John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hi—
I'm humbled to be posting here, especially since my math skills leave much to be desired, but hopefully I've learned enough to communicate. I hope you’ve had some caffeine. I think I kind of wrote a lot….

My name is Mark, and I live in Seattle, WA. I’m going to build a studio in my one-car garage, which I’ve enlarged as much as my property and local building codes allow. Originally, it measured 11’ 3” by 18’ (outside dimensions). I’ve added on to the front of the building so that it now measures roughly 11’ 3” by 30.’ I wish I could make it wider, but that just wasn’t feasible. The inside dimensions (framing to framing) are 10’ 5 ½” (w) x 29’ 4 ½” (l) x 8’7” (h). I posted a brief thread on the construction forum awhile back and got some help from xSpace on some outer leaf questions. Since then I’ve just been focusing on the actual design for the studio. I’ve spent many months and countless hours on this site and in Rod’s book, trying to learn as much as I can so that I can ask some intelligent questions. Thank you so much for this resource, John and everyone else! I’ve already learned a ton, and I know I will learn much more before I’m done.

My hopes for this space are to play with small groups of musicians (3-4, including myself) and to be able to record live drums. More specifically, I'd like to be able to record rock music in there without being visited by the police. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make a design for separate tracking and control rooms in Sketchup, but I’ve come to the realization that, acoustically, this is just not very realistic for the small space I have to work with: either I can have a decent-sized control room and a tiny tracking space, or vice-versa. However, I’m working on a possible compromise that I’ll describe in a moment.

The floor is concrete slab on grade, although it's 100 years old in the existing section, and I doubt it's very thick. I’ve decided after reading a lot of the posts on this site that I won’t float the floor. I may, however, install a Dricore sub floor system, like Greg did on his build:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11485&start=90
…caulking around the perimeter as I go, and build my inner leaf walls on top of that. Isolation will be quite important; my neighbors’ house is only about 12’ from the garage, and they have three young kids.

On that topic, here is what I’ve done so far to the building: Once the new addition was built, I tore off the original siding and installed a new layer of Densglass sheathing on the entire exterior. Because of the proximity to the property line, I was required by building (fire) code to use Densglass on the wall facing my neighbors. I decided that the garage was small enough that I could afford to do that all the way around, giving another 5/8” layer of mass on my outer leaf, caulking the seams with acoustic caulk as I went. I plan to add another layer of drywall on the inside, between the studs up against the outer leaf, as well. The new addition has 2x6 ceiling joists, and I will be replacing the 2x4’s in the existing structure with 2x6’s, as well. From this, I will hang 2 layers of 5/8” drywall for my outer leaf. I realize that once I build my inner leaf structure that the roof will act as a third leaf, but I don’t see any alternative to this: the roof area needs to remain open in order to ventilate.

I haven’t really come up with a budget. I’m really trying to do this as well as I can to get the best isolation possible. I may decide at the finishing stage to save money on those materials, but the “beef-up” stage will be very important. If, in the end, I still feel that acoustic drums are too noisy, I’ll have to settle for electronic ones, although I really don’t want to do that. I just picked up the sound level meter that Rod recommends in his book; I’ll take some readings with that to get a baseline for what’s feasible. Budget-wise, I’m doing all the work myself (used to be a carpenter), so I’m saving there. Still going through the “can I afford Green Glue?” debate in my head. I’ll probably end up biting the bullet on that one.

So….on to my design ideas so far:

I’ll be replacing the roll-up garage door with old carriage doors that I resurrected. They’ll look better, and I won’t have the whole overhead track issue. I do need to keep the first five feet for storage of yard stuff, tools, etc. I’d love to build a separate shed for this stuff, but we just don’t have the space on our property. I will be beefing up these doors, although I haven’t settled on the specifics yet. I’ll probably do something along the lines of what Rod provides in his door designs. I plan to install a 2’6” door going into the inner space from the storage area. This will be beefed up, as well. This leaves me with 10’ 5 ½” (w) x 24’ 4 ½” (l) x 8’ 7” (h) for the interior dimensions. Depending on final decisions about how to build my inner walls, the width (and all my room calculations) might change slightly, but for now, I think these dimensions are a good starting point.

