John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hello John and Forum members,

My wife and I are trying to decide which of two houses to buy. We live in Central/Western Massachusetts. Of course I am trying to imagine my recording studio in each location.

Both houses are in private, rural settings, with no other houses in close proximity. The only soundproofing issues will be from crickets, peepers, birds, etc.

One house has a walkout finished basement, with the option to make use of an adjacent workshop area if isolation is needed when recording multiple instruments simultaneously. I don't know the exact dimensions of the finished basement room yet (I'll find out soon), but it is rectangular with parallel walls and a reasonably high ceiling for a basement (8 or 9 feet).

Another house that we're looking at (which is being sold for $50,000 less) doesn't really have an adequate space that could be used for recording. But I could easily imagine an addition out of the back of the house or a freestanding outbuilding that could be used for a studio. Of course there are challenges associated with all of this (i.e. a foundation, insulation, electrical, the $40-$60,000 cost of the addition or outbuilding, etc.). But both options (an outbuilding or addition) have the advantage that they be designed with a studio build in mind (soundproofing, room treatment built into the walls and ceiling, non-parallel walls, etc.). My common sense tells me not to buy a house knowing that I will need to add to it. But since the price tag is $50,000 less than the other house, perhaps it is a viable option (although we'd have to figure out how to somehow work the additional amount into the home loan).

A few other relevant points:

- An addition seems a bit simpler than a freestanding structure in terms of electricity as well as security.
- My accountant says that it's easier to write off an outbuilding studio than an addition.
- I believe that in Massachusetts there are fewer building code restrictions placed on outbuildings than on additions.
- If we move at some point, it could be relatively easy to take the outbuilding with us.

By the way, my home studio is typically used for a wide variety of projects, such as Reggae, Jazz, Latin, Reggae, African, Blues, Church Band, Narration, Singer/Songwriter, Rock, etc. I have started to build up a small collection of acoustic treatment materials, which I use in my existing home studio. I have four GIK acoustics bass traps, plus six two-panel Sorber S5-2 panels that that I have been using in various ways: as gobos while tracking, or folded and leaned against the wall as broadband absorbers and rear bass traps while mixing. I am planning to invest in some quadratic diffusers at some point as well.

I should also mention that my wife and I are definitely not DIY-types (well, at least in terms of house construction). So we would be hiring a contractor for the build. There are plenty of good builders in our area. Perhaps I should start to discuss it with a few of them. I have seen some great design plans on this forum and Ethan Winer's forums and articles.

My basic question to the forum is: Do you think that it would be possible to build an addition to a house that would be suitable as a recording studio in the $50,000 range? How about an outbuilding?

As a side note, I also come across an interesting looking design from a company based in England.

http://www.gardenoffice.net/recording-studios.html

It's basically an outbuilding with non-parallel walls, a vaulted ceiling, acoustic treatment built into the walls, etc. According to the sales rep that I have corresponded with, the main structure would be prebuilt in England, then dismantled and shipped to me. Some materials would be sourced locally (wall board etc.) and plastering and decorating would be done on site. The size of the structure that he recommended would be 24' by 12'. I am curious what people on the forum think about it as an option for me.

Thanks so much!

Brian Bender
Face The Music Recording Studio
Shutesbury, MA

http://www.brianbender.com

BEFORE YOU POST, YOU MUST READ AND FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS


From the page at gardenoffice.net/recording-studios.html:

"It’s all to do with the vaulted ceiling which allows the sound waves to travel around unimpeded. And there are no walls at right angles to set up unwanted harmonics.

Garden Studio already insulated with fibreglass which helps create a quiet environment.

Two types of additional sound insulation available – soundblock wall board, or the ultimate Maxiboard™ acoustic wall board.

This is a turnkey building… including flooring and decoration… so when we hand you the keys you can just move your equipment in and start recording."


The vaulted ceiling is not a key to anything, the volume of the room is, matter of fact, depending on the actual footprint of the room, the vaulted ceiling can be a big problem to treat.

No walls at right angles does not modify harmonics, those [harmonics] exist in every equation of every room. Creating acute angles of wall intersections reduces flutter echo and does modify the modes associated with the room dimensions.

