John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello, loooongtime lurker. Finally in the position to need help from this forum, Thanks.

OVERVIEW: We are 7 guys looking to build a studio in our shop that we currently practice in. We currently have a rehearsal space that we use that we hate, so we are building the studio to rehearse and track in.

LOUDNESS: We are in the middle of the country, with no neighbors. I have not bought my SPL meter yet. We aren't loud, we play electric bob dylan songs and the like, but have many members so it can get quite loud, but loudness is not the goal. We have to compete with our drums in the room, so that sets our level. Sorry for the subjective description. I am NOT concerned with containment, only as it pertains to the treatment in the room, again no neighbors beside the coyotes.

EXISTING CONSTRUCTION: No studio construction has been started. We are going to build inside a shop/barn/warehouse, in a corner. I attached an example of the type of building we are building inside. The building is not climate controlled but does have quality roofing so water is not an issue. As we are building in a corner, we have the right angle. We are aiming for 30 X 30 floorspace tucked into the corner. See the attached image. Thinking 8-foot tall ceiling for cost control. Concrete floors. Love rugs.

QUESTIONS: So, things are pretty open-ended. I wanted to start here instead of just randomly drawing some cool shapes and falling in love with them. You guys are the pros, help me! I read last night about LEDE rooms, all kinds of stuff and I dont want to go alone. We are looking for a small control room, big live room that will also be the rehearsal space. I have worked at a number of studios in NYC and other places so I am comfortable building and making wire runs. I have a ton of 10 X 4.5 fabric and cedar planks I would like to use as absorbers and reflectors/bass traps. I would be comfortable making a diffuser. Our HVAC system will just be a wall unit in the wall for now and our heater will be a space heater. There are no building codes where I live. Please show me a plan to follow in a 30 X 30 X 8 box with the above. We have 4 identical Peavy loudspeakers. I want to sofit mount two in the control room for now, and have pedestals in the live room for them as live room monitors (we all go through the board during rehearsal). We also have a sub that is about the same size as a loudspeaker which will need a place.

BUDGET: 2k? We make money by playing gigs and put it back into gear. We now have everything we want, so it's time to build a better place. We can do everything ourselves and build our own cables, subs, framing. Just tell us what to do!

Looking foward to making this place and taking pics.

Edit: 30 X 30 is max, if there is another dimension that would be better feel free to tell me about it.

Hi there "rabbiccu", and welcome!

That's a nice looking space, and 30x30 is a decent size for a small 2-room studio. Set aside around 200ft2 of that for the control room, and the rest for the live room.

Concrete slab floor is excellent, the metal walls and ceiling: not so much... but still usable.

However, there's a big "elephant in the room" problem here, and it is VERY big. This is it:

BUDGET: 2k?

There's your "elephant". That's not nearly enough, to be brutally blunt. It's far away from what you would need. Very far. You have 600 square feet, so with 2,000 dollars budget, you are hoping to build a complete studio for three dollars and thirty three cents per square foot. You can't even buy decent carpet for that price. Your entire budget won't even cover the cost of the mini-split. A case of good quality caulk could cost you US$ 100, and for that size studio, you could easily go through 20 or 30 cases, so your budget would not even cover the cost of caulk. The installed cost of 5/8" drywall is about US$ 1.50 per square feet, so assuming the typical 2 layers common used in home studios, your entire budget would be just about enough to buy the drywall for the ceiling, but not the walls. A single pre-hung solid core door will cost you about US$ 300, and you'll be needing at least 4 of those, probably 6, so there goes your entire budget again, just on doors.

I could carry on naming all the costs that typically go into building a home studio, but I think you get the idea: your budget is far short of what you need. My clients who have built studios that I designed for them report that, for a ground-up build of a home studio (starting with an empty piece of land), they end up with a total cost of around US$ 80-160 per square foot, and for remodeling an existing building or room, it works out to about half that. So use that as a very rough guide to estimate what your budget will be, realistically: in the range US$ 40-80 per square foot, so 600 ft2 is going to cost you US$ 24,000 to 48,000, to build a typical home studio or project studio of that size.

Now, you did mention that you have some materials already, so maybe you can knock a little off that, and that you can do most of the labor yourself, so you can knock a little more off... but you won't be knocking 85% off! Maybe 20%, if you are lucky.

So, before starting on this project, or even starting with the basic layout, I would suggest that you take another look at your budget, and figure out how to increase it ten-fold. It would not be a good idea to commence a large project, such as this, without a realistic budget.

- Stuart -

Thank you soundman.

