The basic plan behind the studio was to allow it to be quickly and easily remodeled back into bedrooms, if needed. Both rooms are rectangular, so if I need to sell this place and can't find someone who thinks a studio in the basement is cool ... all I'll have to do is replace the window with drywall and patch over where the audio jacks are. I'm still working on controlling the acoustics, but the foam that I have installed is mounted on fiber-board and hung like a picture. Which makes it very easy to remove, yet still effective.

The exterior walls of the basement are made up of 12" concrete block (up to about 4' high) with 2"x6" walls (filled with insulation) on top of that. The interior walls are placed 2" away from the exterior concrete block. The end result was a 2" gap from the 4' of concrete block and an 8" gap from the exterior stud walls.

All interior walls are 2"x4" construction filled with insulation. All walls have layer of 1/2" soundboard and then a layer of 5/8" drywall. The control/studio room wall is a double 2"x4" stud wall design with a 2" airspace in between. I used the same design on the studio/stairway wall. The ceilings are made up of 20" open floor-trusses (instead of typical 2"x12" joists), we layed a double layer of insulation and covered it with a layer of 1/2" soundboard and 5/8" drywall. Then we installed 1/2" interlocking acoustical tile on top of the drywall. The floors are all typical poured concrete.

This was our first attempt at constructing a studio, and while I think we did pretty well ... I still made some mistakes in planning along the way. Some big mistakes, some small. Some of them were due to my low budget (everything was finished for under $6000 US, including the bathroom) ... and others were made due to my inexperience and lack of knowledge. Either way, I have enjoyed the level of soundproofing that we did acheive. However, I'm confident that the next studio we build, after reading all of the advice from John, Brian and others at homerecording.com will be much, much better. It almost makes me want to move now!

 

Anyway, on to the pictures!!

I actually only took out the camera two times during construction ... once while building the stud walls ... and once after wiring the audio lines between the control room and studio room. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the insulation, drywall, etc stages.

 

This picture is on the first day of construction. The guy in the blue shirt is standing about where the mixing desk will be ... and I'm standing about where the control/studio room wall will be. This is also a pretty good picture of the open floor-truss system up above us.

 

This is also from the first day. My brother is making sure the wall is plumb by holding the level up and eyeballing it. ; )
That's my other brother on the ladder doing all the work.
And yeah ... that's snow on the ground outside. All of the lumber I bought was frozen and needed to be thawed out and dried before we could use it. Fun fun.

 

This is me after cutting up some wood. Don't I look happy?
This is the studio room looking along the studio/stairway wall. There already was an existing 2"x4" wall, we built another here with a 2" airspace in between the two.

 

Here is the control room side of the double wall. In the corner is where all the audio cables come into the control room ... to make it a little prettier, I built an oak box that runs along the base of the wall to run the audio cables through. This box also helps isolate the audio cables from the power cables.

 

Here's a shot of the studio room after the audio cable had been run. I was new to soldering, so I left the cable extra long in case I messed it up. We wound up running 30 cables in total. 16 XLR, 6 TRS (headphones) and 2 RCA jacks for the studio room ... and 2 XLR, 2 TRS (headphones again) and 2 RCA jacks for the room on the other side of the bathroom ... which is unfinished for now. The RCA jacks are used to hook up additional speaker systems. Which works out nice because I can have people sit and listen in the unfinished area when I'm mixing, so they don't distract me with a lot of noise.

 

This is the studio room side of the double wall. This window ledge became the place to put all of our crap ... which, as you can see, didn't stop us from putting some more crap on the floor.

Well, that's all I have for construction pics ... now onto some finished pics.

 

Here is a shot of the mixing desk in the control room. My brother made this desk for me about 8 years ago. It's built like a tank. You can't tell from this picture ... but the computer is tuned to homerecording.com! : )

 

Here is another of the control room but looking at the keyboard area. That tall wooden thing behind the keyboard is actually a rack that sat horizontally on the back of the desk at one time. It was attached to the desk with lag-bolts and had two 8-space racks on either side of the console ... I could also fit a 14" computer monitor in the center right above the console ... with the speaker monitors on the top. I took it off because the desk is huge as it is, and with that thing on ... it was just enormous. Plus I couldn't put the desk in front of the window like I wanted to. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it ... right now it's kinda like a book case, I suppose.

 

Here is a pic of the studio room (the only one that turned out). I'll try to take some more later. You may notice very little acoustic control in this room (one blanket only) ... I'm still working on that.

 

.........

To get around the lack of acoustic control, I've been using these two gobos. They're made from particle board and have hinges so they stand on their own. On one side is cotton batting covered with fabric ... on the other is a laminate material. I put them in front of the drums when recording to make the room 'appear' smaller and less reflective to the mics. I can also make a small vocal booth out of them. They work pretty well. You can also see my tele and Ibanez here ... my bass and acoustic are obscured by the gobo.

 

Anyway, that's my studio. Nothing major, but it works well for me.
I hope you enjoyed looking at these pictures.

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