possible to get in the Bolt area.

-design must be simple enough for your average person and a couple buddies to build from scratch over the course of a few days.

For a fully operating recording studio? Ummmm... good luck with that! Just installing and calibrating the speakers can take that long....

I'm not actually necessarily concerned with creating a sound "proof" room -

Good, because that is impossible! There's no such thing as "soundproof"....

more just decently isolated,

Please define that, in terms of decibels of transmission loss. It is one thing to design a studio for 10 dB isolation (cardboard boxes would work fine), and quite another thing to design it for 100 dB isolation (even a concrete bunker floated inside another concrete bunker would be borderline). Unless you have a number, it is impossible to design the isolation system.

Also, for 3,000 "dollars" (even if they are US$), you won't be getting much isolation. You also seem to want to make this portable and modular, so I doubt that you'd be able to get much more than about 30 dB, maximum. That's about what a typical interior house wall gets you: ie, not much at all.

with the much higher priority of being a decent room to both track and mix in.

Specs for control rooms call for a MINIMUM floor area pf 20m2 (215 ft2). If you don't have that, then you don't have good acoustics. You can get reasonably decent acoustics with a bit less than that, down to maybe 14m (150 ft2), but beyond that, there's not much chance. And due to the limitations you mentioned, you wont be able to get that. A room that is 6'4" wide and 8' high cannot be any longer than about 11' (more than that, and you will be outside the Bolt area), so your maximum possible floor area is 70 ft2. That's just out of the question. It's less than half of the minimum possible area for even vaguely decent acoustics, and less than one third of what you would need for real control room acoustics that meets international specs. The floor area of that studio I linked you to above is about 280 ft2. Even though it looks small, it is still FOUR TIMES the size of what you are talking about.


But to make matters worse, you say that you also want to track ion there, as well as mix? Sorry, but that just is not going to happen. 70ft2 is barely enough to fit in a desk, chair and the speakers. There is no way on earth that you could also get an instrument in there (except maybe a piccolo) and be able to play it, let alone track it. Let's say that you could fit an acoustic guitar in there: How would you mic it? Where would you put the ambient mic? Why even bother, as a guitar in such a tiny space would sound terrible anyway?

Studio will be open concept with no separate tracking and control rooms, likely no vocal booth either.

Sorry, but that is just not feasible. Your width and height limits make it totally out of the question. The generally accepted principle is that the tracking room must be at least 3 times the air volume of the control room, and preferably 5 times. You can't even get enough volume in the control room to make it usable....

for now I'm looking for any applicable insights, suggestions, resources etc.

My suggestion would be to do one of thee things: 1) lift the restrictions that make it impossible to do this, by allowing an acoustically feasible size for the room. 2) Drop the goal of having usable acoustics in there, and just present it as an architectural challenge, but with no real purpose in the actual world we live in (like many such architectural works!). 3) forget the whole idea.

I'll likely post some regular updates here on the project,

Please do! I'd love to see which way this goes.


- Stuart -

[cicciosound]

Think "Tiny House Movement"..... I'm part of a project where we are going to build a "Tiny" Studio. Treating it as sort of a challenge, and with the challenge comes a few self imposed restrictions. Such as:

-aiming for a construction budget of $3000 or less (for materials)
-Internal width of room will be 74" (creates a structure small enough to fit out the bay doors of a warehouse, but wide enough inside to fit a double mattress in widthwise - in case the band needs to sleep over!)
-all building materials used will be basic materials available at your local hardware store.
-room will be a basic rectangle shape. Haven't fully decides on length or height of room, although will likely do a standard 8' height for simplicity's sake.
-design must be simple enough for your average person and a couple buddies to build from scratch over the course of a few days.

While obviously the more isolated, the better - I'm not actually necessarily concerned with creating a sound "proof" room - more just decently isolated, with the much higher priority of being a decent room to both track and mix in. Studio will be open concept with no separate tracking and control rooms, likely no vocal booth either.

I'll likely post some regular updates here on the project, but for now I'm looking for any applicable insights, suggestions, resources etc.

Pleased to hear people's thoughts!

MC

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[Soundman2020]

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- Stuart -

[DanCostello]

To give some perspective, in my department of 5 sound designers/editors, we each have offices that are about 8' w x 12' d, which function as control rooms / editing booths - and shit is tight. I frequently produce vo sessions in my room, and I can't comfortably fit more than two people standing behind me - I've done 3, but it's kind of silly. I can't get more than one other chair in here. My stuff is, admittedly, a little more spread out than some of the other guys, so they could maybe fit 2 chairs in addition to theirs, but that's it. They might be able to squeeze in an acoustic guitarist and a single mic, but that's about it. I couldn't fit that into mine.

Wall treatments also eat up a bunch of space, and when you don't have much to begin with, it hurts.

-Dan.