We follow theory as well as we can and use materials within our limitations. We could definitely increase the budget some, though.

My thought was that because leakage either in or out is not an issue the structure would be a very basic drywall wall, and most consideration would be given to the positioning of different reflectors, diffusers, and baffles, which we can DIY. We already have our HVAC which will be a very basic set up.

We were contemplating having a main door into the control room, and then using a sliding door we already own to egress from that room into the live room.

I would want to cover the metal walls with drywall framing.

I hope I am explaining myself well.

Barnstorming! If you do not need Isolation, why the drywall?
INTERIOR isolation between CR and the rest is very difficult and expensive, so no go there.
Consider a single room with some purposeful sub areas.

Build something around and above the drummer. Even a framed 'cave' with walls of rigid absorption should be very helpful.
Add drywall on the outside if you need it, but you won't.

Ditto Mix area. Again a Cave of framed rigid absorbent material.

Don't go small with either of these 'caves', and include an absorbent ceiling.

Two such large absorptive lumps should knock down the reverb in that room quite a bit, and perhaps do a bit of blocking of guitar amps etc.
Guitar and Bass Cab Iso boxes or areas can be done cheaply DIY also.
Coyotes be a bit small, but some Buffalo would provide nice absorption, as long as you don't mind sharing.....
DD

DanDan wrote:Barnstorming! If you do not need Isolation, why the drywall?
INTERIOR isolation between CR and the rest is very difficult and expensive, so no go there.
Consider a single room with some purposeful sub areas.

Build something around and above the drummer. Even a framed 'cave' with walls of rigid absorption should be very helpful.
Add drywall on the outside if you need it, but you won't.

Ditto Mix area. Again a Cave of framed rigid absorbent material.

Don't go small with either of these 'caves', and include an absorbent ceiling.

Two such large absorptive lumps should knock down the reverb in that room quite a bit, and perhaps do a bit of blocking of guitar amps etc.
Guitar and Bass Cab Iso boxes or areas can be done cheaply DIY also.
Coyotes be a bit small, but some Buffalo would provide nice absorption, as long as you don't mind sharing.....
DD

I suppose if computer noise was minimal there would be no need for an actual control room. I like that idea. The reason i need drywall is the barn is not climate controlled and we will need to heat and cool the room, so drywall and insulation (already owned) will be needed so the room is comfortable year round.

My thought was that because leakage either in or out is not an issue

Let's start with that, before going on to acoustics:

Are you SURE that isolation is not an issue? In Missouri, there is nothing that could trash your recording / rehearsal sessions? No thunder, rain, hail, or wind? No aircraft or helicopters flying over? No sirens from ambulances / police / fire engines? No trains? No cars arriving / leaving / driving past? No dogs barking outside? And nothing in the the rest of the building either, such as water running in pipes, fans, pumps and other motors, people around, dropping things on the floor, doors closing, people talking, vacuum cleaners, washing machine, radio, TV, furnace.... There's hundreds of possible sounds that could destroy a good recording if they get into the mics in your control room, or simply make a rehearsal unpleasant. Are you CERTAIN that your studio will not get any of that?

Likewise, for tracking, the normal reason why you isolate a control room form the live room is so that there is no sound from the control room getting back into the mics in the live room, and also so that when you listen to the speakers in the control room, you are actually hearing ONLY the mic sound coming through the speaker, not the sound coming through the wall as well.... How else would you know if the mic is located properly to pic up the sound you want, if you can't hear how that mic sounds when you listen on the CR speakers, because the sound coming through the walls messes it up?

What happens of you want to have a rehearsal going on in the live room, while you work on a mix for an entirely different song in the control room? That won't be possible if you have poor isolation...

Etc.

Isolation is a necessity for studios: not a luxury.

because leakage either in or out is not an issue the structure would be a very basic drywall wall,

You can get reasonable isolation with drywall on studs, yes... but you don't have enough budget to do even that. As I mentioned, the installed cost of drywall works out to about US$ 1.50 per square foot. Let's say that your live room measures 20' by 20' by 8' tall. Your ceiling will need 20x20= 400 square feet for ONE layer. Each inner-leaf wall will need 20x8=160 square feet, but there are four walls, so 640 square feet. You will also need outer-leaf walls, but you can use two two existing walls of the building for that, so let's assume that you only need another two walls to complete the outer-leaf shell: So another 2x160=320 ft2 (actually it would be more than that, because they would have to be longer and higher than the inner leaf, but let's keep the assumptions simple)

Total: 400+640+320 = 1,360 square feet. That's ONE layer. You will need TWO layers. 2 x 1,360 = 2,720 ft2. At US$ 1.50 per square foot = US$ 4,080, just for drywall, without considering the studs, joists, nails, screws, caulk, or insulation.

