John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hello.

This is my first post on this forum, and I would like to thank everyone in advance for checking this out. I am an active member on gearslutz, and will soon be delving into my self-education of acoustics and studio design, so I am looking forward to becoming a part of this community.

I am renting the following space and would greatly appreciate some advice for room treatment based on my specific needs.

The space is a +1,200 square foot concrete room (35'x37' w/ 10' ceilings, with piping/beams hanging down), that we plan on using for rehearsal and live band recording. There is a large pole in the middle of the room, and one large beam hanging down about 3 feet from the ceiling. Other than that, it's basically a rectangle. Detailed pictures/room plans below:

I do 8 track live all-analog recordings with some really top notch recording gear, and have been looking for a space as a semi-permanent home. I am not ready to build out a "professional" studio; it's going to be a very DIY project. I need some basic advice on what I can do to this room to get it suitable for rehearsal and live recording.

Currently, the room reverberates tremendously when we are just speaking inside the room. The main goal is to get this reverb tamed so a loud rock band can play in there, and we can track it live to tape (overdub vocals). The reverb already sounds phenomenal, but it's out of control. Most of the music we will be recording will be loud rock bands, noise rock, metal, grunge, alternative, etc.

We do not need to worry about neighbors or sound entering/escaping the room. It's far off the street, in the bad of a commercial complex and have been given permission to make as much noise as we want. Therefore, we are mainly looking to treat the current room, rather than build soundproofing to prevent outside noise from getting in and inside noise from getting out.

We would like to spend $3000 - $5,000 on materials over the next 6 months; we will do all construction ourselves; We are planning a one-room studio, rather than separating a control room.

Here are some pictures of the space: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 276&type=3

Thanks again.
Mike
http://www.grandfathermusic.com

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 276&type=3

Here are some more detailed images of the space and all the measurements. any advice would be great. we are going to stick to a one-room studio mainly for recording bands live, some overdubs and mixing.

Thanks!

"mikoo69",

Well, you succeeded to broke almost all rules from this post

and not a small number of additional rules from this one.

As a matter of fact I'm breaking them right now just by assisting you, but I'm also curious to hear some expert thoughts about this particular problem.

Sorry, I jumped the gun and posted before reading those rules. I apologize, I should have known better, though we are on such a small timeframe (need to buy materials friday, build saturday and start rehearsing there sunday), that I freaked out a bit and didn't do my research on this forum.

I edited my above post slightly (and added location) to conform to the rules better, though not sure how to post the pictures directly to the board. I created a Facebook page with very detailed SketchUp images and real pictures, so hopefully that is suitable for members.

Thank you very much.

Hi Mike. As Shomium said, you seem to have missed several of the forum rules! Please check them again.

One of the reasons you aren't getting any responses is because nobody here can really reply to your post, since you didn't provide anywhere near enough information on the room itself, on what your goals are, on what type of music you play/record, or on may other things. If you correct that (and also stick to the other forum rules), and provide as much detail as possible, then we might be able to help.

Unlike some other internet forums about studios, we don't offer advice based on acoustic myths and half-truths, nor incomplete information and guesses. Instead, the advice you'll get here is based on the science of acoustics, and proven, tested methods, materials and techniques. There's links to mountains of solid research, done by reputable organizations around the world, and some of the top studio designers on the planet post here, as do some of the leading manufacturers of acoustic products, who are very careful not to promote their products here, and only offer advice. But to do that, we need enough basic information to work with! Acoustically, your post is similar to saying "I need to buy a piece of something. Please tell me how to do that. What should I do first?".

So, based on the very little bit of information you did give:

That's actually good, and that's also why your room sounds bad. That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? Actually, it isn't. Concrete walls, floor and ceiling mean that you should have good isolation, or at least the basis for achieving good isolation (But you didn't mention your isolation goals, so its impossible to say if you ave enough isolation, or what you need to do to get more.) So that's why I said it is good.

Now for the bad: The very fact of having a well-isolated room also means that it will sound bad. Since the walls are stopping the sound from getting out, it must all be staying in. It is bouncing around, reverberating, echoing and exciting the natural modes of the room. That's why it sounds bad. About the modal behavior: that is something that you do have to consider, but since you didn't give us the room dimensions, there's no way we can figure out what that behavior might be, or what to do about it.