The inclusion of fiberglass does not mean the reducing of sound it only means that you can reduce the frequencies at mids and high frequency and that has nothing to do with a purpose built room for music which is ALWAYS concerned with low frequency isolation, which insulation will not and cannot isolate...that requires mass.

If it is a turnkey then the assumption is a wooden floor structure...and that is never a good start. We have people here now going thru the head aches that happen from making a wood framed floor and thinking it will isolate...it will not do it at the LF.

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

Hi Brian. As Brien mentioned, you should go over the forum rules one more time, since you seem to be missing something important...

Anyway, some random comments on things you mentioned:

That would probably be a mistake, since it doesn't sound like your studio is going to be large enough to benefit from that type of diffusion. There are certain distance and volume issues involved in using QRD type diffusers, and they are not recommended for small rooms. So leave that purchase on hold until you know what size the room is, and if it will even need (or benefit from) QRD's.

You also didn't say what is the purpose of this studio: Is this going to be a dual room studio, with both a control room and a live room? Or maybe a 3-room facility, with an iso booth too? Or maybe a single room studio, based on a large control room? Or no control room at all (and therefore no mixing/mastering)? Or just a rehearsal space? All of those are major, major, as in big-time major differences.

You also mention a lot of genres of music, but not how they will be recorded. Is this just mostly ITB and MIDI based instruments, or is it mostly acoustic instruments? That's another huge difference. Isolating for Roland V-drums is rather different from isolating for Mapex or Pearl drums!

Your set of acoustic panels is a very basic start on what will be needed, but you can build treatment much cheaper than you can buy commercial products, and the purpose-built stuff can be just as effective (or arguably even more effective) than purchased commercial products. You say you are not much into DIY yourself, but practically anyone can build a very decent panel with zero skills! There are many examples of just that, right here on the forum. Or you can get your contractor to build them for you.

CAUTION! DANGER! BEWARE! This is probably hard to grasp, but most contractors don't have a clue how to build a studio, and if they try to build it the same way they build a house, office or shop, it will be a disaster, acoustically. That's almost guaranteed. Building a studio is nothing at all like building a house. Same materials, sure. Same tools, sure. But very different techniques. Things that they never even have to bother thinking about in normal house construction are critically important in building a studio. Multiple seals on all edges, for example: Not needed at all in normally houses, and if they don't quite understand the immense importance of that in a studio, then your isolation will not work, and neither will any tuned acoustic treatment. Lots of money down the drain. And lots of examples of exactly that, all over the forum.

In other words, look for a contractor who either already has experience building studios, or who is totally willing to learn how to do it right, and to have you (and us!) looking over his shoulder all teh time.

Once again, this might not sound important to you, but building it right is extremely, extremely important. Even small, apparently "insignificant" things can make a huge difference, for both isolation and for acoustics.

The basic answer is: How much does it cost to build a house (per square foot) where you live? You are talking about a 300 square foot building for about $50,000, which translates to roughly $160 per square foot. Sounds promising, but the key point here is simply this: Building a studio from the ground up will cost about 10 to 20% more than building an up-scale house of the same size, in your area. So if you could build a 300 square foot house in your area for about $40,000, then 50k sounds about right. OK, so that's rather small for a house (!) but you get the idea: Ask those contractors that you are talking about for the approximate rough cost per square foot of building a nice up-scale home in your area. That's the general rule of thumb for figuring the cost of building a studio.

Doesn't sound like much of a studio to me! Like Brien said, there are big issues with treating vaulted ceilings, and non-parallel walls can be useful, acoustically, but only when done right, and since there is no floor plan, it's hard to see if it is done right, but from those photos, there certainly doesn't appear to be much "done right" in evidence at all! It even looks hexagonal from some angles! Wouldn't that be fun! Imagine the acoustics of a perfect hexagon with a vaulted ceiling.... Anybody care to calculate the modal behavior for that???

And like Brien said, some of the statements on that web site are, well, shall we say "highly questionable", to put it diplomatically?

Brian, there's a science called "acoustics", which is pretty clear about how sound waves actually behave in real life, and then there's this thing called "marketing" which has practically no basis in science or real-life, and frequently ascribes magical properties to sound waves, building materials, shapes and dimensions, and occasionally appears to be based far more on wishful thinking and snake-oil, than on anything even vaguely resembling science! I'll leave it up to you to figure out how much of each of these two concepts is evident in the "design" for that studio....