Now, that's just for minimal isolation, and assuming that what you say is true: that you actually don't need much isolation.

and most consideration would be given to the positioning of different reflectors, diffusers, and baffles, which we can DIY.

That's fine, and you might be able to get by on a budget if US$ 2k for treating the control room, but that won't leave anything for treating the live room / rehearsal room...

We already have our HVAC which will be a very basic set up.

What you you have for that? What make and model system do you have for the live room, and what make and model do you have for the control room? What capacity is each one, in BTU/Hr, and how does that compare to the real latent heat load and sensible heat load that you will have in each room? You live in Missouri, so the climate is basically hot and humid: that implies high latent heat load, especially when you have a dozen musicians jamming hard in the LR, while eating pizza and drinking beer, with WAG's in the CR doing the same... Did you do the math, to make sure you have enough capacity?

Also, how do you know that the units you have will be correct for the rooms, when you don't yet know the sizes of the rooms? You can't just throw any old mini.split in any old room, and expect it to work: there's some calculations to be done, to make sure that the condenser unit can supply the correct air flow rate for the room (at least 6 volume changes per hour) while also supplying the the correct air flow velocity at the registers (less than 300 fpm) and doing all of that while being able to handle the static pressure of your duct system...

And speaking of the duct system, you didn't mention that yet: you only mentioned your split systems, but split systems do not supply any ventilation: they only heat and cool. But they don't ventilate. And for a studio, you do need to ventilate. If you want to keep the musicians and engineers alive in there, then you need to supply fresh air to the rooms, and remove the stale air. And no "opening the door every few minutes" is not a valid ventilation plan. It won't work anyway, but even if it did, it's still not viable.

So, in addition to your two mini-splits (which you say that you already have), you will need a duct system for the fresh air supply to each room, and another duct system for the stale air removal from each room. Those ducts will need fans, filters, registers, and silencer boxes. All of those cost money (although you can build and install a lot of that yourself).

OK, I'm not trying to rain on your parade here, or be a wet blanket on your project: I'm just being realistic. I'm pointing out all the things that most first-time studio builders never consider, until someone mentions it. It's best to find out about all this stuff at the beginning, so you can adjust your budget and/or expectations right form the start, instead of getting bogged down in unexpected expenses and complications along the way, then ending up with a place that does not meet your expectations or goals.

We were contemplating having a main door into the control room,

Two doors, back to back. Your wall will have two leaves, and you need one door in each leaf, so you need two doors for that access path. Then another two doors, back to back, in the other doorways.

and then using a sliding door we already own to egress from that room into the live room.

So the only way to get into the live room, is through the control room? Every time a musician needs to bring in his drum kit for a session, he'll have to carry each part of it though the first pair of doors, then through the control room, around the console, and the client couch, then through the other doors into the live room, then go back for the next piece? Ditto every other musician? And when somebody in the live room needs to go to the bathroom, or go outside to answer the phone, or take a smoke break, or whatever.... he has to interrupt the session in the control room to do that? Then interrupt it again, when he comes back in?

This is not a good plan.

Most studios have independent access paths for each room, plus connecting doors and windows.

I would want to cover the metal walls with drywall framing.

Definitely! No question about that. See above for the estimate of drywall costs. Now for framing costs... A single 2x4 stud is about US$ 10 right now, give or take a bit... but for the entire wall, current estimates are between about US$ 2.50 and US$ 4.50 per square foot. Call it 3.50 to be safe. We already figured you will have about 1,360 square feet of wall and ceiling area, so 1,360 x 3.5 = US$ 4,760 for the framing.... and that's for ONLY the live room... not the control room. And that assumes 2x4 framing for the ceiling, which won't be the case: you'll need something more like 2x8, perhaps 2x10.

So, for the LR, drywall is about 4k, framing is about 5k, plus maybe another 4k for the control room (framing + drywall), so 13k for the wall structure... plus insulation ,nails, screws, caulk, doors, windows, HVAC, electrical system.... then treatment in both rooms.... that's how we get to the realistic estimate of around 25 k as the bare minimum for this size studio.

I hope I am explaining myself well.

Ditto!

Once again, I', not trying to u you guys out, and damp your enthusiasm!!! It's great that you want to build a studio! Fantastic! Your current place clearly sucks, and you want quality. Wonderful! I'm just trying to help you avoid the very common mistakes that are very commonly made by folks like you, who decide that that need a better place to rehears/track/mix/master. And those mistakes are usually related to the same thing: underestimating the cost of doing what they want to do. It's not as easy as you would hope, and costs a lot more than you would expect.

