Hi there "guitarteacher"; and Welcome to the forum! Please read the
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We want to build a small recording student ourselves but don't know where to start. Can you recommend any articles on your forum that would be a good place to start?
Just adding to what the folks have already suggested (above), also take a look around the forum, and specifically searching for cases like yours. There are many, many threads from members who have designed and built studios, so it's probable there is something similar to what you need to do.
The normal process starts by defining how much isolation you need for the studio: how well it stops sound going out, and how well it stops unwanted external sound getting it. You need to define this firs, since all of the building materials, construction techniques, and methods depend on that. So start by getting a hand-held sound level meter, and checking around in typical sessions and the location where you plan to build the studio, to answer two very simple questions. "How loud am I, in decibels?" and "How quite do I need to be, in decibels?". The difference between those two numbers is the answer to your basic question; "How much isolation do I need, in decibels".
With that question answered, you then need to define how much total floor area you need, how many rooms you need, what type of rooms you need. For example, if you plan to have a typical project studio for recording a small rock band, all at once, with vocals, then mixing the song to a good level where it sould be played on the radio, in a club, or even released as an album, then you would need a control room with a floor area of around 20m2, a live room (racking room) with a floor area of around 80m2, a vocal booth with a floor area of around 10m2, plus storage space, perhaps a "green room" (lounge), bathroom, kitchenette, etc. So a total of maybe 160m2 for the complete building.
When you have that worked out, then you will need to try out many, many, many layouts for those rooms, to optimize the use of space, while considering things like sight-lines between rooms (very important!), traffic flow between rooms, isolation between rooms, acoustics, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, structural, etc. This is the phase that takes the longest time usually, as there are numerous possible ways of arranging the rooms. When I'm designing a facility like this, I often go through a dozen or so layouts before I have a good basic arrangement of the rooms, then I start working on the details of each room.
When you have the layout finalized, then it's time to do the hardest part: HVAC design. Since studios have to be hermetically sealed. HVAC is an absolute necessity, and it's not easy to do right for studios. As you design the HVAC, you will need to modify the rooms themselves, since the silencer boxes are very large, and the air flow needs to be optimized for each room, for all possible scenarios (in other words, the HVAC system must be able to handle the "worst case" situation of having all the rooms at maximum occupancy on the hottest, most humid day in mid-summer, with all the musicians playing hard, without the HVAC being overloaded, but it must also be able to handle the opposite case of one single mix engineer working all alone late at night on the coldest day of winter, without freezing the poor guy!)
Once the layout is done, and the HVAC is roughed in, then you can start thinking about the acoustic aspects of the rooms, to ensure that they are usable for their design purposes! For the control room, that is fairly straightforward, because the necessary acoustic response is already defined in specifications such as ITU BS.1116-3, or EBU Tech.3276, so it's just a matter of designing the room response to meet those specifications. The vocal booth is also reasonably simple, in concept: mostly subdued behind the talent (the direction the mic is pointing), but possibly more live in the opposite direction, but with no specular reflections at the mic locations, and fairly smooth frequency response, with good low-end control). The live room, however, can be whatever you want it to be! If you plan to track many different types of instruments, various genres, various size bands, then you would probably want to consider having variable-acoustic devices on the walls, so that you can adjust the acoustics as needed for different scenarios.
And once all that is in place, then you can call in the architect to put that down on paper in whatever for your local authorities require, so you can get your permits and approvals. Then you can hire a contractor who has experience in building studios, to do the actual construction.
So that's the basic process. It's a bit more complicated in reality, but that's the underlying procedure.
If you intend to do this yourself by learning from those books that were recommended above (and they are great books!), then realistically it would take you six months to a year of reading and learning until you know enough about acoustics and studio design that you could actually do it, then you should allow another three to six months for doing the actual design, followed by another three to six months of coordinating with the architect, contractor, and authorities, until you can actually break ground and start building. So figure about two years until you can get your shovel out, and dig the first trench.
I that all sounds a bit too daunting for you to do yourself, then you should probably consider hiring a studio designer to do it all for you. That will probably save you money on the long run, as you will avoid all of the typical first-time mistakes. It would also be much faster, and you could probably cut down the "first shovel" time to under a year, perhaps as little as 6 months.
So that's about it. You'll find a lot of people on the forum who have already done this, taken the time to learn it all for themselves, then design and build their own places. There's MANY threads like that. There are also many threads where forum members have hired studio designers to do some or all of the design work for them, then they just built it themselves, or hired contractors to build it. Here are a couple of examples:
thread about Steve's high-end control room in New Orleans thread about Studio Three Productions' studio . There are PLENTY more like that, all over the forum. Take your time to read through a few of those, so you get an idea of how the process goes.
Oh, and one other point: budget. You do need to budget properly for the build, or it will go sour very fast! Many first-time studio builders under-estimate the cost of building a studio. If you hire a studio designer then he can probably orient you well in figuring our your budget, but if not, then you do need to analyze all your costs very carefully, and double-check everything.
- Stuart -