John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

INTRO
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I've been a fan of this forum for a long time and have learned a lot from it and I'm hoping I can get some feedback on how to best setup my room and treat it so that I can get decent results while mixing.


STUDIO BUILD INFO W/ LOCATION DETAILS
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I have a 2 story house in north eastern Wisconsin with a small-ish basement and I'm using 1/2 of the basement for the studio. While I had lofty goals of an awesomely designed room with soffit mounted speakers and angled walls... it didn't work out that way. Unfortunately my father in law isn't as keen on spending extra time/money on a design as me and being as I needed his help to construct my entire studio I had to make some concessions on design. I was lucky enough to convince him to listen to me for some of the isolation techniques though, here's how we built it:

Outer walls (except for the back wall which is the one against the utility room) are all 2x4 16" OC standard framing spaced a few inches away from the cement foundation, R-19 fiberglass insulation w/ 2 layers of 5/8" drywall with green glue in between. There is a small portion of the wall that is exposed to the rest of the basement (not against a cement foundation wall) and we used a 2x4 double stud wall there with a double door airlock (see annotations on the attached images)

Inner wall between control room and vocal booth: 2x6" sill plate with staggered stud 2x4 walls, 2 layers 5/8" drywall with green glue in between. This wall also has a 48x32 dual paned window with 1/2" and 3/8" laminated glass angled away from each other at the top. It also has a double door airlock. All the doors I used are injected with a sound deadening foam that supposedly has a better STC rating than "solid" (particle board filled) wooden doors. I couldn't afford flush solid oak doors.

The back wall is just a standard 2x4 wall with 2 layers of 5/8" drywall with GG for the control room side, and the other side is a single layer of 5/8 but the single layer side is the furnace/storage room so it's a freestanding wall that we built and I'm not worried about sound getting in there too much and it'll be full of crap anyway which should help dampen any sound that does get in there.

The ceiling is suspended via whisper clips and hat channel and is again 2 layers of 5/8" drywall with GG, all the joints were sealed there too. R-24 (I think) fiberglass insulation was stuffed in the ceiling.

Floor: I have a nice flat concrete floor and I'm putting 8mm laminate in both rooms with pre-attached pad which raises it up a bit higher than 8mm obviously. I'll put a vapor barrier (super thin plastic crap) down first.

Misc: I sealed all of the sill plates and all of the staggered drywall joints with GG acoustic sealant (the white stuff that comes in large caulk like tubes) I used 2 GG 5-gallon pails for the walls and ceiling FYI. Also, I covered the backs of all of my outlets and switches with putty packs.

I feel like I did all the "proper" isolation that I could, and while I'm sad that I couldn't design a more acoustically pleasant space... for the room size we were working with in the basement, I'm happy with the overall end result (having not listened to any music in it yet that is )


ADDITIONAL BUDGET TO BUILD/BUY SUPPLEMENTAL THINGS TO HELP THE ROOM
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$1000 (ish) could do more if it would really help


QUESTIONS BELOW
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What I need help with is how to position my desk in the room and where to put absorbers, etc. Should I buy an auralex kit? I sent my Sketchup off for analysis so we'll see what they recommend at least. Do I need to put in an angled slat resonating wall to save my space? Any ideas for how to best outfit the room with the dimensions I have would be very much appreciated.

Since the desk is sitting on laminate I bought some felt slider pads which will allow me to move the desk anywhere along the wall with the window. I was thinking of moving it to the center of the room when it's just me mixing in there since it won't matter if I block the vocal booth door. I figure when I'm tracking the room acoustics don't matter as much and I need pathways accessible and will have other people in the room with me listening so my square-ish rooms are fine. But I know I'll have problem mixes with this design. That is where I'm hoping you guys can help me! I'd be willing to get speaker stands and build some custom panels that would sort of allow me to temporarily soffit mount the speakers in the corners of the rooms. But... the question is, would that actually do any good?


SKETCHUP FILE
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My SketchUp file was way too big to post here (6MB) so I'm including a link to the file that won't hang around indefinitely (sorry I'm probably breaking a rule there), but that's why I'm also including some screenshots of the sketchup here directly too. One of them is even annotated with a bunch of extra crap!

http://cl.ly/c040200db1c7abbfd08e


YOU GUYS ROCK
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Again, thanks for any ideas you can provide to help me get the most out of my little project studio rooms!

Hi,
A couple of quick thoughts.

1. you have built a very square room.
2. the desk and monitors are not centered.


I hate to be the bearer of bad news, so I am going to suggest you do some research on these issues.

My suggestion on how to resolve this is going to annoy you as well.

I would suggest removing the vocal booth all together. This would at least give you a shot at a usable space.

It would still be very small, but at least it wouldn't be square.

Sorry,
Steve

I saw this and wanted to reply but all I had was the same negative input as well Steve.

Thanks for being fair and knowledgeable and kind to someone who came here at the wrong phase of their construction...JohnLSayers.com should be the first stop, not the middle or last

_________________
Brien Holcombe
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Sound: You can't stop it, you can only try to contain it.