But here's a hint: take a look around this forum at studios designed by John and other professional designers, who really do know what they are doing (and aren't in the serpent juice business!), and see how those studios compare to the one in question. I think the differences should be rather evident.

Or better still, buy some of the books that you often see recommended here on the forum, and compare what you see in those with what you see on certain web sites...

Regardless of the acoustic properties of the design, that seems like a rather expensive way of doing things! From the photos, I see ordinary building materials, like stud framing, drywall, wood, and suchlike. ALL of that can be purchased at your local hardware store, and for an awful lot less money than having it shipped around the world! Maybe it's just me, but shipping thousands of pounds of building materials across the planet doesn't sound like an efficient way of doing things, when EVERYTHING you need is available a few blocks away, for a fraction of the price.

That's a nice size, but for what? What shape? What ratio? What design principle? For example, is it based on LEDE, or RFZ or CID or some other concept? Is it based on a Louden ratio, or maybe a Bolt ratio, or perhaps a Sepmeyer? Or maybe non at all? Where are the acoustic specs? What is the isolation level that they guarantee? What does the RT-60 curve look like? In other words, where is all the IMPORTANT stuff, that matters acoustically? And what about the HVAC sytem? There's no mention of that at all. Or the electrical system (which of course you'd have to completely replace anyway, since the British system is based on 220 volts / 50 Hz and the USA system is 110 volts, 60 Hz, with rather different electrical code requirements, different plugs, ground, sockets, fusing, etc ...). Also, is it one room, or two, or three? Does it include a bathroom and plumbing, or would you have to add that yourself? Etc.

Lots of questions and "questionables" there, and precious little real information.

Let me put it this way: If I had 50k and a piece of land where I could build my own studio, I would not send most of it to England to buy stuff that I could buy down the street for a fraction of the price! I'd also make darn sure that the design will work acoustically for MY needs: I'd spend a lot of time defining exactly what my goals are, in terms of how many decibels of isolation I need for my studio in my location, what my needs and expectations are, what a normal recording session would be like, and how that might affect my design. Then I'd put those int actual acoustic specifications, objective ones that can be measured. Then I'd spend even more time making sure that the design for my studio meets all of the specifications, at least on paper. And if I decided that the whole things was just too complicated for me to design alone then I'd spend some of my budget on getting a design done properly by someone who already does know (someone like John, for example). Then I'd find a builder who understands the concepts of acoustic isolation and acoustic treatment, understands the design, and get him to build the place exactly to my specs, while I watch over him like a hawk, to make sure that not even one of his nails goes in the wrong direction.

That would be my approach to building something like this. Building a studio is roughly 90% design and planning, and about 10% actual hammer-and-nails.

So that's my way of saying that I think maybe you should re-consider your plan to import a British garden shed of "quaint" acoustic design (I guess sounds waves must behave differently over there...), and rather go with a tried-and-true design, based on actual solid acoustic principles, and on the laws of physics that work exactly the same way throughout the known universe (except for certain parts of the UK, apparently), that can be built with things you can buy at your local Home Depot.



- Stuart -

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

Hello everyone,

First of all, THANK YOU all for your quick and thoughtful replies!

Just to clear a few things up -- I am not wedded to the idea of going with the British company, for many of the reasons stated in some of the reply posts (importing materials that could be found locally, having more control over the design elements, etc.). I just thought it looked like an interesting option and frankly I haven't been able to find anything similar (prefab recording studio outbuilding) in the US market. I would be more than happy to hire a designer and construction team that has experience with studio builds. To my knowledge, John Sayer is based in Australia, so I'm not sure how practical that would be. Perhaps the designer doesn't need to based locally. Ethan Winer lives in CT (probably about a two hour drive from me), so perhaps working with him could be an option as well. Or coming up with design plans from a forum like this one and then working with a local construction team. I am an active musician in my local area, and I do in fact know of several teams of builders with commercial and residential recording studio experience.

