Preliminary Studio Design

[sixfour]

We're about to approve and/or tweak some designs before they become official architectural plans, but I wanted to run them by the community first. Easier than posting many "how do I fix this acoustics problem" after it's built!

http://www.kellermusicstudio.com/studio-plans

We're turning an existing garage/shop building into a recording studio and teaching space. This can be seen in the linked pics, but the building now is two-thirds garages and one-third shop space, all open with vaulted/open ceilings. Our plan is to keep one garage bay for a car/shop space and enclose it with a wall and loft above it.

This leaves us with about 19 ft. x 20 ft. (380 sq ft. not including the loft space above the garage) for the music space. The peak of the ceilings will be about 18 ft. and the bottom of the ceilings meet the walls at about 9 ft. It seems like this will be a big enough space to avoid all but the lowest bass frequency issues, right? The loft space (about 1600 cubic ft.) will be storage for cases and seldom used stuff. Any chance an open loft like that will cause acoustic issues? The cubic footage without the loft will be about 4000 cubic ft.

There will be parallel walls, but I'm hoping that having some storage cabinets, bookshelves, kitchenette, etc. around the edges will help with some issues that parallel walls cause.

I'm definitely planning on building acoustic treatments at least in corners and the peak of the ceiling, and at reflection points from my monitors. We'll also have heavy curtains to cover any windows.

And I'm planning on experimenting with desk/monitor placement, but is there an obvious spot for it that I should plan on?

This will be a versatile space, so I'm not counting on a pristine recording environment. I just want to avoid any obvious and annoying issues. And it would be amazing to get a good drum sound in there. I know I need to have specific isolation goals, but for right now I just want to not hear my neighbor's barking dog while I'm in there. I already teach and sometimes rehearse a band in a very un-insulated house right next to where the studio will be, and it's never been a problem with neighbors.

I should also say that I've read the Rod Gervais book and will be taking as many precautions as I can for sound-proofing. Also, the contractor we're using has built studios before and knows the techniques it seems. I'll be discussing this in more detail with him before we finalize the plans and throughout the building process. If there are any not-so-obvious pitfalls to look out for, though, please let me know!

I should also say that we've been in communication with the building inspector and making sure things are up to code.

Any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

[Soundman2020]

Hi there " sixfour", and Welcome to the forum!

That's a nice sized space for a studio. Lucky you! And he best part is the high ceiling. VERY lucky you! Not too many home studio builders have the luxury of 18 feet of headroom to play with... that bodes very well for good acoustics.

It seems like this will be a big enough space to avoid all but the lowest bass frequency issues, right?

Not really, unfortunately. When you realize that you are dealing with waves dozens of feet long, your studio is still small with respect to those. Even at 50 Hz for example, with is nowhere near the lower limit of many instruments, the wavelength is already over 22 feet, so it one wave would not even fit in between the ceiling and floor. A six string bass goes down much lower than that, to about 31 Hz, where the wavelength is nearly 37 feet. So only half of that would fit in from ceiling to floor...

On the other hand, the answer is "yes". You will avoid many of the modal issues that a smaller room would have, but there will still be some, and they will be on the lowest part of the spectrum... which makes them the hardest ones to treat.

The loft space (about 1600 cubic ft.) will be storage for cases and seldom used stuff. Any chance an open loft like that will cause acoustic issues? The cubic footage without the loft will be about 4000 cubic ft.

The acoustic response of the room will change as you put stuff into the loft, and take it out. It has to change, as it affects the room air volume, and changes the reflection patterns, and resonance patterns. The overall effect might be small, or it might be large: hard to say, without knowing how much "stuff" you might have up there... or NOT have up there. You could limit the effect of those changes by building an enclosed room up there around the storage area, with a door on it, so that things remain fairly constant, no matter what you put into the storage area, or take out of it.

There will be parallel walls,

No problem. It's a myth that studio walls must be angled...

but I'm hoping that having some storage cabinets, bookshelves, kitchenette, etc. around the edges will help with some issues that parallel walls cause.

The only major issue that parallel walls cause is flutter echo, and that's easy to deal with, using he type of treatment you will need in there anyway.

I'm definitely planning on building acoustic treatments at least in corners and the peak of the ceiling, and at reflection points from my monitors.