For my inner leaf, this is where I’m at so far:
I’m planning to do inside-out walls all the way around, with two layers of 5/8” drywall.

Question: Does that make sense for this shape? I figure I can add treatment in order to liven up the room as necessary, but maybe it makes sense to just build the walls in the normal way and add absorption to the side walls (?) I need to make this decision before I can really do proper calculations for room dimensions. For the sake of the conversation right now, I’ll plan to build them inside-out, and adjust my dimensions if I change my mind.

I’ve tried angling the side walls 6 degrees for 6 ½ feet from the front of the room to help make a reflection-free zone. This is shown in version one of the plan. These will be treated with slats. I tried to do more of an angle, but the narrow width of the room made that difficult when it came time for the soffits. The problem with this version is that the listening position would probably lie right about where the angle begins. Probably not going to give me much benefit in terms of an RFZ. Version two of the plan has these angled walls going out further, extending the RFZ, which is probably better. However, in this plan, the distance between the soffits is pretty small. I’m not sure if that’s good,either.

Question: Perhaps my space is too narrow to angle the walls? Or does one of these versions look ok? I suppose a compromise to the inside-out issue would be to build this front area inside-out and the rest of it normally.

For figuring out the proper dimensions for the room, I’m using my width as the critical dimension (I don’t want to lose any width), and trying to size the height and length to create a good room ratio. For my calculations, I’m measuring drywall-to-drywall (assuming the walls will be inside out, this is correct, yes?). My width with inside-out walls is 10’3 1/2.”

Here’s where I get to the compromise I mentioned earlier:
I’m working on designing a moveable wall in three sections. The two outer sections would be framed in 2x6 with one or two layers of mdf running down the center. The mdf would be covered on both sides with 2” of 703 or something like it. The center section would essentially be a typical insulated glass door, with the doorjamb framed in 2x4, which would rest against 1 ½ x 2” stops attached to the inner frame of the outer sections. All three sections would have wheels on the bottom (like they do with an Ampeg 8x10 speaker cabinet) to facilitate moving around the room. Isolation-wise, I think the door would be my weak link, which might affect whether I decide to do one or two layers of mdf in the other sections. I would build them in such a way so that there was a gasket all the way around, to help with isolation, as well as a solid section of wall on the inner leaf for it to rest against.

While I know this would be nowhere near as good as a double wall, it would give me some flexibility with back wall placement in the CR. The wall could be closer to the desk when tracking drums, for instance, and farther back when mixing. You can see by the Sketchup design that I’ve put large traps in the back corners of the room. I suppose these could be made moveable, similar to dynamike’s: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8205&start=60
so that I could use them when mixing, as well. The two side sections could also be stored diagonally up against the bass traps on the back wall when not in use. I know this would be a lot of work for less-than-ideal results, but I really like to hear what things sound like through the monitors rather than through headphones as I’m recording. I suppose I could also configure these to make a vocal booth, as well.

Question: does this seem dumb, or do you think it could be worth doing? I’m confident in my carpentry/design skills that I could build this in a way to make it safe and relatively easy to move around.

Assuming that the above wall idea is workable, this is where I get back to my room dimensions. If I take a 96” ceiling height (ceiling not built inside-out—I was planning to use clouds) and my 123.5” width, and I put the move-able wall at 182,” I’m at Louden’s 2nd room ratio. With an 88” ceiling height, my 123.5” width, and placing the back wall at 167,” I’m at Louden’s 1st room ratio, although then I’m losing quite a bit of height at that point.

I’m planning to soffit-mount my monitors (Alesis M-1’s). I’ve angled the soffits 30 degrees, which gives me a space between the soffits that’s 37” wide and 6.5” deep in version one of the plan. I could fill this space with insulation (I'm under the impression that that can help focus my stereo image[?]), or I could just let the soffits run into the front wall, but I think Knightfly said something about a “horn effect” with this sort of placement, so I’m not sure what to do here.