Ahh, the topic of studio layout! I definitely like to track vocals in my control room rather than in an isolated booth. I find that the client is more comfortable, we can communicate much more easily, and we get better results. Fan noise from my recording consoles (I use two Yamaha AWW4416's chained together for 32 tracks) can be an issue, but using my 5.5 feet high gobos on three sides of the vocalist seems to do the trick. If the vocalist is 6 feet tall, I still find that I don't hear fan noise on the vocal tracks, especially in the context of a band mix. Sometimes that vocalist also has a guitar in his/her hand, or the person is a horn player...you get the picture. Most of the time in my existing home studio is spent either recording or mixing in the control room/tracking room.

I have also had 5-7 piece bands recording in my existing studio. Typically I put the client (vocalist or horn player) in the control room with me to lay down scratch tracks. Once again, ease of communication with the client is key for me. I basically use the rest of the house for other instruments: drums in the living room, electric bass (no amp, recorded direct) in the same room as the drummer for their ease of communication, rhythm guitar also in the same room as the drums and bass but with his/her amp upstairs in a bedroom with a mic on a guitar amp, keyboard player in the same room as rhythm section also but recorded directly without an amp. If there is an upright bass instead of an electric bass, I make use of another upstairs bedroom to create an isolated environment (unfortunately giving up a sightline with the drummer). So as you can see, there typically isn't a sightline between the vocalist and the rhythm section, or between an upright bass player and a drummer. I have thought about using video cameras and monitors to accomplish this, but honestly I haven't felt a dire need for it yet.

This has been my basic setup for the past 12 years and it has worked really well. Basically my house becomes a tangled mess of wires for the duration of the initial band tracking sessions (usually 1-2 days). The primary goal of these sessions for me is to get good rhythm section tracks. Then of course in subsequent sessions taking place in my control room/tracking room, I can replace scratch vocal tracks, record lead guitar parts, horn parts and solos, etc.

The difference now is that I am recently married and that we plan to have two kids. So I would like to have a functioning recording studio that doesn't disrupt my home environment. Ideally, I would like the studio to have a separate entrance and its own bathroom so that clients and their bands don't need to enter the house at all. House #1 (mentioned in my first post) does in fact have many of these features: the finished walkout basement has its own entrance in the rear of the house with a pretty convenient load-in from the driveway, its own bathroom on the basement level, and an adjacent workshop area that could be suitable to create isolation when recording a full band. There is linoleum flooring in the finished room that would be used for a control room/tracking room (I know, not ideal). I could imagine adding a dropped ceiling with tiles and some R38 fiberglass batts on top of the grid, above the ceiling tiles for bass trapping (as Ethan Winer has suggested in one of his articles). Not sure how expensive this would be. And of course some treatment would be needed for the workshop area where I would want to record drums, since the floor is concrete. Perhaps even the bathroom could be used as an isolated space if needed. The reverberance of the bathroom could potentially be used to some advantage for something like a lead guitar amp, although it would be a small space so there would be some room mode issues. We have another viewing of the house scheduled in the next week and I will gather more info about room dimensions, materials and construction.

Moving on to House #2 ($50,000 less than House #1) which would require an addition or outbuilding. I'm not even sure if I would be allowed to put a bathroom into the addition because of local zoning regulations, septic capacity, etc. I will look into it. But for the moment let's assume that I can. It seems like what I need for an addition or outbuilding is a rectangular shaped control room/tracking room with non-parallel walls. As I have explained above, this is where most of the time in my recording studio will be spent. Then another isolated space suitable for recording drums, and large enough to accommodate a bass player, guitar player (with amp in separate isolated space) and keyboard player. So not a drum booth but rather a mid-large sized room suitable for recording drums (with the added bonus of being usable for a rehearsal space). Then possibly a third isolated area. Windows between rooms are not essential to me. Plus a bathroom, which could be used as an isolated space if needed, especially for something like a guitar amp so that a person doesn't need to spend an entire session in a bathroom!. As far as the dimensions of these rooms, I honestly don't know...that's why I'm here!

Perhaps my question bears asking again at this point: Can I do this for $50,000? With House #2, either an outbuilding or addition are possible. Which would be better? Should I not even consider House #2 and just go with House #1? These are really the important questions right now. If we decide to buy House #2, I'll be back with more specific design questions

Brian

Perhaps my answer bears repeating at this point: You can get a good idea of what it will cost to build a studio by calling around contractors IN YOUR AREA and asking them about the going rate (per square foot) for building an upscale home IN YOUR AREA. Add about 10% to 20% to that, and you'll have a ballpark figure for what this is likely to cost you.