I hadn't replied for the same reason: It's never fun to let someone know that what they have already done to the room wasn't a good idea, acoustically.

J2fly, you are probably not liking what you are reading here, but unfortunately it is the sad, hard truth. A control room must have symmetry, and it must have reasonably dimensions. I know you realize this, since you came up with the "sliding desk" plan, to get room symmetry, but I really don't see that as being a viable solution, and even then it doesn't solve the dimensions issue.

Is there any chance at all that you could so as the others suggested, and forget the booth? That would give you a decent shot at a good room.

- Stuart -

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

Well... I figured as much. Unfortunately I can't really demo the room at all at this point (I have a client coming in 10 days to start tracking an album and I don't even have my floor in yet!). I've already put $5-6k into materials for the studio and my wife and father in law would kill me if I wanted to rip down anything. We've literally been building it for 4-5 months on weekends in his "free time". I needed a control room and a booth (for the kind of work I have lined up - a cappella vocal bands and acoustic singer/songwriter type acts) and this was all we could come up with... idk, I knew it wasn't going to win me any grammy's, but I didn't think it would be THAT poorly received!

One of the other concerns was resale value, we didn't want too crazy of a room shape, etc since it might detract buyers. With this room it can easily be used as an office when we re-sell. I plan to build a new house in 6-8 years when we have too many kiddies to fit into this smaller 3 bedroom home and I'm planning on building my studio to end all studios in the new house it might even be in a detached building off to the side of the house, or I might just carve out a good portion of the basement, we'll see. I know the former would afford a lot more options.

I do have some nice Ultrasone 650 Pro headphones I can use for reference while mixing, so my main concern was space for clientele while tracking (there are usually 2-3 people in the control room with me) and sound isolation from the rest of the house since I'll have to do most of my mixing between 9pm and 2am. Hopefully I will have at least achieved that. And hell... I mixed my last album in a spare bedroom in our old apartment that was quite a bit smaller than this room and it turned out alright (checking most stuff and doing final mixdown on my headphones) so I figure I can just keep to that path. Sucks that I won't be able to get super accurate mixes, but such is life.

What do you guys think about building those acoustic panels I was talking about to fake soffit mount the speakers and change the room dimensions to be a 8-pannel design? Is that just a waste of time? It seems like it would work to me, but obviously I'm not an expert

Thanks!
-Jon

Seems like, for balance, you could turn the desk 90 degrees to the left, have your corner absorbers installed and work back from there. Obviously it isn't ideal but might be better to work with then having one speaker shoved in a corner which is never good, and the other out in the open, and that will tend to have you over compensating levels on the right and pulling low frequency out of the left, as it is.

_________________
Brien Holcombe
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Sound: You can't stop it, you can only try to contain it.

That makes a lot of sense. Sounds like a good idea to me.

By the way, Jon, what is the "thingy" circled in red here:?



Is that some kind of pillar, duct, shaft, closet, chimney or something? Any chance that you can get rid of it, and get that corner back to normal, so that at least that left side of the room is symmetrical? That would improve things greatly.


- Stuart -

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

I was told it's a clean-out pipe and it goes into the foundation of the house so I'm assuming it would be pretty difficult to move. I do have it called out in my annotated screenshot above too along with some additional details like where the earth is along with the outer foundation walls, etc.

I still haven't heard anyone comment specifically about changing the shape of the room by building some movable walls that I can position to change the dimensions of the room. My idea was the red lines in the annotated screenshot above. I could build the room to have eight sides so that I could use that shape for mixing and then take the walls down when I need to track. I thought this would be a good idea because the room is already isolated on the square walls/edges so I don't need to fix these temporary walls to the current structure (I'm thinking actually more like thick acoustic panels) which gives me the flexibility to change the room shape/configuration for my various needs. I'd be very interested in whether or not this is conceivable.

Thanks!
-Jon

There's two problems with that approach: Unless you can seal those "movable" walls hermetically to the existing walls, then they aren't really walls, an won't really help. Sound travels through air. If the "air" on one side of a wall is somehow joined to the air on the other side, through even a tiny gap, then you have a problem: You have two coupled acoustic cavities. All you will accomplish with "movable walls" is to create several acoustic areas in your room, pretty much like you could do with gobos.

The other problem is that any walls you add to that room will make it even smaller than it is already. And it is already pretty small.

Personally, I'd go with Brien's idea: Rotate the layout 90° left, add stacks of bass trapping, and make the best you can of that. There really isn't much more you can do, as far as I can see. Maybe someone else has a better idea, but I can't see anything else you can do, without taking out the dividing partition to the booth.


- Stuart -

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

Alright, thanks for the suggestion Stuart. Would the bass traps go in each corner of the control room then? Or just behind the monitors?

Also with regard to the "booth"... is that room shape super terrible too? Should I bass trap that room as well? I'm not planning on recording acoustic drums in there ever, but pretty much everything else.