That's certainly do-able, but not without understanding the room and the band. When you say "loud rock band", do you mean the typical "1 x drums/ 1 x bass/ 1 x guitar/ 1 x vocal" thing? Or are we also talking multiple guitars, a percussion section, multiple keyboards, a brass section, a string section, and a 20-voice choir for backing vocals? Big difference! Are the drums acoustic or electric? Are the guitars acoustic or electric? Any Hammond in there, perhaps? A baby grand, maybe? That's the kind of information that helps to decide on what you need to do. You know what you have, but we can't know unless you tell us!

Also: is this a commercial facility, or just hobby? If it is commercial, you will be subject to a different set of laws and regulations than for a non-commercial facility. Such as wheelchair access, fire regulations, etc.

Not very useful info! Are we talking an RT-60 of 2 seconds? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? 20 seconds? Bass dominant? Treble dominant? Flutter echo as well? You need to at least give us a ball-park of how bad it is! The best would be to run an analysis on the space with REW or Fuzz Measure or ETC, so we can see the objective graphs of what is wrong with it, but at the minimum we need subjective description of what is going on in there.

Well, in acoustics the best way to end up with a small budget, is to start with a really BIG budget: The small budget is what you'll have left over when you are done! OK, that was too easy and not very helpful: The point is, it's hard to do good acoustics cheaply. You can have great acoustics in your room, that really looks cool, and is very cheap. Pick any ONE of the above. Great acoustics is never cheap. Cheap acoustics is never great. And making either cheap or great look good can add even more. That's why, on this forum, you wont find the typical silly recommendations for egg crates on the walls and carpet on the ceiling. That's just a pointless waste of money, with no acoustic benefit at all. Carpet and egg crates will most likely make your room sound worse. If you are lucky, they will do nothing and leave it sounding the same. But you can rest assured, they will never improve the acoustics. They cannot, since the laws of physics do not agree. Yet many ignorant people and web sites carry on promoting those "concepts", unfortunately...

On a budget of 5k, about all you can do is treat what you have, as-is. There's no way you can build a control room, live room and iso booth for US$ per square foot! To get an idea of what it really costs, call some local building contractors in your area and ask for the rough estimate, per square foot, of building an upscale bedroom or home theater in an unfinished garage or basement. That's what you should b budgeting. Not sure how prices go in your area (since you never provided that information), but I'm guessing that construction costs are just a bit more than US$ 4 per square foot. So your budget is maybe enough for some treatment on the existing walls and ceiling, and that's about all. Leave the floor as it is: concrete is a great surface, acoustically. You could stain it artistically maybe. or if it is in bad shape, then just lay simple laminate flooring on it. But properly laying 1200 square feet of laminate flooring is going to pretty much blow your entire budget anyway, so it looks like you are stuck with bare concrete.

That would probably be about the worst possible thing you could do. Carpet is acoustically selective absorption: it absorbs highs quite well, mid somewhat, and lows not at all. In other words, it does the exact opposite of what you need! Putting carpet in there is going to make that full reverberant sound go "honky" and "boomy": At best, it will take the edge off the highs, which aren't even important, and maybe smooth some of the specular reflections off the floor, which is actually bad, psycho-acoustically speaking. And it will do zero for the modal issues.

In a room like that you will need a fair amount of bass trapping, plus dealing with reflections, flutter, and other issues. The cheapest way of doing that is with large quantities of ordinary fiberglass or mineral wool insulation. They type used for insulating homes. It needs to have a density of roughly 30 kg/m3 for fiberglass, or 50 kg/m3 for mineral wool, in order to have optimum acoustic properties. The best stuff is Owens Corning 703, commonly referred to simply as "703" which is semi-rigid 4' x 8' panels that are easy to work with. Get a whole bunch of 4" panels. You'll be using those in different ways, for treating different acoustic issues, but a couple of dozen of those will get you the basis for your treatment. You can wrap some of them in fabric, as they aren't very pretty, or build simple wooden frames in other cases, and once again stretch fabric across the frames, to hide the "ugly". You will also need some wood, not just for framing but for other types of acoustic treatment that will be needed, in order to not kill the acoustics of the room from too much absorption. Etc.