Question: When I trace the equilateral triangle for my listening position in version one, it’s a challenge to get me 38% back from the front wall. I think it can be done if I tweak the monitor positioning within the soffits and use Louden’s 2nd ratio for the room, but I’m not totally confident on what I’ve done so far with the soffits. I guess I’m hoping someone can guide me on this. I am planning to use the room calculators available here to the best of my ability, but until I zone in on the proper thinking for my room ratio, I don’t know if they’ll help me much. Version two works better in this respect, and when I plug the numbers into Thomas Barefoot’s Wall Bounce Calculator, it looks pretty good (I think, but what do I know?) I did not plug in any absorption coefficients, because I think I need some more guidance on what a good treatment would be in this space.

I’m sure there are many questions that I didn’t think to ask, but I hope I’ve provided enough information to get the ball rolling. Thank you in advance for any guidance you all can offer!

P.S.: I tried to reduce the size of my Sketchup designs so that I could attach them: Window/Model Info/Statistics/purge unused, but it didn't seem to work. Am I missing a step?

probably one of your components is a large file - the garge door??/

check out this studio layout.

http://www.johnlsayers.com/Pages/Flying_Fox.htm

Thank you, John. Tried deleting the doors completely from the file and that didn't work. I'll keep playing with it.

Also, thank you for the design idea. I have seen that one, and that is basically the approach that I was trying to use before I came up with versions 2 and 3. My problem is that I think it will be very cramped in there with a few musicians playing (I know it will be cramped no matter what, but still...) I thought that if I was able to make this moving wall work I could have the best of both worlds: decent room ratios when mixing, and a bit larger tracking room when recording or just jamming.

However, I will keep exploring the two room option, as well. When I have something worth posting, I'll do so.

Just a little more info...I did a few meter readings this morning. I would say that my average mix level is probably around 82 db, C weighting. Occasionally, I'll turn it up a bit so that I can "feel" it more, maybe up to 90db, but I try to keep it at a reasonable level. As far as the acoustic drums go, I took readings with a drummer friend of mine who I would say is about "average" in terms of how hard he hits, and he peaked around 110 db, although most of the time he was more in the 102-105 range. Outside, the ambient reading around 10:00 a.m. was about 65db. Inside, it dropped maybe 8db. However, I am not even close to being finished with the outer leaf (there's still just 1/2" plywood screwed over the 8' x 7' door opening, thin glass windows, no ceiling, etc. etc.). I would love a transmission loss in the neighborhood of 40 db in the lower frequency range. I'm hoping that's attainable with the construction that I have in mind, but I'm not sure....

I'm going to work some more today on the two-room design, spurred on by John, but I still have concerns about final dimensions. I really just want a space in the end that sounds as good as it can but is still somewhat comfortable to work in.
Thanks, Mark

Hello again--
So, I've been working again on a two-room design, which I'm still not sure about. I played around quite a bit a while back, inspired by John's "Small Studio in 3-D":
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... f=1&t=5457
In other words, orienting the CR sideways, next to the LR. Given the dimensions I have to work with, however, I finally decided that my building is too narrow to execute this design very well: the control room would not be long enough front to back.

So in the last few days, I've been working on the the design attached below. The first change I made from version 2 and 3 is that I narrowed my "garden storage area" located behind the carriage doors down to 3' wide. This will force me to build an additional small shed to make up for the storage lost, but if this is a better design, then so be it. Doing this gives me an additional 2' in length to work with, which I will sorely need if I abandon my "moving wall" idea.

The design would still be entirely inside-out walls with two layers of 5/8" drywall. I'm still leaning towards building the ceiling normally, using clouds for treatment, but I guess I'm still up in the air about that. All the yellow areas would be treated with insulation. I would still have slot resonators angled at 6 degrees extending past my listening position, with 30 degree soffits in front. The bass trap behind and to the right of the listening position would be moveable, so that I could keep the existing door to the outside in its present location (the other two plans call for just eliminating that door). The wall area between the bass traps and the slots would be cloth-covered inside-out walls. I'm hoping I'm not overdoing it with absorption in this room; my thinking is that the glass door to the LR, the top part of the soffits (tan area), and the slats will keep things lively enough. I know that a room of this small size will need a lot of treatment, hence my decision to build inside-out (no room to spare).

