John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hello Everyone.

First: Great place, great info and so many people that are willing to share their knowledge and experience – outstanding place in the web!

I’ve been reading and thinking and reading and planning and re-reading and re-planning again for a year now and came up with a plan that i would like to present to you and hopefully get any help with the design and construction.

What do you want to build?
For me the next step to improve my studio would be to build a designated control room for mixing that is (more or less) seperated from the rest of the place. That i want to achieve by deviding my room into two rooms by a separating wall. Having the best possible acoustics for mixing is the main focus, not isolation. Further down you find a sketch where the walls i want to build are marked red.

Whats your budget?
I do not have any budget. I will pay for the materials as i advance with the build. Everything will be diy. I’ll pause if i’m broke until i can buy what i need next.

What do you record / How loud are you?
I do record all kinds of instruments and kinds of musical styles. Volume ranges from fingerpicked acoustic guitar to loud rock-drumset.

How much isolation do you need / How noisy are your neighbours?
The place is very quiet. No streetnoise or noise from outside-neighbours. I’m using the space for 3 years now, there havent been any complaints yet. Improved isolation to my friends controlroom (see plan below „Studio B“) is an issue though. In the past
we came along pretty well by matching our studio-schedules for critical listening and recording sensible stuff.

Where exactly is your room located?
We have a studiospace located in the basement of an old industrial building. That is me, a friend (who rented the whole thing) and a video-cutter. The place is halfway under ground with the windows being on street level.
The following plan shows the location with my room (the one i could do changes to) being on the lower half of the place (the coloured area).


Whats the dimensions of your place?
Here you can see the dimensions of my room in cm (if not indicated otherwise).
The red rectangles are the walls i want to build, they do not exist at present.


Whats your walls / ceiling / floor made of?
The walls to the outside are made of brick (and plaster or concrete? dunno really) and are about 50cm thick. The floor is concrete. The ceiling is concrete too.

In what stage of your project are you now?
I closed the door to my buddys studio (control B) and i want to permanently close one window and a hatch (trap door?) thats right in the ceiling obove the proposed mixposition. For that i want to use one layer of mdf 22mm (because i have some leftover) and two layers of gb and the cavity filled loosely with insulation. Everything sealed with caulk.

Whats below / above / sideways of you?
Underneath is just concrete. There is nobody besides us as we have the basement to ourselves. The two storys above us are used for storage of furniture. The guys come once or twice a weak to put stuff in or take it out and never stay for longer then 30min. When they come, we make coffee-break

Dude, why are you not doing it right? You should go room-in-room!
1.) I really-really-really ain’t got the funds to do a real r-i-r construction. It’s way to expensive.
2.) The building itself offers sufficient isolation to the outside.
3.) This is a rented space. If i have to move out i might have to remove everything i did to my room.
4.) There is an elevator entrance in the right wall of the proposed new controlroom that i could "plug" in some way but not permanently close because of maintanance issues.
5.) There is a rediator in the right front corner of the new control room that may not be moved. It can go behind the soffits though as its not needed or used.

Wow that was a lot of text! What are your questions in particular?
1.) What kind of walls would you suggest? Single frame with 2 layers of 12,5mm gypsum-board on each side mounted to light metall framing with insulation in between would be my guess. As I’m not going room-in-room and not doing a new ceiling there would be no point in having walls that offer better isolation than what i get from the concrete ceiling. Am i wrong?
2.) How would i join the new walls to the exising walls and ceiling? Would there be any point in trying to have some kind of decoupling? I was thinking of mounting the metal sections with some sealing-tape (similar to backer rod) underneath to existing floor, walls and ceiling, caulking around the perimeter and then screwing the gb to the studs leaving a small gap around and seal it with backer rod and caulk. Good? Bad idea?

I’m really looking forward to any comments, critique or suggestions!

Simon
p.s. i’m working on a design for treatment, speakerfront and mixposition for the new control room which i will post shortly, as soon as i’m done with the sketchup.

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http://www.ostheim.com

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http://www.ostheim.com

Welcome! Nice first post and it's good to see you don't need a lot of isolation.