Thanks,
-Jon

What you put behind monitors (on the front wall) isn't really bass trapping: It is absorption to help kill reflections coming off the front wall, and therefore to kill comb filtering artifacts due to that.

As for general treatment, that is small room: The general rule for small rooms is that they need a LOT of bass trapping. And bass trapping is most effective in corners, so that's where you want it. A rectangular room has 12 corners, so try to fill as many of them as you can, realistically, with large, thick, deep, and wide, bass traps. Superchunks are a good solution.

The booth is a different story: Symmetry os great for a controll room, but asymmetry is better for a live room. I'd risk angling one of the walls a bit, even though the room is small. Perhaps even angled broadband build slot walls across two of those walls, and absorption on the other two. I think I'd go for a deadish sound for that booth, but not totally dead. You might even want to consider adjustable acoustic treatment, such as things that open and close on hinges to either reveal or hide lots of absorption or lots of reflective surfaces, to modify the room acoustics.

My 0.02...


- Stuart -

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

Thanks for the additional feedback Stuart. I may end up trying to create an angled wall in the vocal booth after a while (behind the door probably angling to the back wall as you enter the booth such that the door couldn't open flush to the wall anymore (which I don't think would be a problem). I'm about out of money for the time being though. The good news is that I expect to have quite a few paying gigs with my new room!

Out of curiosity, what do you guys (Stuart, et al) think of Auralex stuff? I don't really have the time to build my own treatments since I need to start tracking on Friday the 24th (5 days from now) and still need to poly the window frame/doors, put on another coat of paint on the ceiling/walls, install the glass in the window, install the floor, and install the lighting/switches.

I've attached the treatment recommendations from them and am just curious if you guys think it'll be worth the cash. I'm figuring around $800-$1k is what their suggestions will run me which is doable.

Thanks!
-Jon

people have done worse than using Auralex (no disrespect intended). that said, you have some severe time pressures and a paying client on the hook. worst case, you'll have to live with the acoustics and do your best to make sure the recordings are what your client expects and the mixes translate well. this may require getting used to the room and some patience. save your money from your gigs and plan ahead for your next studio. remember to post photos and keep in touch.

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Glenn

As you can imagine I've been quite busy getting things ready for my first session. Things went OK... I had some issues with my Mac Pro not playing well with Pro Tools (DAW flame-war commence!) and the foam didn't come until 1.5 hours before my client showed up so I only had time to foam up the booth room. All I wanted to do this weekend was make sure I had everything setup/working and lay down a few scratch tracks to get the guys used to multi-tracking. They're a 7-member all male college a cappella group (vocal band genre) and are very used to singing all together so it's interesting when they're all alone sometimes to see how they tune with parts missing, etc.

They do their arrangements in Finale so typically I have them export the midi file which I import into PT and playback with the grand piano instrument track and with the addition of a click, that sets the foundation. Then we lay down a scratch solo track so people have reference during tracking and we also lay down a scratch vocal percussion track so we can kill the click for certain people if it's bugging them... I try to leave the click in though since I don't really feel like quantizing a scratch VP track. Anyway, we got all that done and I felt pretty good about the day! They loved the space and I was proud to show it off

I'll post some pics once I get the rest of the foam installed.

The one thing that I'm unhappy about is that my vocal booth seems to have a very high pitched resonant frequency (I'm sure it's because it's a rectangle). I haven't noticed it yet during "normal" tracking, but I can consistently do it when trying (sans mic) by pitching an "aah" or "hey" pretty loudly in the room (a very loud clap will also make the room ring) with the door closed. If I do it with the door open the ring is WAAAAY louder. Would more foam cut that down? Or am I just screwed because of the room's geometry?

Thanks everyone!

OK, so I was going to shut down the studio for the night (man...I have to work in like 3 hours... damn, anyway) so I reached down to turn off my Groove Tubes GT60 Tube mic and when I placed my hand on the metal casing it slipped a tiny bit off the edge (almost like flicking it) and the case rung at about the same frequency I was noticing... no effing way I thought... so I put my finger on the top of the metal enclosure to deaden it and tried to make the room ring... IT DIDN'T. I started laughing immediately. So needless to say, now with the foam treatment in my vocal booth I'm quite happy with the results! I know I said I wouldn't post pics until after I got the control room foam up but I couldn't help myself. Here are a couple of panorama attempts.

Thanks everyone!

-Jon

PS regarding the photos. My Mac Pro that I use to run Pro Tools M-Powered 8 is actually in a server closet under my stairs and I ran wires (4 cat 5e for video with the monoprice DVI extenders, 2 daisy chained FW repeaters for my audio interface - again monoprice variety, and a USB extender for keyboard/mouse) through the walls/ceiling so I wouldn't have the mac pro pumping hot air into the control room. The 2 laptops you see in the photos are just for general use. The one on the end table is for clients to browse the web or look at lyrics, etc. and the other is my work laptop that I use for Ruby on Rails development. Just in case people are wondering about the computers