The CR room ratio with this design is 1:1.27:1.52, close to Sepmeyer's 2nd. (95"0 ceiling height) My biggest concern here is that the listening position is almost exactly 1/2 way between the front and back walls. I really don't want to make the CR any longer, because I'm already afraid that the LR is going to feel too cramped as it is.

Question:
Is this one of those things that I can just deal with, or should I just go back to the one room layout?

The live room is inside out as well, with bass traps in three of the corners, and resonators on one wall. I only angled these at 6 degrees, because I didn't want to eat up too much room. Hopefully this is enough to cut down on reflections while still giving the room some life. I've actually begun to wonder, though, if I might be better off in terms of TL by not building the live room inside-out. This would increase my "spring" in the MSM by 3 1/2". I know this would mean losing space to treatment, but perhaps the trade-off would be worthwhile.

I still haven't abandoned the one room idea with movable partition wall, mainly because I like the idea of being able to fit more musicians in the room to just play music sometimes. I will refine versions 2 and 3 with more wall treatments, to flesh out the designs more, but I'm really hoping for a little feedback. Is there something I'm not doing that I should be doing in order to get more responses? I'm trying to do as much work that I can think of on my own. Any guidance will be very appreciated!

Thank you!
Mark

Are you going to follow the roof line of the outer leaf in your live room?

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inkspotproductions
www.bantamstudio.info

Hi!
No, unfortunately, the building would have to be re-engineered for that to work, and that would blow my budget. I'd love to, though!

Actually, the way the design is going to have to work is for my roof to be a 3rd leaf--that's the only way for it to ventilate properly. I know that the 3rd leaf is evil, but I'm in a similar predicament that Greg from onpurposeproductions was in in his build (don't have time to find the link right now).The ceiling of the outer structure will be my 2nd leaf. Long story short, the ceiling height in the LR will be the same as in the CR.

Given that, do you have any thoughts about the design?
Thanks for your interest!

Given the question that Lilith_envy just asked, I thought I'd post more pictures. One shows the new addition and roof framing from the inside. For me to be able to vault the ceiling in the live room, I'd need to install a ridge beam to pick up the roof load, and who knows what else in order for the structure to remain sound, once the ceiling joists were elimated. Sure would be nice, though....

You'll notice that the header over the door looks to be out of level. Actually, the header is level, but the east wall is about 1 3/4" lower than the west. Since I'm adding on to the front, and need to follow the existing roof plane, there's nothing I can do but follow the existing conditions for the new walls.

Then there's a shot looking in the opposite direction, just showing the general condition of the existing room (sorry for the mess!)

The third shot is a close-up of the existing sheathing. This garage is 100 years old, and the sheathing shows it. xSpace's advice when I asked about adding another layer of sheathing to the outside was that I should do it, and then "sandwich" the old sheathing by adding another layer inside, between the studs, which I'm planning to do. However, I'm also considering caulking all these seams and filling the knot holes with Fix-All, giving me a third good layer to the outer leaf walls, unless that just seems like a waste of time to any of you experts out there...

Anyway, I hope these shots help to illustrate what I have to work with.
Thanks,
Mark

I'm wondering if I left something out, or if people are just really busy right now. I'd really appreciate some input on my basic design concepts from any of you experts out there before I move forward. Thank you!!
Mark

You might find you only get a response when you a) ask a question or b) Appear to be doing something wrong.
I'd take the lack of response as a good thing.
Shame about the roof. That height would be great if you could change the truss down that end to a hip or sissors truss.

