Hi there Frank, and welcome to the forum!
something happened that destroyed my plans. In my case it had to do something with Women ... ... My girlfriend said: the garden is large enough so why don't you build a studio?
Sounds like you found the right woman this time!
What Dimensions should my Live room and Controll room have?
Two things limit that: How much space do you have, and how much money do you have? That might sound like a joke, but I'm very serious. Studios cost money to design and build. Lots of it. The cost is normally expressed in terms of "Dollars per square foot" or maybe "Euros per square meter" in your case. So if your budget is very tight, then the maximum size of your studio is limited by how many Euros you have on hand, and the cost per square meter to build where you live. On the other hand, if money is not a problem for you, then the only limit is how much space you have available in your yard.
Maybe this information is somewhere on the forum but I could not find it....
It is here, but in disguise! It's a question many people ask, but since most people are limited by either money or the size of existing rooms, it isn't usually spelled out so clearly. It's a very good question, though!
I want to rehearse with my band in the Live Room. We are: Drums, Bass, 2 x Guitar and 3 of us are singing. Style: Rock/Metal. Of course I want the room to be suitable for a larger bands as well but no big band or something like that.
So you need a live room big enough to fit in a good sized band of say a dozen people, with their instruments and gear, with enough acoustic separation between them that you can play well, rehearse well, and record well. So you need to come up with a figure that describes how much space each of your musicians needs, multiply that by 12, add a bit extra for room to move around, and that's how big your live room needs to be.
For the control room, that's a different matter. There's a huge amount of research that has been done on that, and several organizations have put out guidelines and specifications. There are very good, solid, strict acoustical reasons for their recommendations, and rooms built to those specs can truly be considered "word class". Organizations like AES, EBU, ITU, Dolby, the BBC, and others have all put out specs, and they are all similar.
The general consensus from all of these specifications is that for a good control room you need between 20 and 60 m2 of floor area, and the cubic volume of the room should be around 45 to 200 cubic meters. There are a whole bunch of other parameters, but that's the basics.
There's one more ingredient for your recipe: in general, the live room should have a cubic volume of around 5 to 8 times the volume of the control room, according to other specs (and studio designers).
Based on all that, you should be able to come up with some reasonable dimensions.
However, if I was going to invest a lot of money for a ground-up studio build in my back yard, then I would also add a few more rooms to the facility: A bathroom (so that musicians don't have to run up to my bathroom in the house), a kitchenette (for making coffee, warming pizza, etc.), a "green room" for resting, relaxing, talking, etc., a storage room, for keeping equipment and instruments in (and their cases!), and at least one isolation booth.
215 Square feet (20 M2) for the Control room (Eventually with a Vocal Boot in it)
20m2 for the control room is fine, but not with a vocal booth in it! There's no way you could do that anyway, without destroying the very carefully tuned acoustics of the control room. Look at the designs and builds of control rooms here on the forum, and you will see that NONE of the successful ones has a vocal booth in it. IF there is a vocal booth, it should go on the live room, never in the control room. A control room is very carefully design, laid out, and built to have very exact acoustics. You cannot put a vocal booth inside a control room, and still use it as a control room.
270-322 Square Feet (25-30 M2) for the Live room.
Too small. 25m2 gives each of your 12 musicians a tiny space of just 1,4m x 1,4 m. You will need much more than that. Also, if your CR is 20m2 with a 2.5m ceiling, that's a volume of 50m3, so your live room should have a volume of at least 250m3. Assuming you have a ceiling of 4m in there, your floor area needs to be about 60 - 70 m2.
Other facilities like Kitchen, toilet etc. are in the house where the studio will connect with the house.
Ummmm... this is much less acoustic advice, and much more family advice: DON'T DO THAT! Right now, your girlfriend is just fine with you building the studio in the garden, but I'm betting big money she will NOT be so fine with it when she has random stranger musicians invading her kitchen and her bathroom at unearthly times of the day and night! If the studio is just for you alone, then fine. But if you will be having other musicians in there, then don't do that. It is a recipe for yet more of those "Women trouble" issues you mentioned. Rather, make the studio big enough to fit in it's own small bathroom and kitchenette area. I have done that in several studios that I have designed for my customers, and it is simple to do, does not need to take up much space, and is very, very necessary.
As soon as I have reasonable dimensions I will try to plan how it should be constructed. Therefore I still have a lot of reading to do
Oh yes! Realistically, you will need about six months to read and learn all the basics of acoustics, studio design, architecture, structural design, construction, and interior decoration. Then another three or four months to actually design the studio. Then you can start building it.
I'd suggest that you start with 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. They will give you the initial basics you need to know about acoustics, and about studio construction.
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if a control room longest dimension is shorter than half of the wavelength of the lower frequency you have to monitor (generally speaking, your monitor cutoff frequency), then the room is not able to support that frequency (letting you to hear that frequency without distortions) due to the pressure zone effect (more about it googling "control room pressure zone", the first links are a nice reading).
I think you've been reading too much John Brandt! He's a great guy, and I like his designs a lot, and we share many viewpoints on studio design. However, what he has published in his blog about frequencies and room modes is applicable to the rooms that he designs for his high end clients. It does not mean that you cannot build a smaller control room successfully. John Sayers has designed many small control rooms, and has even built one inside a shipping container! I have not designed or built one that small, but many of my customers have very limited spaces where I have managed to fit in control rooms that work very well.
So it is entirely possible to build a control room that is smaller than half the longest wavelength that you need to deal with. It might not be mathematically perfect, but it can still be very good.
Also take in account room dimesions ratio to have a good modal spreading
That is important, yes, but people do tend to place way too much emphasis on room ratios. As long as you stay away from the really bad ratios (cube, square section, direct relationship between L, W, H, or within 5%, etc.) then you are fine.
I spent years rehearsing with other 3 people in 16 square meters rooms, it's not comfortable
Right! That would be uncomfortable, even with good acoustic treatment. But as you say, of that's the only place you have, then it can be done. But if you have the opportunity to build a place that is any size you want, then 16m2 for 3 people would not be a good choice..
I'd say 30 square meters is a good comfortable room to play in.
For three people, that would be very nice, but Frank mentioned a group of seven people, with the need to have even more. Assume 12 people, and 30m2 isn't very big. That's even more cramped than 3 people in 16m2!
But a lot of this depends on Frank's budget and garden: If he has unlimited funds and a huge garden, then he can build Abbey Road #2. But if he has a very tight budget and/or a very small garden, then his options will be more limited.
Frank, please give us an idea of how much money you are prepared to spend on this, and how much maximum space you have in your garden. Obviously, you have at least 50m2, but do you have more than that?
- Stuart -
understood.