HI there "jakrambl", and Welcome:
Kitchen and bathroom are non negotiable
I always get worried when I see phrases like that in the brief for a studio... It usually means that decisions have already been made without thinking things through. Rather, that point should have been: We would really, really like to have a bathroom and kitchen in the studio: Is that possible? How can we make that work? Saying up-front that two rooms that are NOT necessary for a studio absolutely must be inside the studio, no other options, tells me that this is not a serious studio: It's more of a family room that happens to have some mixing gear and musical instruments in it.
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That said, yes you CAN have a bathroom and kitchen in your studio building. No problem. You just CANNOT have them inside the studio itself, for oh-so-many reasons. Do you REALLY want water, grease, flour, food particles, and other assorted nastiest floating around in the same space where you have thousands of dollars worth of precision electronic gear, and thousands ore of delicate musical instruments? Can you imagine what your mics would end up like, if you have someone cooking food a few feet away? Do you really want gunk and grime inside your gear? Yes, it will get in there. Have you ever seen the disgusting state of the interior of computers, rack gear, and other stuff that has been operated in a non-clean environment? I have. It's not a pretty sight. I have had the misfortune to try to repair such gear... with little success. Once the fans get gunked up, and the cooling fins are coated in muck, and things start overheating, there's not much you can do to fix it. Just chuck it in the bin and buy a new one. Have you ever noticed how most studios have all their mics carefully stored in closets, cases, or stands that are nicely sealed against dirt, muck and grunge? There's no way you'd catch e using my U47 in the kitchen! I'd like to use it again in the future...
Then there's the issue of humidity and temperature: Most musical instruments, some mics, and even some analog gear will suffer from changes in tone, tuning, and timber if the temperature in the room rises or falls, or of the humidity changes. Do you really want to run all your recording sessions with stops every few minutes while every re-tunes their instruments, and the engineer adjust the EQ because of the tonal changes, due to the rising and falling temperature and humidity?
Not to mention the overload on the HVAC system, and the constant need to change filters. Most studios only need filters on the external fresh air intake, but yours will need filters on every single return register as well. And they will need replacing every few weeks.
Finally, there's the issue of noise: do you really want to be recording soft vocals or acoustic guitar amidst the clatter of pots and pans, and the sizzling of food on the stove?
So put your bathroom and kitchen IN the building, for sure, but NOT in the studio itself.
I have designed a number of studios which include bathrooms and kitchenettes (I'm working on one right now, for a customer in the UK), but in all of those cases, those rooms are outside the isolation shell, not inside it.
Many studios don't even allow you to eat food or take drinks inside . . . and certainly not to prepare it in there!
4) I also will be storing my photo/video/music gear/and other stuff that rattles in there, so I will need a fairly isolated storage closet.
That's a common need in studios, and once again, that goes outside the isolation shell. It costs a lot of money, and takes a lot of space, to isolate areas. There's no need to do that for storage areas. Keep all non-essential areas outside the isolation shell.
5) I was just in a studio with an amazing drum room that had angled a couple of walls about 7 degrees towards the ceiling,
What makes you think the angled walls made the room sound great? You are arriving at conclusions for the wrong reasons. That's sort of like saying: "I was in thus amazingly fast and sporty car that had Deep Purple playing on the radio, so I'll play Deep Purple in my car next time, to make it go faster"...
Angled walls are a myth. Sort of! "Everybody" knows that you have to angle the walls in a live room to make it sound fantastic, right? Yet every single room in Abbey Road is a plain old rectangle....
Nobody questions that Abbey Road has fantastic sounding rooms... Truth is, there is no acoustic need to angle walls in a live room.
Angling walls in a live room works for one single thing: flutter echo. That's about all it is good for. Yet it is dead easy to deal with flutter echo in far simpler ways. And in order to kill flutter echo with angles, the angle needs to be greater than 12°.
That said, I often do angle walls in the live room of studios I design, but not for acoustic reasons: Usually I do that because the wall is following the angled wall of the control room on the other side, where it makes a more sense, or because I need to get around some structural member, or just for aesthetic reasons.
Angling walls in the
control room is an entirely different thing! That does indeed make sense for design concepts such as RFZ, CID, NER, and others. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to implement those design concepts without angling some parts of some walls. But I digress: You were talking about angling the walls for better drum sounds, which is a live-room issue, not a control-room issue.
6) we will need one large window on the North wall for photography light,
No problem. Many studios have windows to the outside world. Not an issue.
I thought about also making some kind of baffle to put over it when I am recording.
Why?
Sunlight does not affect recording quality... :
There's no need to cover the window, if it is designed and built correctly.
I have never used the space because it hasn't been built yet
OK, so this is a ground-up build then? All you have is a patch of dirt and grass right now?
Currently it is the outer 22'x22' frame, roof, and a dirt floor
Huh? You just said that it has not yet been built, but here you are saying that it HAS been built! So which is it?
it hasn't been built yet so I don't know what the dBs are at different lengths
I don't understand the comment: Why are you unable to find out how loud your sessions will be, and how quite you need to make that, just because the studio has not yet been built? I don't follow. If you have a hand-held sound-level meter, and you have access to your local municipality's noise ordinance section on their web site, then you have everything that you need. Determining how much isolation you need is the most basic starting point for any studio design. If you don't know that, them you can't design anything!
It will have a concrete floor and the roof is sloped from 13' to 6'
Can that be changed? If not, then put the non-essential rooms at the 6 foot end (storage, bathroom, kitchen), and the live room at the 13 foot end.
I am exploring the idea of angling the tall and short walls upwards at a 7 degree angle
I'd love to see your framing plan for structurally supporting an isolation wall that weighs many hundreds of pounds, but is leaning over and top heavy! I'd love to see the face of your building inspector when he sees your plans, and of your framing inspector when he comes to take a look and approve it (or not approve, as the case may be...).