First would be to measure the dimensions of the room accurately, and do a basic model in SketchUp, showing the position of the doors, pillars, electrical panel, HVAC supply and return, and anything else that can't be moved. Next step would be to measure the room acoustically, preferably with REW, and post the results here. Third step would be to describe in much more detail your goals: what you are trying to accomplish. Fourth would be to seriously re-think your budget.

You have a good space, it seems, and you certainly could fit in a nice control room, live room and iso booth, as well as the other spaces that go along with a studio, but not on your current budget. Not even close. I strongly urge you to call some local contractors, to get a better idea of what it REALLY costs to do this kind of building. In fact, get a coupe to come and look at your space, and ask them to quote for setting it up as an modern office, with a board room, reception area, and three individual private offices, all fully walled with doors, including HVAC and electrical. That's more or less what this will really cost.

- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Sorry, but that's totally unrealistic. Even if I worked on it full time from now through Friday, that's not enough to even get a handle on the basics, let alone come up with a design for a 4-room studio! It normally takes months to design a studio, and months more to build it. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was a studio built in 4 days.

About all I could suggest is a generic approach: Rent a small truck, go to Home Depot, and buy about 50 panels of 4" thick, 4 foot by 8 foot, OC-703. Stack four flat on top of each other in each corner of the room, stand up one vertically on top of them, diagonally across the corner, and another one in front of it. Spread another 12 panels around the room, 3 on each wall, standing vertically against the walls, in a "checkerboard" pattern, where each panel faces empty wall on the other side of the room, and each section of empty wall faces a panel on the other side of the room. The rest you need to hang from the ceiling somehow: Maybe just stretch string or chicken mesh across, attached to the walls and beams, and stack a couple of panels thick on top of that.

That won't get you an acoustically acceptable room, but it should help quite a bit. It will at least take the edge off the reverb, get some of the modes under control, deal with your flutter echo, and stop some of the reflections.

Sorry, but there's no way that you can get a design to do any better than that in just a couple of days. The room is basically square, which is a terrible shape, but you don't have the time to do anything about that.

That's about all I can suggest.


- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

thank you very much for the responses.

to answer a few more questions:

most bands we are working with in the near future will be 2 electric guitars, electric bass, acoustic drums + vocals - wed like to track instruments live and overdub vocals for the most part...few instrumental overdubs as possible.

we're going to stick with a one-room studio idea rather than building out separate control/iso booths for now. I am attaching a SketchUp file of the space. there is one door on the front wall and one of those long rectangle AC/Heating units on the front wall to the left of the door, by the ceiling. there is no HVAC/built in ac/heating...its just that portable/window type AC/heater.

I think it makes sense to buy a bunch of 703 and just stack it until we can come up with a more permanent design plan. Will 50 panels be enough? I found a place right near me that sells 10 panels of 703 for $75 but thats the 2'x4' 2" thick panels. Thats 80sqft of 703/$75 .

Get 78, and you can do the ceiling better, like this:



Here's the SKP:


Note that there are TWO layers around the edge of the ceiling, and only one layer further in, towards the center.

Get a few more panels, and you can also treat the side faces of the ceiling support beams. That should be enough. In fact, there's probably too much absorption in there for the high end: the room will likely sound a little too dead, but there's no time to do anything about that.

One other thing you could do, is to get a couple of sheets of thick plywood or OSB (5/8"), lay a couple more panels of 703 on the floor, lay the plywood on top, and use that as a make-shift drum riser, to set your drums on. Not really necessary, but you could if you want.

Do all of the above, and see how it goes, then let us know.

It would be GREAT if you could do a full acoustic test of the room with REW both before and after this load of treatment! That would reveal a lot about the room and what more needs to be done: You can download REW for free from Home Theater Shack, and run it from a laptop with a decent external audio interface (not the built-in one), a good mic (SM-57, maybe) and your best speaker. The results won't be accurate or calibrated when done like that, of course (not using a full range speaker and proper measurement mic), but I'm more interested in seeing the change in response, rather than getting valid and accurate response data. Just make sure that you get the mic and speaker in the exact same location for both tests, accurate to within a half inch!!! If not, then the comparison won't be valid either...

That would be really helpful, to have the REW data from the empty room especially, and also the response after treatment.


- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.