Nobody here can answer your question ("Is 50k enough to build a studio?"), since we don't know what expenses are like IN YOUR AREA. That's the key. Where I live, in Santiago, Chile, 50k would not be enough. But I also own a small plot of land on the coast, about 150km from my home, where 50k would be more than enough. I could build something much bigger for that amount on the coast.

So the only person who can answer your question accurately is YOU, by calling around and learning about what it costs to build WHERE YOU LIVE.

The DESIGN would be pretty much the same anywhere in the world: sound waves follow the same laws of physics in Australia as the do where you live! What changes is the cost of actually building it, and perhaps a few details of the actual plans, to meet your local building code, but the overall design concepts remains the same anywhere. If you tell John or someone else what you want to accomplish, and how much space you have available, then the actual internal layout and acoustic treatment would be pretty much the same in the USA, Chile, Europe or Australia. (Except of course that in Aussie, it would have to be built upside-down... )

That's actually a really good option, if you have the time! Lots of folks do that here: they spend the time to learn the basics of acoustics, and the basics of studio design, then put it all together and post their concepts here. Others comment, offer suggestions on how to improve the design, etc. Realistically, it takes a few months to learn enough to be able to do that yourself.

Actually, that's perfect! Linoleum is a pretty decent surface, acoustically speaking, so if if looks good aesthetically, then you already have a floor.

This assumes that you don't need any isolation for that room, which would be rather strange for a control room, especially if you say you plan to have kids in the house. Even more so, if you plan to track vocals in there! Maybe your console fans can be taken out of the equation, but it's hard to get a crying baby out of the equation, in the middle of that once-in-a-lifetime perfect take.... Ditto for the myriad other sounds in and around typical homes: rain, wind, cars, TV, phones ringing, radios, dogs, toilets flushing, people walking, HVAC system, neighbors (lawnmower, stereo, etc.), planes flying over, nearby roads, etc. There's about a million reasons why you would want to isolate your control room properly, apart from treating it. It also seems strange that you would go with a real cheap solution and no design (insulation batts above a drop ceiling), when you have are talking about a budget of around 50k. If you have the money, then do it properly! Ethan's suggestion is fine for a real tight budget, but if you have the money, then why not do it right?

Why??? If you have a concrete floor in there already, then your floor is ready! Nothing else required there. But that still leaves the OTHER five sides of the room, which WILL need attention. Once again, if you want to record live drums and also expect to have babies sleeping nearby, then you need isolation. That implies doing the walls, ceiling, doors, windows (if any), HVAC and electrical system correctly to achieve the level of isolation that you need.

All of the rooms you are talking about are small rooms! All of them will have modal issues that need to be considered in both the isolation plan and also in the treatment plan. You can only forget about modal issues in large rooms that actually do have a statistical reverberant filed right down to lowest frequency of interest. That simply does not happen in home studios: the rooms are way too small to have statistically valid reverberant fields, so room modes dominate the low end. That will be a major issue in all of your rooms, and is always a big consideration in the design phase: How do you minimize modal effects?

And photos! Take several photos, take accurate measurements, and post those here. We can predict some of the acoustic behavior of those rooms to a certain extent, based on the dimensions.

Well which is it? Is it rectangular, or does it have non-parallel walls? The two are mutually exclusive. If it is rectangular, then by definition the walls are parallel!

Second, why do you think that you need non-parallel walls in your control room? What design principle are you basing that on? You can build a great studio with parallel walls, and you can build a great studio with splayed walls, provided that in each case you design accordingly. So it would be good to know what you have in mind, and WHY you want non-parallel walls.


From what you say in the rest of your post, it seems like what you need is a design with a large control room, a small live room, and an iso booth, plus perhaps a bathroom. That can be done in 300 square feet, but it would be cutting it fine. I'd look at something a bit bigger. To give you an idea, ITU and EBU recommendations for critical listening rooms are a MINIMUM volume of about 1500 cubic feet. allowing for an 8 foot ceiling, that implies a footprint of about 190 square feet right there, just for your control room. Acoustically, the live room should be larger than the control room, with longer RT times, and even the iso booth needs a reasonable amount of floor space. Plus bathroom, sound lock, etc. You should probably be thinking on the order of 500 square feet, at least.