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inkspotproductions
www.bantamstudio.info

Hi--
Thanks for the reply. I suppose I could talk to an engineer to see if a scissors truss could be built in place. That's probably worth exploring. However, once the truss was built, I would still lose quite a bit of my height, especially once I framed the inner leaf ceiling. Still, thanks for stressing how nice that would be. I still (theoretically) could do it. Perhaps I shouldn't close the book on that idea yet....

Regarding questions, I do have several questions, but they're peppered throughout my posts. I'll cut and paste the most important ones here:

This first one refers to my first post, where I'm exploring a one-room design with a "move-able" wall:



This next one refers to the post where I'm trying out a two-room design and I'm concerned about that limited CR depth that I have to work with, leaving the listening position basically halfway between the front and back walls:






Anyway, my biggest need for guidance at this point is on the topic of wheter it makes sense to pursue the one or two room ideas, given the limited space I have. The pros for the one-room idea are that I could have a little more room for just playing with other musicians when I want, and some flexibility as to where my back wall of the control room sits. The big cons would be poor isolation, along with the hassle of moving the wall around.

The Pro of the two room design would be good isolation, but the cons would be that I would be locked into a smaller tracking room size, and that my listening position in the CR would be about halfway between the front and back walls.

Anyway, that's where I'm at. Thanks in advance for any opinions regarding this dilemma!

I would hate to work in a one room studio. But I think of my self as an engineer 1st and a musicain 2nd.
But it would be cheaper.
A moveable wall defeats the purpose of having a big room and still won't allow you to monitor with speakers with out spill.
My 0.02c

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inkspotproductions
www.bantamstudio.info

I'm not convinced the "movable wall" idea is even feasible. How would you manage to have it both movable and also totally hermetically sealed? Not to mention that it would be extremely heavy and difficult to move, plus the possibility that constantly moving it around might break something.

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

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think it's not a good idea. I agree that it's not realistic for it to be hermetically sealed (especially after moving it again and again). I guess I thought that even so, it would give me some isolation--maybe not enough to be worth all the trouble, though. And you're right, Stuart, it would be quite heavy, even in three sections. Believe it or not, the thought of losing control of it and dropping it on some equipment, or worse, a person, didn't really occur to me. So thank you, Lilith and Stuart, for "talking me down."

So, assuming that "one room with a moveable wall" idea is dead, do you have any thoughts on the two-room design I came up with, especially the dimensions of the control room? I think the room ratio seems pretty good, but obviously, it's a small room, and I keep worrying about the listening position being in the center of the room. Am I too hung up on that issue, or is there a solution that I haven't thought of? I really don't want to make the CR any longer, because of how small the LR would be....
Thanks!
Mark

Regarding the CR, Mark, you definitely do want to keep your head out of the 50% position, and closer to the 38% position. I think it is do-able in your room, but with some compromises.

Right now your speaker / head geometry is based on a 60 degree equilateral triangle. In order to get your head closer to the front wall, you need to increase the intersection angle, and perhaps move the speakers a little further apart too. 60° is not written in stone: It is the ideal arrangement, but you can increase the angle of intersection of the speaker axes up to 90°, if you really need to, which would bring your head much closer to the front wall: The trade off is the size of your sweet spot: it will be squashed a little due to the tighter angle, and the stereo image might be stretched a little, but apart from that there isn't much of a down side. So changing the geometry will get your head closer to the front wall, which is what you have to do to get away from 50%.

However, that also means that your desk will have to shrink a bit (either depth or width, or both), or there won't be enough room for you to get past the desk to the door into the LR. Maybe if you re-think your desk layout, what you are going to have on top of it, etc, you can come up with a desk shape that will work. maybe even make the desk itself more "wedge" shaped (narrower towards the front of the room, wider at the back, or a "wrap-around" shape that comes a bit around the chair on either side. Perhaps even have a folding panel on one side that you can drop down when you need to get past, or something like that. If you get really creative with the desk shape/size, I think you can probably fix it so that your head is in a better location and you can also get around the desk to the door. You just have to juggle the dimensions of the desk and the geometry of the speaker / mix positions, until you get the best fit.

I think it can be done.

- Stuart -

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