John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I wasn't going to post this in a thread, but then I saw a thread somewhere where a guy had PM'd John, and John had told him to post it in a thread, and so I'm just doing the same thing, ok?

I have a room on the side of the house. It used to be the garage, but a prior owner has turned it into an enclosed room. The house is brick construction, but I couldn't tell you if it was single brick or double brick. (How do I tell the difference?) Where the cars used to drive in, there's now a window. The other end (which looks into the back yard) has a 7 foot high sliding glass door.
What I'm thinking about is putting a control room at the street end, a small equipment room in the middle (more like a closet for the computer) and a small vocal/guitar room at the back yard end.
Primary goal is good isolation for recording so that I don't have to stop what I'm doing when a plane passes overhead.
Now, I know that's all very generic, but roughly how much should I be expecting to spend on such a job?
Is $10k gonna do it? Or do I need more like $50k?
I'd just like to get a ballpark figure.
Thanks in advance.

"How much will it cost" is like asking a NASCAR mechanic "how fast will it go?" - Answer: How much do you want to spend.

I know that's probably not much help but that's the way it works. It sounds like your major noise concern is recording guitar and not bothering the neighbors, and not letting being under the landing pattern for the airport causing you so screw up an otherwise good take.

Might I suggest using a DI for your guitar (I'm assuming electric) so that you could record ON the runway and not be bothered? If you're trying to get sound of the amplifier record (and the various emulation boxes won't cut it for you) you could always build a micro-booth to hold your amp and microphone with a SEALED connection in and out to your room. These solutions are all fairly inexpensive.

For what you are describing, you could get a very good room for the lower (i.e., $10K) number assuming that doesn't include a 128 channel SSL mixing board and full ProTools set up.

My strongest recommendation would be to read all of the links in the reference section before you start doing anything. Accoustics doesn't make sense sometimes and if you start off trying to build something "logically" rather that using the experience and knowledge found here, you'll quickly spend all of your budget fixing what's not working.

Hope that gives you some food for thought.

len

Thanks for the reply, Len.
Actually, the use of the recording booth would be:
80% spoken vocal
10% sung vocal
and 10% recording guitars and hand percussion.
...and the guitar stuff would be more miked up acoustic, than electric.
As much as I'd love to have fully soundproofed control room and recording space, I'd settle for just the record space if I had to.
My two biggest issues at the moment are:
Exterior noise (aeroplanes, cars driving past, lawnmowers etc), and
PC noise.
On the PC side of things, I built a box out of pine panelling to house the whole PC tower. The box is rigid and lined with acoustic foam, and at a guess, I'd say it's probably dropped the noise of the PC by 20dB (that's never been properly measured.. just taking a stab at it), but it's still audible. A good condensor (AKG C3000 in this case) will pick that up when it's only 6 feet away!
When you say...

For what you are describing, you could get a very good room for the lower (i.e., $10K) number...

...do you mean both rooms soundproofed, or just the recording space?
And are you assuming that I'm going to do the construction myself, or would that figure get me a professional in to do it?

I was assuming you'd do a lot of the work yourself (we'll help you along the way ), but for the space you have, it's still not unreasonable to think that $10K would do the trick even if you did hire someone to do some of the work.

We really need a little more information about the current space to offer more suggestions. For example,

What are the current INTERIOR walls covered with?

What kind of "brick" are you talking about? Red brick or the bigger cement blocks (also called bricks in some parts of the world)? I would be surprised if it was constructed from red brick (even two layers) because it is not terribly strong. In almost every case I've ever seen, there is a wooden shell that is covered with OSB or plywood and then the brick is added to the outside for decoration. It appears to be brick walls but in fact it is plain old wooden stud framing.

If we can make the assumption that it is stud walls, I might suggest the following:

MOST IMPORTANT: Have a structural engineer or QUALIFIED builder look at how the roof is made and find out if it can support a couple of layers of 5/8" drywall. A garage might not have been built up to the same standard as the house itself.

Get a Dremel or similar rotary saw and a few drywall bits, and carefully remove the drywall between the studs on the inside. Save the pieces! Now take the pieces you've just cut out and push them between the studs right up against the OUTSIDE sheathing. Make sure that you get it up as close as you can (i.e., any nails protruding need to be cut off or bent over flush) so that when you are done with this step, you have no air gap between the outside sheathing and the drywall you've put between the studs.