You could use some strips of neoprene or sylomer or agglomerated foam to put under and on top of the steel framing and use anchors into the floor and ceiling to hold it off the concrete walls. Light insulation and 2x 16mm drywall should be good. On the dividing wall, do two walls with 3x 16mm drywall on one side only each (double leaf) and get a good air gap between the drywall layers.

If you could put the heater in the back, it would be better to avoid a lot of heat up front.

For treatments, consider portable treatments. John Sayer has posted a components sketch up file which should help your planning.

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Glenn

hello gullfo.
thanks a lot for the reply and sorry for not answering until now. i've been on holidays but now im back

i have some questions considering your reply which i really appreciate but don't understand completly.

question 1

this sounds like you are talking about two walls? i'm a little confused which construction you'd suggest where? i want to devide the room i have like the plan above showing the new-to-be-build walls in red. i suppose you suggested the double leaf system for that? but where goes the "light insulation and 2x16mm"?

question 2

the heater is not in use. right now it's as cold as it ever gets in frankfurt and it still is turned off. i couldn't move it anyway.


yip, thats exactly what i'm planning. as soon as my su of the room is finished i'll post it to be discussed

thanks so much
simon

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http://www.ostheim.com

sorry, use the 2x 16mm on frames around the periphery (double leaf) and the 3x 16mm on the room dividing walls (also a double leaf).

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Glenn

aah gullfo - sorry if im to stupid to get what you're saying.

you suggest that i build a room inside my room all around using a framework and 2x16mm gb (double leaf) - green in the following sketch. and after doing that you suggest to devide this by building a double-frame-wall (double leaf again) with 3x16mm gb - red in the following sketch. did i understand this correctly?

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http://www.ostheim.com

i was thinking more like this

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Glenn

wow! thank you!


glenn you are some helpfull fellow!!!

i really like your drawing but this is (so sorry) exceeding what i can do by far. problems that would occur with your suggestion would be:

- radiator on right control room wall that cant be moved
- heating pipes on right cr wall
- elevator entrance on right cr wall
- window that i want to keep for fresh air/sunlight on cr backwall
- the water-pipe-valve on the right cr wall that needs to accessible
- water pipe on cr frontwall (top corner)
... i know that there is a solution for each of these problems if you just looked at one of them but alltogether this is too much to make any sense imho.


what if i just devided the room with a double-leaf-wall and see what kind of isolation between the rooms i can get?
what do you think? worth a try? or is this just senseless?

simon

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http://www.ostheim.com

try it! if you frame it so you could add the additional walls/ceiling later, then if you need more you can then sort that out. in my mind, the pipes etc aren't as much of an issue as you can simply build the inner wall inset from them. elevator = door, etc. the ceiling might be a bit tricker but doable as well.

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Glenn

very good. thats exactly what i need! is there anything special i have to pay attention to when i build the walls in a way that enables me to do the additional walls later?
your help is highly appreciated
thanks simon

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http://www.ostheim.com

make sure the framing has studs on either end that will be in the correct position to line up with a new wall so you don't have to do significant re-work on the ends.

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Glenn

ok great. i hope i got it - please have a look.

i did a quick sketch of what i came up with. i didnt do all the details (doors, windows) yet. the acoutstic stuff (speakerfront, absorbers etc) is just a sketch to, i'll do a proper suggestion later.

my idea was to avoid quadruple or tripple leaf effects by just doing one side of every new framed wall with plasterboard and the other side with insulation and fabric cover. kind of "inside-out-walls" i think.

for the recording of noisy stuff i use the "drum/liveroom" which i will have double-leaf isolation from controlroom and for vocals i hope that the single-leaf-one-side-gypsum(4x12,5mm gb) will give me enough isolation to live with.

i realise that i build rectangular rooms instead of angling the walls. this is because of several pipes on ceiling and walls and two beams on the ceiling - its the best option for me like that. i can do some breaking up with slanted slat-wall-modules later.

what do you think? if it sucks badly i could easily put in additional frames to get a double leaf wall where now theres only one leaf.



i wanted to post the su file to but its to big. i did window -> model info -> statistics -> purge unused but its still about 8mb...

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http://www.ostheim.com

you might consider just going with the double walls between the booth and the live room as amps and drums will be much louder than your CR.

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Glenn

do you mean something like this glenn?
thanks again for your help!

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http://www.ostheim.com

yeppers

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Glenn