John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi.

Ive spent the last couple of days reading through the information on this website, and im beginning to get a little confused about what my studio requires. A little background...

For my final year project (Uni) i am converting my garage at home into a project studio. The garage has far from ideal dimensions, 4.9m long, 2.35m wide, and 2.6m high, kinda shown in the pictures below. (sorry if these are not ideal - i dont have a scanner so I used a digital cameral to capture my scetch) I havnt designed the room yet as I will be conducting experiments into isolation materials over the weekend, so i dont know any thicknesses etc. I am thinking of having my console (just a mixer, monitors and computer screen really) in the corner of the room, opposite the door and on the same wall as the window. To make this Ill construct a corner desk tyoe thingy - not too sure yet!


Due to these dimensions not fitting into the ideal ratios (suggested by Sepmeyer, Louden, Bolt etc) i have decided to go for the non-parallel walls option. Is this a recomended??

I am comming round to the idea of having my 'studio' as a single room, as I will mostly be using it to record my compositions. I plan to have a few pc monitors around the room, and a wireless mouse to enable me to record from any position easily. Obviously I intend to construct a sound-proof box to hold noisy equipment/pc. One thing that is confusing me is the acoustic treatment required for my room...

I intend to use this studio to record drums, acoustic guitars, vocals, electric guitars, and bass guitar! Im sure this is a tall order, but is there a way to make the room sound good for all of these purposes, or will I be compromising a lot of sound quality?? I was considering the possibility of having different areas of the room designated to different purposes - i.e. a 'drum end', or a section with desirable acoustics for vocals etc. Is this achievable, or is my room size too much of a limiting factor??

Another thing that is confusing me is the amount and positioning of bass traps and slat resonators required!! Bass traps in the corners seems to be a popular aproach, and I was thinking of having ceiling bass traps too, but can you overdo it?? Also, Im unsure where to place slat resonators (if this is the best tool to use!), and how many I would require??

One more question, is it best to have a dead ceiling or one which is reflective?? I plan to use a floating floor system, maybe finished with laminate flooring, but the finish of the ceiling is still a mystery!!

Thankyou for your time, and for all of the information I have gathered over the last few days of reading!

John Vernon

Welcome to the forum, John!

concentrationface wrote:Ive spent the last couple of days reading through the information on this website . . .

Have you seen the "Before You Post" announcement and the critical "Reference Area" sticky thread linked from it?

You've posted in the "Acoustics" area here, but I'm wondering if this is maybe more of a design question at this stage...

I intend to use this studio to record drums, acoustic guitars, vocals, electric guitars, and bass guitar!

Acoustic drums and bass guitar really push at the edges when it comes to achieving good isolation. How close are your neighbors? What kinds of noise ordinances do you have to comply with? (Don't guess on that one!)

. . . I will be conducting experiments into isolation materials over the weekend. . .

What kinds of experiments? What kinds of materials?

How familiar are you with the mass-air-mass principle?

FYI, that big garage door looks like it's going to be a major problem...

I plan to use a floating floor system, maybe finished with laminate flooring, but the finish of the ceiling is still a mystery!!

I'm concerned about this... Your floating floor system is also still a mystery -- you haven't posted any details of what you plan to do for that. I spent four months in my own "to float or not to float" dilemma... Ultimately, I decided not to float, instead doing an "isolated slab." I'm betting you're not out of the woods yet on that decision. In short, floating floors are really difficult to do correctly. Many people assume they are miraculous and that every studio needs to have one. However, done incorrectly (which is often the case!), the results are worse than if a floor hadn't been floated at all... And even those that are done correctly, often the walls and/or ceiling aren't up to the same standard, so all the effort and money spent on the floor is essentially wasted.

I'm not "anti-floating," but I want to make sure you don't make that decision too casually. There is a lot of science behind elastometers, modulus of elasticity, resonance frequencies, building codes, and other things that can really melt the brain.

Hi sharward, thanks for replying!

As this is a university project I have to complete a planning stage (deadline for the report on the 16th dec!!! oops), and so as part of that I intend to do some experiments to back up the decisions i make in relation to materials used, and construction techniques used! Therefore, this weekend I intend to construct some test walls in my garage and test their insulation properties. To do this I will:

~ Build some different types of internal wall - im going to test conctere blocks (the ones with holes inside them) with variations such as plastering the wall(s), filling the cavity with dry sand, making another wall and altering the distance between the two, using insulation (i got loads of different types to test, like rockwool etc), testing varying air gaps etc etc. Ill also test wooden constructions, altering the same factors as before (air gap size, insulation etc), and i also intend to test a new type (maybe not new, but new to me!!) of construction using a polystyrene wall as a template, then filling a gap with concrete (check out www.becowallform.co.uk for more info on this - thats where I got a sample from).