So this is going to be a control room, for mixing and mastering? With that shape and size, I was sort of figuring it would be a tracking room / live room / rehearsal room. If it is a control room, then you need to do some work on the shape and dimensions... for a control room, symmetry is critical, and I don't see any place you can get symmetry with the current layout.

We'll also have heavy curtains to cover any windows.

Forget the curtains: the will make the room sound worse, not better, and won't do anything to isolate the room either. Curtains have the exact opposite acoustic effect of what a room needs.

And I'm planning on experimenting with desk/monitor placement, but is there an obvious spot for it that I should plan on?

There's no need to experiment much: there's fairly well defined "rules" for where you can and cannot have speakers and the mix position in a room. Once you have figured out how to get your room symmetrical, then I can help you work out the theoretical best location for both the mix position and the speakers. From there, its simple to do try out a few minor adjustments to optimize that. But that's not "experimenting": it's more like "refining". There's a procedure that I use for doing that too. Boring, but not complicated.

This will be a versatile space, so I'm not counting on a pristine recording environment. I just want to avoid any obvious and annoying issues. And it would be amazing to get a good drum sound in there.

Drums? In a control room? OK, so this is not just a control room. It's a single-room studio that has to serve as both a control room AND a tracking room. Is that it? If so, then that complicates matters quite a bit! Because the acoustic response needed for a control room is very, very different from that needed for a live room / tracking room / rehearsal room. A control room absolutely must have totally neutral response: it must not add anything to the sound that comes out the speakers, and must but take anything away either: it must be "transparent", as though it wasn't even there, not coloring the sound in the slightest. There are very clear specifications for what the acoustic response of a control room must be, such as chapters 7 and 8 of ITU BS.1116-3 (google it), and there are very, very good reasons behind each and every one of those specs. Basically, if your room meets those specs then your mixes will translate very well to all other places. If you don't meet the specs, then your mixes won't translate. It's that simple. But a live room needs a very different response! If you play drums in space optimized for control room acoustics, the drums will sound like garbage. The kick will be a wet cardboard box, the snare will be an upturned trash can (with the trash still inside it), and the toms will be packing crates beaten with wooden spoons... Totally the wrong environment. Drums need space, air, long decay times, a room with character, warmth, snap, depth, cripsness, but also a little reverb. And if you try to MIX in a room meant for drums, then you might as well try mixing in the subway station... with the trains running through!

These are two totally opposite acoustic needs. There are two solutions: 1) build separate rooms, one for mixing, one for tracking (you do have the space for that....), and 2) build the room to have variable acoustics, with treatment devices that you can flip, swing, rotate, slide, open, close, or change in some physical manner that alters the response of the room. With all the acoustic devices set to one extreme, the room would be ideal for mixing, and with all of the set to the other extreme it would be ideal for drums. And if you set them somewhere in between, you can get any desired acoustic response that you might need, for whatever instrument you choose to play in there.

You might think that there is an option #3 as well: have fixed acoustics sort of half way in between "control room" and "live room", to get the best of both worlds... except that does not work. What you actually get is the WORST of both worlds! You get a room that is lousy for mixing and also lousy for tracking...

So you only have options 1 and 2 to chose from.

I know I need to have specific isolation goals, but for right now I just want to not hear my neighbor's barking dog while I'm in there.

You need to do some measuring with a sound level meter, and also check your local noise regulations, to put real numbers on your isolation needs. Don't guess here! That would be an expensive mistake... Do some actual testing with the meter, and figure out what your isolation needs really are, in terms of a single decibel number. Then check the charts, tables, research papers, equations, and the forum, to find out what materials and construction techniques you need to get that specific level of isolation. This is the normal starting point for designing a studio: first define your isolation, and that already takes care of a whole bunch of decisions that you could waste a long time trying to figure out (and still get them wrong) if you DON'T start out with the isolation number: It's the single most important number that defines a lot of stuff about your build.

I should also say that I've read the Rod Gervais book and will be taking as many precautions as I can for sound-proofing.

I'd suggest that you also read "Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest. That will fill in the gaps in the underlying theory and practice, that Rod doesn't cover in his book. Rod's book is more about the construction itself, without going much into the reasons why he says certain things, or the theory behind it. MHoA gives you all of that, and more.... but does not cover much at all about construction! So the two books go together, complementing each other.

the contractor we're using has built studios before and knows the techniques it seems

Ask for some references, call the studio owners, and go visit. Talk to them about the process and the outcome, and check it out for yourself. If the contractor has done good work, and his customers are happy, then there should be no issues with him giving you the contact details. He should be proud to show off his achievements.. If he does not want to do that, then.. RED FLAGS!