That's reality.

What I would really suggest is that you guys sit down and figure out where to get about US$ 25 k from, so you can build this place right and get the results that you want. Take a look at the studios that are currently under construction here by forum members, and those that have been completed, and ask on their threads how much they spent. Look for cases like yours, so you get realistic situations to compare with.

I'm really looking forward to seeing your studio progress, and end up with the place you want it to be! Please don't take anything I said as discouraging, or negative criticism: It's not mean that way at all. Call it more of a "reality check", to help you guys get on the right path, realistically.

- Stuart -

Soundman2020 wrote:

I'm really looking forward to seeing your studio progress, and end up with the place you want it to be! Please don't take anything I said as discouraging, or negative criticism: It's not mean that way at all. Call it more of a "reality check", to help you guys get on the right path, realistically.

- Stuart -

Totally, I have read enough threads around here to know that's not what you're about or doing. We haven't nailed down a budget, I am sure we can come up with much more, just spitballing, poorly. We go project from project and it's all of our hobbies so this will get done.

I really do not need any isolation or HVAC. This is a very rural area and the shop does actually eat a lot of the rain noise. It's also a hobby room which will be only used by us - although we do want to make good recordings in it. I have an audio engineer background, I would never build what we are building and enter it into the market as a commercial studio. We can take a break from tracking from rain, and work around the wall unit air conditioner. We have the rest of our lives to track our masterpiece. We also have 7 guys doing this, so in our projects, we usually do have somebody that has this or that. Let's pretend that money is not an option and we are looking to spend somewhere near what you say. I really just want the room to sound great.

What stopped me from going ahead alone was when I looked at the prescription from amroc calculator and then I was reading about absorption coefficient of different materials to match that. My head was spinning and I thought "where should i put this 300sqft of .19 absorbents? I also have ideas for using these cedar boards which are rough yewn and I read someone has used them to build a multi-purpose bass trap + reflector. What is the inherently best-shaped room? The amroc says " this function should be strictly increasing to reach a good distribution of modes." But a square room goes down and then back up.

I thought staggering 4'X8' 703 absorbent and 4X8 cedar reflectors and then on the ceiling having a DIY diffuser (where can I find the correct info on this?) Mounting the studio live monitors on either side of the control room window, back wall having some diffusers as well and the window wall ahving lots of absorbancy a la LEDE.

OVerwhelmed.

I'm sorry rabbiccu, but you need to listen to the experienced people replying to your thread.

You say:

Totally, I have read enough threads around here to know that's not what you're about or doing.

Then you say:

I really do not need any isolation or HVAC.

If you actually had read a bunch of threads on here, you'd realize that at MINIMUM, you NEED a properly designed HVAC system.

Stuart has clearly spent a very long time replying to you with real life numbers and then you turn around and basically tell state that he is wrong by saying that you "really do not need this or that". I'm personally not going to waste my time trying to help you because you clearly aren't willing to listen to a professional like Stuart. Good luck with your space.

Greg

Thanks and I do appreciate the thought and have read a ton of threads from here. Is it not possible that every space and person has different needs? I'm just casually asking advice casually because the things involving positioning of acoustic elements are a little over my head but I can surely figure them out.

Wanted the perspective of some folks who dream up this stuff daily. HVAC, I know we don't need because we have systems for that that have been working 3 years in our current space just fine. I do understand what you are saying, but this isn't a professional studio it's a place for one band to rehearse and track.

The two biggest areas in nearly any space are floor and ceiling. Presuming you are not doing carpet, I would start with the ceiling.
What do you think would be doable up there? You say thinking of an 8 foot ceiling. No comprendo, what is the current ceiling height and what is is made of.
Do you have enough height to do a very affordable regular suspended ceiling, as you see in offices and indeed studios.
If you chose fully absorbent batts/tiles, and add fibre above in the void, this is an amazing powerful acoustic intervention.
Did you understand what I mean by absorbent 'caves' for semi isolating drum and mix areas?
DD

DanDan wrote:What do you think would be doable up there? You say thinking of an 8 foot ceiling. No comprendo, what is the current ceiling height and what is is made of.

I mean the ceiling will be 8 feet high- but they dont exist right now. All I have is a 30 x 30 area on a concrete floor in the corner of our barn.
I'm open to doing anything on them. Was thinking it would be a good place for a group of diffusers opposite the hard concrete floor. On the floor we will put oriental rugs.