~Blast white noise at the walls (using a loudspeaker) at a volume similar to the volume of me playing drums (i will test this when I get home using a recently acquired Sound Level meter)

~Record the sound that passes through the wall using a flat response microphone (borrowed one from uni!). To make sure that I only get the sound passing through the wall im going to make a soundproof box (floating box within a box, with non-parallel walls and absorption behind the mic to hopefully avoid resonance effects in the box!) to hold the microphone (one end of it will be open!), and this box will be positioned right up close to the test wall. Hopefully this will mean that diffracted sound will not affect my results!

~ Measure the change in Sound level using my trusty meter. This will be positioned in the box too!

~Do a spectrum analysis of each recording to see which frequencies are stopped and which pass through.

~ I also intend to repeat this test using a bass guitar and amplifier to test the walls responses to lows (a low E on a Bass guitar is as low as I forsee going, but i might drop it a bit to make sure!!)

Sorry to babble - thats roughly my intended experiment!! Obviously the results I get will not be truly accurate, as my walls will be smaller than a real one! I can use them as a comparison between materials though...hopefully!!

The garage door is a concern, but hopefully I will be able to find some materials using my testing that will block it off properly! The neighbours are also a concern - their house is just the other side of that one-brick thick wall (they converted their garage into an office a while ago!), so i will have to get a LOT of isolation to not affect them! Thats the reason for the heavy duty material testing! To find the level of isolation required I intend to measure the sound-proof qualities of the garage wall (using my white noise and bass guitar method!), then work out from that what i need my internal walls to do! Im sure my neighbours will be ok with me going round to their side and assesing the effectiveness of my construction too!

Im not sure about the required levels in my area - ill be sure to check that out soon though!! Good call!!

Thanks for the advice on the floating floor - ill definately heed your warning! I havnt really given much thought to the floor and ceiling as of yet...The floor seems to be a solid concrete block, so the mass problem should be ok (??). Ill look into this when my wall tests are compete!

If you hadnt used a floating system what would you have done/rather have done??

Any advice on my project would be greatfully appreciated - this is my first attempt at any studio build so I am a true newbie!!

Thanks

John

But did you read all the info provided in this forum. There specs for diff walls and estiumated STL, etc....

In short, you can design a live room that will accomodate multiple uses. AND SOUND GOOD.

But keep reading............

It seems you're trying to reinvent a wheel that our wonderful Canadian friends have already managed to make very, very round...

Here's an example:

• Sound Insulation of Load Bearing Shear Resistant Wood and Steel Stud Walls
  by Nightingale, T.R.T.; Halliwell, R.E.; Quirt, J.D.; Birta, J.A.
  Institute for Research in Construction
  IR-832

Happy reading! This is just one of the many gems of reports that are available. Here's an index of some of the Acoustics Research that the IRC has done. Trust us -- you're just barely scratching the surface!

If you hadnt used a floating system what would you have done/rather have done??

Well, again, I didn't use a floating system. I instead chose to remove my entire slab and I'm in the process of installing a replacement slab that is isolated from the rest of the building, with the exception of the fact that they'll share the same earth. My main reason for doing this was actually not to decouple -- rather, it was to ensure that the floor was strong enough for the massively heavy walls, which will be supporting a heavy ceiling overhead. I couldn't take chances that my existing 4" non-structural garage floor slab would crack, break, or sink. Since I need to put in a new slab anyway, why not do it in such a way that doesn't connect it to the rest of the house?

There are floating floor success stories to be sure... But what's not always clear is what the results would have been if they hadn't floated, so in some cases, it's difficult to know if they're really better.

Also, most of the hard data I've seen on the subject of floating floors has been for cases where there is a lot of impact noise (i.e., bowling alleys, dance studios, etc.) and when there are people below the noisy floor that need to be protected from the noise above.

Hope that helps!

--Keith

Up here in michigan when we build auto plants and supplier plants and stuff we call that a floating slab of concrete

You guys still building plants?

(me running: »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»».......)

Always growth even when stuff is shrinking. This is #1 place for a business losing money to build a $70,000,000 Plant. Sickening but they do it.

Cry Broke, build a new building.