I'll be discussing this in more detail with him before we finalize the plans

Am I understanding that right? The CONTRACTOR is going to help you finalize the plans? RED FLAGS!!!! The contractor should not be designing the studio, nor should he be modifying the plans! You should have a studio designer doing all that! Think of it this way: Would you allow the drummer to do the final mastering for the album? Or allow the vocalist to set up the mics on the drums? Would you let the mix engineer arrange the music score? Or the guitarist decide what bit rate ad bit depth to record at? f course not. Each person deals with his field of expertise, and leaves the rest up to the others. By the same token, the contractor should not be designing the studio, and the studio designer should not be building it. It does not matter how many studios the contractor has BUILT: that has no bearing on the design. Acoustic design is a highly specialized field, and is far more complex than it looks at first glance. A lot of people "think" they can do it, but not many actually can. Just like the drummer might think he can master Adele's's next album, in reality he cannot. Your contractor might THINK he can design your studio, but in reality he cannot. His job is to take the design created by the designer, and turn it into reality. That's all. His job does not involve helping you finalize the plans: his jobs STARTS only once the plans are already COMPLETED. The way this normally works is that you ave a studio designer, and an architect, and a contractor. The designer lays out the acoustic concepts, making sure that the room(s) will actually achieve what htey are supposed to achieve, then he works with the architect to put that into lines on paper. The architect walks those "lines on paper" though the local red tape process, to get them approve, then he sites down with the contractor to show him how to build it. Then the contractor builds it. There might also be other specialists involved, such as a structural engineer, electrical engineer, HVAC engineer, etc. Each one checks the part of the designer's design pertinent to his own specialty, and gives the designer feedback on things that should be changed to meet code, or to be safe, or to be less expensive, or to be simpler to build, or whatever. Then the designer updates the design, along with the architect. Nobody but the studio designer should be making decisions about the isolation, layout, geometry, sight-lines, air flow, traffic flow, operational aspects, or acoustics of the studio. That's all too specialized to leave in the hands of a building contractor.

Excuse the rant, but that phrase got my attention more than anything else you said... Beware....

and throughout the building process.

You will need "all of the above" people involved in the build process. From the studio designer on down.

If there are any not-so-obvious pitfalls to look out for, though, please let me know!

There's many of those, for sure! That's a big part of the studio designer's job: to identify and avoid the pitfalls, well in advance of encountering them...

A couple I see in your very rough, basic plans, are:
1) You seem to have a sink inside the studio???
2) There's no isolation of the stair well!
3) There's a bathroom that opens directly into the studio!
4) There's no way to get symmetry at present!
5) There are several doors into the studio, which makes isolation difficult (and expensive).
6) There's a "desk and storage and Murphy bed" tucked into one wall of the studio!

Those are just a few things I noticed at a quick glance. Some are deal-breakers, some are just inconveniences.

I should also say that we've been in communication with the building inspector and making sure things are up to code.

Smart move! Very smart move. Make friends with the inspector(s) early on, and things should go smoothly....

As I said at the start, you have a pretty nice space there that would work out to be a great studio, if you do it right.

- Stuart -

[sixfour]

Thank you Soundman2020! Very helpful. Especially the part about not really being able to mix and record in the same room. I guess that's obvious, but it had not dawned on me for some reason. I have a room in our house for mixing, so I'll probably keep that as the mixing room and just use the "studio" as a tracking room. If I have to do a bit of mixing while recording, I'll do it on headphones. Not ideal, I know, but we don't want to split up the space to make a separate control room.

I don't think it's in our budget to hire a studio-designer. The contractor has built small studios before and I'm hoping between the two of us we can make it into something workable. I'm coming from having to record in bedrooms, so I just want a space that sounds decent where I can have my recording gear set up all the time and not bother the neighbors. To use your analogy, maybe it's not great to have the drummer master the record, but some drummers might do a decent job with some help. And this drummer has mastered some records before that turned out decently.

One thing I didn't mention before that might be pertinent is that the space currently has no insulation at all. So we get to do all that from the ground up, and we'll do our best to do it properly.

I'm sure I'll be back with specific questions along the way. Very thankful for this forum!