John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello.

Welcome to AudioMedios thread. My name is Eduardo Serrano I have 34 years old, I’m a musician, engineer, and recently I graduated on Mass Comunication Studies and started teaching sound for video in a university in my hometown.

I’ve been producing local bands in rock, rap, metal, caribean and making music for short documentary video films for the last five years. I’ve been teaching too some seminars about music production and sound technology here in Cali in Colombia. My goal has been to expand the knowledge about sound and audio technologies since we don’t have audio schools here and the production quality has so much to improuve. That’s why I decided to rent a local and build a new and bigger studio with space enough to continue the teaching for kids and beginner musicians that can not have the chance or the money to learn audio in other country or in Bogotá the capital city.

The musical scene here in Cali is very rich and is not only salsa music (for wich this city is known) here you can find many different genders and I myself have a blues band and we play all the blues clasics and modern electric blues too.

THE PROJECT.

The idea is to build a live room that will be used for recording and for band rehearsals. The control room will be equiped with Protools LE system and Alesis M1 Active monitoring speakers among other stuff.

First we will close some windows and open new doors to re-distribute the spaces. After that, my first goal is to build the floting floor for the live room. We want to avoid sound leakage from and to the local below us. I don’t know if this floor will be extrictly necessary but my problem is that a big and busy avenue passes in front of the local and loud car noise has to be avoided because you can feel flanking noise passing through the walls. I think a Room in a Room can give the best results. My plan is to go one step at a time in the sound proofing until we are satisfied, of course budget is an issue so rigth decisicions have to be taken from the very beginning.

Pic 1 is a plan of the actual space and pic 2 shows the modifications described here:

A: Window to exterior will be closed with bricks. (A wall.)
B: Door throug class room will be closed with double layer of gypsum board. (B wall )
C: Window beetwen live and control rooms will be made (C wall)
D: Door between control and classroom will be closed with bricks
E: A new door will be made in order to be able to access the classroom.
F: A brick wall will be builded to close access from car repair in the fist floor.
G: A wall will be made for the storage room.

Here is the drawing of the design I have for the live and control rooms. Because I'm renting the place I want the slats and bass traps to be portable or easy to unmount without destroying everything. I'll use the John's designs for corner and wall slat resonators and broadband absorbers.

Ed.

And here some pix of the live room as it is right now, no work has been done yet. This is to give you an ide of the place. You'll notice that I have to do something with the ceiling because it is very irregular.

Ed.

Eduardo,

It seems that you on the second floor (or above)? Do you know that the existing floor can support the extra weight of your room-in-a-room? The inner leaf system will be incredibly heavy, adding up to a number of tons. This is the first thing to find out.

Say a normal floor is meant to hold perhaps 50 pounds per square foot maximum. Maybe your room within a room structure will be as much as 100 pounds per square foot or even more in some places. Multiple layers of gypsum gets very heavy.

Dan

Thanks Dan, saved me the trouble... Steve