have worked in virtually every phase of construction from pouring slabs to painting, trim & cabinetry, plumbing, and electricity.
Great! At a very rough guess, that should knock off about 20% to 30% of the total costs. But you should still call around local contractors to get a realistic "per square foot" rate for your area, then knock 30% off that. Most people who come to this forum underestimate the cost of building their studios, sometimes by large factors. Most people don't realize that there are major differences between building a house and building a studio, in all aspects, that increase the costs.
It would be very sad if you were to set aside 25 k to do the entire studio, then see 5k go on the slab, another 5k on the HVAC system, 10k on outer-leaf walls, 5 k on the roof, then there is nothing left to build the actual studio inside the shell that you made. That's when you realize that you needed a bigger budget, or a smaller footprint. Realistically, in most places around the USA, a ground-up build is going to cost you upwards of US$ 100 per square foot if you hire contractors to do it all, and maybe US$ 60 and up if you do all or part of the work yourself. That's what most people seem to be paying these days. Hence the warning. Don't make the very depressing mistake of under-budgeting your place. The forum is littered with sad stories like that, of studios that ended up half-built because the owner ran out of money.
The Concrete filled block is simply for the outer leaf.
Great! Then you can get good isolation for your place.
I already have a dB Meter.
Excellent! Set it to "C" weighting and "Slow" response for all of your testing.
The question I have is, how do I figure out how much isolation I need when I don't have a source yet??
You are the source!
You need to do two things with your sound level meter:
1) Measure how loud you are when you are doing what you will typically do in the completed studio. It does not matter where you measure that: get your band together, and get them to jam some place like they normally would, while you measure the sound pressure level in and around the band with the meter. Get them to play several songs, as loud as they can, and you measure in a few places right in the middle and just around the band as they play. Note down the highest level that you see on the meter, and also the estimated average level that you see while they are playing the loudest song.
2) Measure the typical, ambient sound level at the place where the studio will be built, at the quietest time of day (probably very late at night, when there is little or no traffic on the road). Take several measurements all around your yard, and note down the LOWEST measurement that you see on your meter.
Subtract the lowest from the highest: That is how much isolation you need.
There might be a third factor that you need to incorporate: get a copy of the noise regulations that apply to your area. You can probably find that on the website of your local municipality. If the legal limit is lower than your lowest measurement, then use the legal limit instead. For example,if you measured 45 dB as the lowest real ambient level, but the law says 40 dB, then 40 dB is what you use.
I want the ceiling higher for putting mic's up above the kit, and because the low roof tends to make it kind of box-like.
Very true, but that is due to reflections from the ceiling causing phase cancellations and comb filtering at the mic tip, with low ceilings. That's why drums never record well in rooms with low ceilings, regardless of how the room sounds otherwise. But that isn't related to the boxy sound: those are two very different things. The boxy sound is due to one of two possibilities: 1) A room that is very small (in addition to the low ceiling). 2) A room that is over-treated with absorption.
Another word for a "boxy" sounding room is a "dead" room.
I want the room fairly large, but very little reverberation.
If you build a big room with high ceilings, then make it dead by treating it with enough absorption to make it non-reverberant, then you will have that exact same "boxy" sound again, regardless of ceiling height.
If you did that, there would not be much point to making the room big in the first place, because making it dead will make it sound exactly like a small room again.
It is impossible to make a very small room sound like a big room, but it is easy to make a big room sound like a very small room: all you have to do is to treat it heavily, so that it has very short reverb times.
If you record bands and instruments on a dead room, they will sound sort of flat, small, dull, and muted. Lifeless.