Calk all the edges of this drywall with ACCOUSTIC calk. In the end what you are after is a more massive outer shell wall. See Sharward's build thread for pictures and narrative about how he did this in his garage. Remember, the whole trick to sound isolation is mass mass mass (I'm using that for emphasis, not suggesting a triple leaf build. ) You will probably want to do this "beefing" up between the underside of the roof sheathing and the studs for the same reason.

How sacred are the window at the front and the sliding glass door at the back? You might be able to do something with the front window but that sliding door is probably a major source of sound leakage right now. If you can, I'd replace that with a single door, or better still, plan on a new wall just inside of the current wall so you could have two doors with a space between them. Maybe you could save the glass from the sliding doors and have it re-cut to use between the recording room and the control room.

Making these changes should go a long way to quieting your space. At this stage you're still left with unfinished interior walls but depending on how good a job the does, you might be able to just put a coupld of layers of drywall back up on the inside and be done with it. If you require even MORE isolation, then we can talk about building a room-within-a-room after that.

I suggest the beef up first though since it's much harder to do after you've spent a lot of time and money finishing the inside.

len

len-morgan wrote:I was assuming you'd do a lot of the work yourself (we'll help you along the way ), but for the space you have, it's still not unreasonable to think that $10K would do the trick even if you did hire someone to do some of the work.

Mmmm. Fair enough.

len-morgan wrote: We really need a little more information about the current space to offer more suggestions.

Before we go any further, I must confess that I should have been clearer about my current space. My current recording space is in another room in the house. It's not the room currently under discussion. The current space is a bedroom, with carpet on the floor, a 2500mmx140mm window (west), a builtin wardrobe and gyprock wall (east), all gyprock (south), and all gyprock (north). Although, the north wall currently has some home made acoustic baffles leaning against it to control reflections between the N/S walls. I monitor facing south. The baffles actually do a reasonable job. If anyone is interested in them, you can find a brief narrative on their construction, and some pics, here.
However, this room is not the issue... well, it is, that's why I'm considering moving.
This current room is only 3500x3500.
The room I'm contemplating moving into is obviously a lot longer.
I've just gone and done a measurement of that room... it's 6000mmx3000mm.

len-morgan wrote: For example,
What are the current INTERIOR walls covered with?

Gyprock sheeting, about 1.5cm thick.

len-morgan wrote: What kind of "brick" are you talking about? Red brick or the bigger cement blocks (also called bricks in some parts of the world)? I would be surprised if it was constructed from red brick (even two layers) because it is not terribly strong. In almost every case I've ever seen, there is a wooden shell that is covered with OSB or plywood and then the brick is added to the outside for decoration. It appears to be brick walls but in fact it is plain old wooden stud framing.

Actually, it is red brick! But you're right, it has a wood frame behind the brick, and Gyprock on the interiors. Not sure if there's anything between the brick and the wood frame yet, as I haven't removed any interior fascia yet.

len-morgan wrote: MOST IMPORTANT: Have a structural engineer or QUALIFIED builder look at how the roof is made and find out if it can support a couple of layers of 5/8" drywall. A garage might not have been built up to the same standard as the house itself.

What exactly is drywall? Is that the same as Gyprock?

len-morgan wrote: How sacred are the window at the front and the sliding glass door at the back?

Absolutley zero attachment to both. Couldn't care less about them.

len-morgan wrote: Maybe you could save the glass from the sliding doors and have it re-cut to use between the recording room and the control room.

Sounds like a good idea.

len-morgan wrote: ...but depending on how good a job the does, you might be able to ...

How good a job what does? The engineer? The drywall?
Thanks for all the advice.
Looks like the first step is to get an engineer in.
I go away next week for Christmas, so I'll have to look into getting someone out to assess the room after the new year.
In the mean time, here's some pics of the room...
Looking east toward the back yard.
Looking south east. Note the irregular wall.
Looking west toward the road.
Looking south west. This leads into the loungeroom.

Audio2U wrote:What exactly is drywall? Is that the same as Gyprock?

Yes. Also known as sheetrock (a trade name), plasterboard, SCPDG (Self Contained Planar Dust Generator), "that damed $&*#$#@$#@##" (but not till you start trying to hang it by yourself).

Outer wall construction:

It probably goes brick, OSB, some sort of foam insulation (probably Styrofoam), studs and drywall.

My first advice still goes. Since it's going to be pretty hard to beef up the outer walls from the outside, beef up between the studs but make sure that we don't get into a triple leaf situation. The insulation in the walls could change all this so we'll have to know the true construction of the current walls before we can go too much further.

len