There is a 6"x6" post just about right in the center of the room, I don't know if that can be moved or not
It can, no problem. The question is not whether or not it can be moved, but rather how much it will cost to move it. With enough money, any support post can be moved. And if you don't move it, then you won't be able to get high isolation easily.
There will be a lofted area above the kitchen for more storage/bed
That implies using the highest portion of the building for a non-essential studio function. Many instruments, especially drums, need high ceilings to be able to sound good. The need space, "air", openness. If you destroy the best area for doing that by putting a storage room and bed in there... well, that's just not a very smart thing to do for a studio. Use the area with the highest ceiling for the live room. If you want a bed, then have a small green-room outside the isolation shell with a sofa that coverts into a bed.
I had a contractor come out and make sure it is as solid as it seems,
A contractor? That's not the right guy for that job! You should have called in a structural engineer. not a contractor! He is the only person qualified to tell you if the structure is good or not. And he can also tell you how much extra load you will be able to hang on the joists, if necessary, as well as give you options on how to move your 6x6 post. You'll need to call one in anyway, but don't do it yet: wait until the design is more advanced, so you can get him to review the structural issues of that as well. Make the most of his visit, to get all your questions in at one, and all the answers in one single report. You'll need that for the red-tape paper-work to get your permits in any case, so optimize!
My budget for the whole project, electrical wiring, concrete, materials, sound proofing/controlling, and labor is no larger than 30,000 USD
That is very much on the low side. You are talking about an area of roughly 500 ft2, so you are planning to spend just US$ 60 per square foot. That's unlikely to be enough. I recently complete the design for a studio right where you live, in Nashville, and just pouring the slab alone came in at close to ten grand. HVAC will be another 3 or 4 grand.... Then there's plumbing, sewer, and electrical connections (which you cannot do yourself).... Building costs where you live are not cheap. I'd strongly suggest that you need to re-think your budget.
Should I mimic this setup with my workstation as shown in the floorpan?
Most definitely not!
That would be a terrible, terrible layout for a control room! You NEVER want reflections from the walls and ceiling to arrive at the mix position! Do some research on the Haas effect, to understand why. The basic design consideration for studios is that the engineer hears ONLY the pure, clean direct sound from the speakers, with no coloration, flat frequency response, smooth phase response, and constant decay rate across the entire spectrum. That direct sound is then followed by a very subdued and diffuse reverberant field, that arrives no less than 20 ms after the direct sound, and no more than 20 dB below the level of the direct sound.
Reflections distort the psycho-acoustic response: the way the human ear and brain interprets the very subtle, minutes differences in phase, timing, and level, to accurately perceive the true frequency response and directionality of the sound. If the direct sound is also mixed up with reflections that arrive within less than 20 ms, you will not be hearing the real frequency and real directionality of the sound, and you will therefor mix badly: you will try to correct "errors" that aren't really there, and you will not correct the ones that are there, because they were masked by the reflections. Your mixes will not translate, and it will be fatiguing and frustrating to try to mix in there.
Take a look at this thread
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471 to see what the response of a good control room should be. Scroll down a bit to see the graphs. That room was carefully designed to provide only clean, pure, perfect, direct sound to the ears of the mix engineer, and the client on the couch. That's how a room should be set up.
To achieve all of the above, the room needs to be LOWERE at the front, not higher, the speakers need to be at ear height (47-1/4" above the floor), NEVER above the ears, and NEVER in corners. The mix position should also NEVER be in the middle of the room. That diagram seems to be have been done to show the worst possible scenario for a control room design! It makes no sense on so many levels. Where did you get that from? You can safely ignore all other advice you get from the same source...
Studio Layout idea 01
I would separate that into two areas: the actual studio area, which will have an isolation shell around it, and the non-essential area, which will be the bathroom, kitchen, storage area, entry lobby, etc. I would also suggest the you consider splitting the studio area into two: a proper control room, and a proper live room. One of the problems with having a combined single room is that the acoustics of a control room are terrible for a live room, and the acoustics of a live room are terrible for a control room. So you cannot have one room that is great for both. Control rooms MUST have perfectly neutral response, in frequency, phase, and time domains, but that's a terrible sound for recording most instruments. If you try to compromise and have a room that is sort of good for recording and sort of good for mixing, then you'll turn out mixes that are sort of good for nothing!
One option is to make the acoustic response of the room variable, so you can change it as needed for the two scenarios, but sliding, flipping, opening, closing, or rotating panels at various places in the room. One position of each panel would provide the "control room" response, the other would be the "instruments" response (which is generally much more live). That is a possibility, but it costs money and increases complexity.
For your control room, there's a pretty much "standard" layout, which has the speakers up against the front wall, or away from them if the room is big enough to do that, and the desk set up with a certain geometrical relationship to the speakers and the room. Once you have a workable design in place for your control room, with the dimensions pretty much settled, I can show you how to set up the speakers and mix position.
So my suggestions would be to separate the functions into "studio" and "non-studio", put the "studio" functions inside the isolation shell and the "non-studio" ones outside of it, consider doing two rooms, increase your budget, and work on getting the layout correct.
For inspiration, look around the forum! There's over 20,000 members here, many hundreds of build threads, with most of those already complete and the rest in progress. You'll see how most people work through the design process to refine their studios as much as possible, then how they work through the build, and how they overcome issues they encounter along the way. But the one common things you'll see in all the
successful build threads, is very careful design, with great attention to detail. One member here (who is an acoustician), has a motto: "Studio building is 80% design, 20% actual construction ". That's not a joke: he is absolutely right. If the studio is very carefully designed, building it will be a breeze.
- Stuart -
I am exploring the idea of angling the tall and short walls upwards at a 7 degree angle