Most commercial facilities have both a live room and also a dead room. The live room is large, and has long decay times. That's where they record bands and instruments that need to sound large, spacious, airy. Dead rooms are often used for things like vocals, voice overs, Foley, ADR, and things like that where no room sound at all is wanted, as the correct ambient effects will be added later. Eg, if you want the sound of water dripping in stone dungeon, then record water dripping in a dead Foley room, and add the "stone dungeon" sound later. If you tried to add "stone dungeon" to sound that already had a different room sound signature built in, then it would not sound like a convincing stone dungeon. Ditto for ADR, some vocal recordings, and a few other things. For ADR, if the actor is supposed to be in a living room, but your tracking room sounds like a bathroom, it ain't gonna work! You need a dead room (or at least a neutral room) for that. But most instruments do not sound good when recorded in a dead room.
Back in the 70's there was a design concept for control rooms called "LEDE", meaning Live-End, Dead-End" where opposite ends of the room were treated very differently, as the name replies. The concept was later heavily modified, since people found it uncomfortable, unnatural and fatiguing to work in such rooms. The "dead" sound was not pleasant.
So I'd really urge you to NOT have your main room as a dead room, unless you have a very specific reason for that. It won't work well for rehearsal, as musicians do not like "dead" sounds, and it won't work well for tracking, since most instruments sound terrible when recorded in very dead acoustic environments. They just sound "thin", "small", and "lifeless".
Of course, it's your choice how you build your studio, but I'm not aware of any professional studio where the main tracking room is acoustically dead.
We had a room before, that we soundproofed when I was 18 and the walls were 16" thick (Brick exteriorwall, then a 2x4" wall covered with 3/4" plywood then an airspace filled with rolled insulation batts, then a 2x4" wall covered with sheetrock,
That's a three-leaf wall. Unfortunately you wasted a lot of time, money and interior room space doing it that way. You cold have gotten better isolation from a properly designed 2-leaf wall, using fewer materials, costing less, building it faster, and leaving more free space inside the room.
It's a common misconception that: "If two walls is good for isolation, then three must be better". That is not true. In fact, the opposite is true: three walls gives worse isolation than two walls, all other factors being equal.
plush carpet tiles layered up the wall.
That would have made the room sound rather dull, and "honky". Carpet does the opposite of what small rooms need. Carpet absorbs highs very well, mids not so much, and lows not at all. No effect. What small rooms need is lots of absorption in the lows, controlled absorption/diffusion in the mids, and no absorption at all in the highs. Often, reflection is needed in the highs, since many treated studios over-absorb that. Carpet has very little use, acoustically. (Except for acoustic carpet, which is something different entirely...)
The priority is the Dead Studio room as a band room, so the actual "Isolation" needed is to keep the drums and band from disturbing the neighbors.
That is two different things: There is no relationship between how well a room isolates and how dead it sounds. You can have a very well isolated room that sounds very live.... or very dead. And you can have a poorly isolated room that sounds very live... or very dead. Isolation and treatment are two totally separate facets of acoustics. They both need to be taken into consideration when designing a studio, of course, and they can affect each other to a certain extent, but in reality there's no relationship between the two. Isolation is one thing, and treatment is another.
I can worry about building the actual control room at a later time.
Actually, that isn't true. You need to design the entire facility to work together from the start, and you need to at least build the isolation system, even if you don't complete the room interior and room treatment until later. Trying to design and build just part of the studio now, without any consideration as to how the rest will be built, is a recipe for disaster. For example, how would you decide on what HVAC system you need if you have not yet designed the control room and iso booth?
The Bathroom, and all the rest of that do not have to be Isolated immediately.
In reality, they do not need to be isolated at all! They will be outside of the isolation shell for the studio, so they won't need any isolation. Bathroom, lobby, offices, storage rooms, green rooms, etc. are not part of the acoustic area of the studio: they are service areas, and therefore can be built the same way as they would be in a typical house, office, school, shop, etc. They need no additional isolation. It is only the rooms that are part of the studio itself that need to be kept within the isolation shell.
There will not be a glass window between the "studio" and control room.
Any reason for that? Fully enclosed rooms with no windows at all can be uncomfortable to work in for long periods.}}
Monolithic slab on a grade most likely,
Great! that's the best way to go for that type of building, unless you do need vibration isolation as well, or extremely high levels of isolation between rooms.
- Stuart -
