John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi,
I recently bought a house and twisted my girlfriend's arm until she agreed that I can take 3 rooms and build a studio. So, I've never built a studio before but I will get some help from a friend who has a pro (small) studio and has helped others building floating "sound proof" studio rooms. My friend adviced me to post here and get help with the actual design, so here I am.

Please check the picture below and come up with a suggestion on how to get best out of so little space. Room C is 14 square meters with walls about 3.8x3.8 meters. I'm thinking about using that as a control room since it has a window on the front of the house. Rooms A and B have no windows since they are under ground (lawn on the other side of the house is on 1st floor).

A problem with studios built in the same house as your family lives in is of course the noise. I want to be able to play drums or crank up my guitar whenever I want so my friend has told me that I have to build floating rooms. That will steal some of the space as well, but I will have to make sure I don't make my rooms too small. Any ideas?

I WILL make a donation to this great forum and I think everybody else should too. Thanks in advance!

- Asgeir

Greetings!

Sounds like you have enough space to build at least a decent studio down there. You're not far off from having rooms a and b combine to be the recording room, with C being the control room, but you'll have to do some design work on the control room- a square is one of the worst shapes for a room because it'll reinforce low freq's in big spikes and valleys. There's lots of ways to get that under control, tho. And your friend is right about floating rooms - what he means is that sound can be transmitted by the structure of the house, so building rooms-within-rooms will cut down the sound coming out of your studio tremendously. You may not think there's much room for it, but it appears that controlling the sound will be worth it to you. If nothing else, you don't want your girlfriend thinking twice about having a studio in the house.

What I'm planning on building in the future will be an outside shell around a bunch of rooms-within-rooms, each with the floor floating on neoprene rubber off the concrete slab, and building the walls for each room off the floated floor. Then a second ceiling will be built off those internal walls. Since there will be double walls between each room, and the structures of the rooms won't touch each other, the transmission between them will be kept pretty low. This is what we'll advise you to do here.

There's other ways to control sound without using up so much valuable space, and they're show in pretty good detail elsewhere on the site.

There's 3 things I can advise;

1) the control room should be symmetrical around wherever you're going to put the listening position. This is just to keep the stereo image from being shifted around by a shape in the wall on one side that doesn't occur on the other. At the design stage this is easy, but in the middle of building it can get tough to fix, so get it right on paper.

2) avoid parallel walls as often as you can. John Sayers recommends a 12 degree difference in opposing wall faces, others say more or less. But parallel walls will bounce sound back and forth between each other, leading to trouble with the room sound.

3) read as much of this site as you possibly can. There is advice on every aspect of building a studio in here, and while you can use the search for individual topics, like floating floors, you'll gain a much more balanced knowledge about the general idea behind designing studios if you just read thru everything. I know it's a pain, but most of the topics here are very interesting, and easy to apply to your own design work. This site is a big bunch of people who were all once exactly where you are, more or less, and have asked all the questions you have and more that you've yet to think of.

Good luck!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Hi Asgeir - welcome to the site - Kase has summed it up pretty well

cheers
JOhn

I am Asgeirs "friend", and have give him advices about gear, room etc...
I think he must remove the soundlock between the rooms to give him about 2-3 square meters more space in the recording room. Maybe, he can use the soundlock as a isobooth for amps, but for that he can make a boot in a corner.

Finstad

Hi Guys - firstl could you get a tape measure and give us proper dimensions. Your plan is not to scale

Perhaps you could try something like this - I haven't drawn it as floating rooms but you get the idea. It means a new doorway.

cheers
john