I'd say that house #1 is far more of a challenge! That's where you'd need the most design help, since you'd be trying to fit rooms in to existing spaces, and that isn't easy at all, either from the point of view of isolation or from the point of view of treatment. At least with #2 you have free reign on what shape and size each room can have, and you can optimize everything for best acoustics. You can't always do that if you have to force the rooms into an existing shell: you have to work around the limitations of the existing walls, ceiling, HVAC, plumbing and electrical, and that normally introduces "surprises" into the equation! (And not the nice type of surprises, either... )

But either way, with option #1 or with option #2, that's what this forum is all about: Help you with your design, and later on help you with your build.


- Stuart -

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

"Can I do this for $50,000? With House #2, either an outbuilding or addition are possible. Which would be better? Should I not even consider House #2 and just go with House #1? These are really the important questions right now."

The only thing I would add to what Stuart has said, assuming it wasn't said and I missed it, is this.

An addition or a purpose built free standing room do two different things, although the difference may not be something the ear can pick up.

On the scale of 1 to 2, 1 being the best and 2 being the least, the difference between a free standing structure and a coupled addition, I would list the free standing as a "1".

So that answers the question of "which would be better". What it does not address is if there are factors in your geographical area of the world that might make this structural separation, more cost than it might be worth. These factors would be bedrock or any type of earth bound surface that would couple the two structures back together.

This is the area that answers the question, is 50K enough. If you have to spend a lot of money at the foundation, then this is going to be a big part of your budget....larger than your HVAC.


The only really important question, and I know Stuart has brought this up, is how much isolation do you require.

The house you purchase only matters if you are going to construct within the structure. Any free standing structure will not be inhibited by this restraint, saving the geology of the terrain, and this can be overcome, but the money involved gets magnified.

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

I'm back with more info...and more questions

Thanks again for all of your expert advice!

HOUSE #1

I have obtained some architectural drawings of House #1 (the house with the finished walkout basement). I annotated the drawings with some layout ideas. I also took some photos of the basement. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good photo of the space that I would use as a Drum Room.



Room Dimensions (all rooms have 8 foot ceilings):
Control Room - 19'6" x 11'7"
Vocal/Iso Room - 11'7" x 7'9"
Drum Room - 14' x 11'6"

How do those room ratios look?

Total Basement Area (including bathroom) = 440 sqft

It seems like from my mix position I might be able to have a sightline to both the Drum Room and Vocal/Iso room. I would need to put a window in the front wall of the Control Room and also replace the door to the Drum Room with a door that has some glass. A wall could be inserted between the Vocal/Iso Room and the Drum Room, with another door containing glass. So there could also be a sightline between the Vocal/Iso Room and the Drum Room. Or perhaps an accordion-style wall between the Vocal/Iso Room and the Drum Room, which would enable me to increase the size of the Drum Room when the Vocal/Iso Room isn't being used.





The total basement area is 440sqft. Concrete floors throughout (sorry, I was mistaken when I mentioned linoleum in a previous post). Very dry and well insulated. Tight house -- Energy Star rated, built in 2009. House is set back 200 feet from the road. House is on a quiet dirt road -- not a lot of traffic. 3.4 acres. Most of the walls in the house are insulated with 9" of blown cellulose with a R33 rating. Double-walled construction. Basement slab insulated with 2" foam around the perimeter and insul tarp underneath. Windows have R3.33 rating.

The main floor of the house has a kitchen, living room, dining room and bathroom. So there would be some noise issues between the basement and main floor (in both directions). I will probably need to do some soundproofing of the basement ceiling and possibly the basement walls (will the walls transmit sound upstairs?). Possibly a room within a room? An easier solution could be to simply ask my family to stay out of the living room while I am using the Control Room as a Control Room/Tracking Room. Recording bands at night should be fine because all of the bedrooms are on the second floor, plus we are planning on finishing the attic to create space for a playroom and guest room. So there will be places in the house where my family can go when I am recording. Not as ideal as an outbuilding, but it could work.

Clients could enter the studio from the back of the house, which is also the rear of the control room. Cars could get about 20 feet away from the rear entrance without driving over the septic tank and/or leach field. So load in/load out would be OK.