DanDan wrote:Do you have enough height to do a very affordable regular suspended ceiling, as you see in offices and indeed studios.

I dont think so. We can't drop the ceiling much from 8 feet. I am thinking the absorbing materials will need to be on the side walls.

DanDan wrote:Did you understand what I mean by absorbent 'caves' for semi isolating drum and mix areas?
DD

I do understand what you are talking about and might consider building some gobos to make those.

I mean the ceiling will be 8 feet high

I think Dan's point was: why only 8 feet, if you have more space up there? The photo shows a lot more than 8 feet. Why not make the most of that, and have higher ceilings, to get all the acoustic benefits of that? Mic'ing drums with a low ceiling does not get fantasitc results, due to the reflections from the ceiling into the overhead mics, and the resulting comb filtering.

In other words, make the most of your available space: if you have enuogh space up there for 12 foot ceilings, then to 12 foot ceilings! Don't short-circuit your studio by place immutable limits on what you can achieve in the future. Doing a high ceiling now is dead easy: trying to raise it in the future when you decide you don't like the "boxy" or "stuffy" sound that you are getting, is going to be a lot more expensive.

Was thinking it would be a good place for a group of diffusers opposite the hard concrete floor.

Are you taking about the live room, or the control room? Those are two very different acoustic environments. For the control room, the goal is to get the sound to be neutral, balanced, with reasonably flat frequency response and reasonably decay times across the entire spectrum, at the mix position. Ideally, you should be aiming to meet the specifications in chapters 7 and 8 of ITU BS.1116-3 ( https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/re ... !PDF-E.pdf ). Download it, and read those two chapters. The goal of your control room should be to get get the acoustic response close to those specs. Gluing diffusers to the ceiling is not going to do that...

On the floor we will put oriental rugs.

That's fine, if you want this type of absorption for your room: That's the actual acoustic absorption curve for typical carpet, as measured in one of the most reputable acoustic laboratories in the world. It shows what you can expect if you put a lot of carpets or rugs on the floor.

To put that in perspective, this is the absorption curve you actually need for a typical studio: Compare those two, and you'll see that carpet does the exact opposite of what you need: In other words, it will make things worse in the room, not better. You can use carpet if you want, but only after you have designed the rest of the treatment first, and compensated for the wrong carpet absorption curve in that other treatment.

I am thinking the absorbing materials will need to be on the side walls.

Not true. For a typical studio where the floor is hard (as it should be!), then the ceiling needs to be "soft", implying thick absorption. If not, then you will end up with serious flutter echo problems in the vertical plane, as well as comb-filtering issues with mics placed up high, such as the overheads on drums, violins, flutes, vocal mics, etc., in addition to the undamped modal problems in the vertical axis. Depending on the desired overall response of the room, you might need to have that absorption in just some areas of the ceiling, in patches perhaps, not necessarily across the entire ceiling, but at the very least some of it is going to need serious absorption. One method I like for treating live rooms, is to "zone" the room, so one area is more live, reflective, "sizzly", while another end is more diffuse, and yet another area is more dead, subdued, muted. That way, you can set up instruments in different locations in the room to get different effects. Another method is to build variable acoustic devices, so you can change the acoustic response of the room by sliding some panels open or closed, flipping them over, rotating them, or whatever, to expose different surfaces to the room, and thus change the response.

The method for treating the control room is mostly fixed and well-known, with not much room for variation, since the goal is always the same (see BS.1116-3). But here are many ways of approaching the treatment of a live room! However, pretty much all of those start by dealing with the modal issues and flutter echo, and that pretty much always means thick absorption on at least some parts of the ceiling, perhaps with diffusers or reflectors hanging below that.


- Stuart -

Alright.

I drew up some stuff for review. Right now just the live room. I fooled around in amroc until I was able to find an attractive bonello curve (see image). I raised the ceiling to 10ft because people here suggested it and also helped with the bonello curve. I am unable to get into the Bolt area, but it was useful in finding the best area.

Amroc suggested 895 sqft of absorb @ .38 (see image)

From there I went into photoshop and drew up the picture posted below.

I am also posting a spreadsheet I used to get my square footage close, but I am not sure how to quantify each surface's absorption coefficient. When amroc suggests 895 sq ft @ .38, is .38 for a certain frequency or is it for the accumulative, average, absorption of any given material?

Be aware there are Polys and absorption running down the ceiling.

This seems like it would be a good rehersal space for the band as we mostly run through the mixing board at all times, I went with a bit of LEDE.

Thoughts please!