John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello Everyone.

Glad that there's such forum like this. I red a lot of topics here, but it's hard for me to understand everything and get just right ideas for such room like I have. And there's no information in russian about studio constructions at all, as far I looked.

I'm about to build the studio in the warehouse I have here in Finland. The warehouse itself is very big, but the place for the studio is very small, because the warehouse is used for other duties.

Studios main purpose is for producing electronic music. For now me and my wife are making music in our bedroom, but our neighbours are not happy for that.

Would be very thankful to get some advises on such things like
Am I on the right way?
How should I arrange ventilation?
What traps should I put and where? Or are they needed?

I tried to calculate amount of reverb, and I got 0,07, which is almost nothing. Is that a bad thing? Or OK for electronic music studio?

Had no time yet to learn to how to make projects sketchup, so I ended up with just drawing the project no the paper

Thank you for possible help.
Leon
P.S. Sorry for my english

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

Would be very thankful to get some advises on such things like
Am I on the right way?

You are wasting space by splaying the complete side walls like that. You only need to splay (angle) a small part at the front of the room, roughly as far back as the mix position. From there to the back, the walls can be parallel, to increase the total volume of the room. If you end up with flutter echo problems like that, then it's easy to treat those with absorption panels on the walls (and you will probably need those in any event).

The same problem happens with the way you are cutting off the rear corners of the room. That wastes space, and those corners are where your bass traps need to go.

How should I arrange ventilation?

You will need to supply fresh air into the room, and remove stale air from the room. I normally do that by placing the fresh air supply registers in the ceiling at the back of the room, and having the stale air return registers on the ceiling at the front of the room. You will need to build "silencer boxes" for each place where an HVAC duct penetrates into the room, and you will need to do a lot of calculations to make sure that you are moving the correct volume of air at the correct speed for that sized room. You will also need to cool the room, probably with a "mini-split system".

What traps should I put and where? Or are they needed?

It is a small room: it will need a LOT of treatment. Stating with very large bass traps in the rear corners. absorption at the first reflection points, a ceiling "cloud", and thick absorption across the back wall.

I tried to calculate amount of reverb, and I got 0,07, which is almost nothing. Is that a bad thing? Or OK for electronic music studio?

I think you calculated wrong! That would be a very, very dead room. Almost an-echoic. For that room, it should be about 170 ms to 220 ms (0.17s to 0.22s).

Had no time yet to learn to how to make projects sketchup, so I ended up with just drawing the project no the paper

It would be a lot easier to do it in SketchUp! Much, much faster and better when you need to change the positions and angles of walls, etc.

- Stuart -