The Vocal/Iso Room is currently set up as a workshop. I could remove the work surface on the right side to provide more standing space. When not in use as a recording room, the space could still be used as a workshop.



As you can see, there would be some challenges in treating the rear wall of the Control Room because of the windows and door. Perhaps they offer some benefits in terms of reducing reflections? I wonder if the recessed window on the rear wall could have a positive effect. Ditto for the recessed window on the side wall.







Regarding the "protruding wall" in the back-left corner of the Control Room -- it might be possible to remove the shower from the bathroom in order to straighten out that wall (in the Control Room) and end up with a shallow closet for storing mic stands, etc. Or maybe the uneven side wall has some advantages in terms of reflections?





When I say "Control Room" I really mean "Control Room/Tracking Room" because I would like to be able track a vocalist or horn player in the back of the control room. I like the vibe and communication that is created in a combined control room/tracking room. In my current studio I have six 2-panel rigid fiberglass gobos (Sorber S5-2) that I use to create temporary booths. Very flexible setup. Each panel is 2' x 5.5' and 1.5" thick. When mixing, the gobos can be folded (thus making them 3" thick) and used as broadband absorbers at first reflection points (leaned against the side walls). If I stack two folded pairs, they become 6" bass traps for the rear wall. Two adjacent stacked folded pairs create a rear wall bass trap that is 4' x 5.5' and 6" thick. I have enjoyed the flexibility and versatility of the gobos in my current studio, but I'm not sure if I could use them on the rear wall in House #1 because of the door and window on the rear wall of the Control Room. Or perhaps the solution is to just lean them against the rear wall (blocking the back door) when I am mixing. I believe that there is a way to place the gobos in a "V" shape for rear wall bass trapping, but I'm not sure how to do this properly. The gobos could also be folded and leaned against the walls in the drum room when tracking drums. So basically my gobos/absorption panels are movable depending on the situation. By the way, I also have four GIK 244 Bass Traps, which are mounted on mic stands, so they are also movable.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a good photo of the Drum Room. Of course I would have to treat the ceiling and side walls (ditto for the Vocal/Iso room). Interestingly enough, though, without adding the wall between the Drum Room and the Vocal/Iso room, the Drum Room would be located in at the intersection of an "L" shape. I wonder how that would behave acoustically?

Perhaps the bathroom could be used as an isolated space during sessions as well, i.e. for recording a guitar amp.

So my main question for House #1 is: Do you think this basement space and layout could work?

HOUSE #2

Here is what I have found out about the House #2 scenario (outbuilding):

Local building costs for an upscale house in my area seem to be in the $150-$200/sqft range. But one or two people have indicated that I might be able to find someone who will work for $100/sqft (hey, times are tough these days, right?). I am in the process of contacting a few local contractors who have been recommended to me, some of whom have experience with recording studios. I am also in the process of inquiring with the town about building restrictions. A designer/contractor friend of mine took a look at the property and suggested that the addition/outbuilding could be built on piers out of the back of the house (with a six foot connecting passageway). It sounds like this type of foundation would be an inexpensive way to go. At the moment, though, the idea of building an outbuilding feels like a daunting task -- lots of unknown costs, navigating through various restrictions, etc. And in the end I might end up with a studio that is too small.

Here is a photo of the back of the house where the proposed addition could be built:



Ideally, the outbuilding/addition would have its own bathroom, but an alternative would be to use the bathroom on the main floor of the house, which would be very easy to get to through the passageway connecting the addition to the house. The passageway would lead into a den that has a door to the bathroom.

That's all of the info that I have at the moment regarding House #2. More to come...

Thanks again for your help!

Brian

Hello again,

My wife and I have decided to pass on House #2 -- too many unknowns (cost of outbuilding, wetland delineation, etc.).

So at the moment I am wondering what people on the forum think about House #1. Do the room dimensions and layout look like they will work well?

Thanks!

Brian

I think that space is usable. With good design and good treatment, it can very likely be turned into a nice little studio. It's not optimal (nothing ever is!) but I don't see anything too wrong with it. No major red flags (just a lot of little pale orange ones )

It will take a lot of work (and money!), but I reckon it should work out fine.

- Stuart -

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