Page 1 of 1

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 08:52
by HoboRec
Hi, my name is Ulf and I run a studio in south of Sweden. Right now I'm renting a space but since a while back bought a house where I want to build my own space.

I've been reading through all topics here that could in some way relate to what I want to do and found so much good stuff. Also used to be a part of the John Sayer forum. My and my fiancé have done some serious renovation to the house where we live so we know how to build and I have a close friend that is a construction engineer that can help with those kind of things.

The situation I'm in now is that I have a double garage that is really worn down and to be honest looks really crappy. The ceiling/roof is really low and right now there's a concrete slab in one of the garages and just paver in the other. The total space is 8x10 meters. We're about to begin taking the whole thing down and dig out the second garage to pour a concrete slab there as well. The plan is to even the whole thing out with the old slab and install water carried floor heating in the foundation.

I made some mockups of roughly what we want it to look like compared to what it looks like now:
Före.jpg

Efter.jpg


The priority in the layout of the studio is to get a really good control room, and secondly a good and roomy live room to record big sounding drums. So here's where I need help. I made a simple sketch to start somewhere and to get some feedback. I made a corner control room but I'm not sure about the dimensions. As it is now is 5,2m long, but I'm having trouble figuring out the total area.

layout v1.jpg


The ceiling hight on the left side of the building will be 4m and 3m to the far right, could maybe do it 0,5 meter higher if necessary. This means the ceiling in the control room will slant diagonally, so probably have to make a false ceiling and fill it up with rock wool?! But should it be levelled or tilted? Height?

My engineer friend will help me with the HVAC and stuff like that. I also have a connection at a building supplier that can give a very good disount and I got an estimate on about $6000 for the other shell of the construction, not the interior. Total budget hopefully around $30.000. The only contractor we will hire is for the concrete foundation.

Hope this is a good enough starting point for some one to give me some feedback on the layout.

Looking forward. Thanks!

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 11:52
by Soundman2020
HI there HoboRec, and Welcome to the forum! :thu: :D

Congratulations on your plans for your studio! The basic concept looks pretty good. So I'm just adding a few comments here, in general.

As you mentioned, what you have there is sometimes called a "corner control room", since the rear wall is a corner, not a wall. When done like that, the room is sort of set up on the room diagonal, from one point of view. And that's a good thing! There are benefits to doing it like that. Also some downside, of course /everything in studio design is a trade-off!) I've done a couple of corner control rooms, and they can work well. The acoustic treatment is a bit different from a more conventional rectangular room, but the same rules apply.

The total space is 8x10 meters.

That's pretty decent! That's a good-sized space. That allows you to have around 20m2 for the control room, which several rechnical guidelines say is the smallest size for good acoustic response (you can go smaller, but it gets harder to treat effectively). The remaining 60m2 can be split between the other rooms. Maybe 40 or so for the live room. I'm guessing that the area to the right of the control room is an isolation booth?

On your plans, you are showing everything as only a single "leaf" walls, but in reality you'll probably want to do it all as "two leaf" walls, in order to get good isolation between rooms, and good isolation to the outside world. That takes up more space, of course, but it's necessary if isolation is important /and it usually is!)

You also show a set of double doors between the booth and the live room, but double doors isn't a good idea in a studio: it's hard to get them to seal properly when they are closed, and good seals is really important for isolation. In the final build, you will have two sets of double-doors there, back-to-back, which complicates things even more. I'd suggest doing that with sliding glass doors, rather than hinged doors. You can get pretty big sliders if you need to have large access opening between rooms, and the sight lines are fantastic. You can still get good isolation with sliders. The other big advantage of sliders is that they don't take up any floor space! Hinged doors have to swing out into the rooms on either side of the wall, so that "door sweep" area is basically not usable: you cant set up mics, instruments, gear, furniture, or anything in the "sweep" area, so you lose a lot of usable floor space like that. Sliding doors don't take up any space in the room, so you can use all of the floor area.

The ceiling hight on the left side of the building will be 4m and 3m to the far right
That's also a good height! For acoustics, room height is paramount, and especially for live rooms: instruments and mics like to have high ceilings. For that reason, I'd suggest flipping your plan around a little, with the iso booth on the left, under the higher ceiling, and the "utility" rooms (kitchen/bathroom) on the right, where the ceiling is lower. Having a lower ceiling for the kitchen and bathroom is not a problem. They don't need height, but the iso booth does.

"This means the ceiling in the control room will slant diagonally, so probably have to make a false ceiling and fill it up with rock wool?" Right! You do, indeed, need to get a level ceiling for the control room. It can slope from front to back of the control room (lower at the front, higher at the back), but it should not slope from left to right. The reason for this is symmetry: the left half of the room needs to be a "mirror image" of the right half, as much as possible, so that the acoustic response on both sides is the same. That way, your left ear and right ear hear the same "signature" in the room. If there's a difference in acoustics on the left and right side, the sound stage you hear will be "skewed" on way or the other, and you'll subconsciously try to compensate for that in your mixes. So your mixes won't translate well: they will seem a bit "offset" to left or right when you play them back in other places, or they just won't sound good, overall. So symmetry is important, and your ceiling needs to be about the same on the left and right. It CAN slope in this direction if you need to do that for structural reasons, but it still has to be symmetrical. For example, it can be higher in the center of the room, and lower out to the side walls.

Also, you'll need to have a "false ceiling" in any case! Even if your outer roof was already flat, you'd still need the inner-ceiling, because that's the only way you can get good isolation between rooms, and to the outside world. Here's some information on this issue, that you might find useful:
Deciding on isolation for your studio
How much isolation does your studio need? How can you figure that out? Is it even important?
Speaker setup, and the equilateral triangle
Angled walls: What are they for? Do you need them?
What is "room-in-a-room" construction?
What is MSM? How does it work?

"Total budget hopefully around $30.000. The only contractor we will hire is for the concrete foundation." 30k for 80m2 seems a little on the low side. That's around USD 375 per square meter. For a typical home studio with existing structure, the average range is around US$ 500 per square meter. I'm not sure about building materials costs in Sweden: maybe it is less expensive to build there... but I'd suggest revising your budget upwards.

Of course, the above is just the cost of building the studio itself, without considering audio equipment. Depending on what you want to do, and what gear you already have, that could add up to many more dollars.

A big part of studio design is the control room speakers: You should put some thought into that before you budget for the gear, and before you get into the details of the control room design. When I'm designing a control room, I usually start out with the speakers before considering anything else. Based on the basic room shape, I narrow the list down to speakers that are suitable for that specific size and shape, then consider the purpose of the studio, and narrow the list down again. If the studio is a high-end professional studio for commercial music production, the list will be a bit different than if it is a home hobby studio. Mastering studio is different again. Once you decide on the speakers, you can plan the room shape and layout in more detail, and that in turn will lead to the basic concept for the needed acoustic treatment.

So I'd suggest you do that too: look at the rough angles and shape of the room as you have it right now, look at all the speakers that are currently available in your area, and eliminate the ones that would not work well with your size and shape of room. Then consider what you plan to do in that room, and eliminate speakers that aren't good for that.

And of course, another major issue when choosing speakers (and designing the control room!) is whether or not you are going to "flush mount" your speakers (also called "soffit mounting"). I highly recommend doing that, since the benefits are really worth the effort. This choice (soffit mount, or not) greatly affects the overall room design, and the overall acoustic treatment as well. Most speakers can be soffit mounted, but some can't, so you need to take that into account as well. The dimensions of the speaker you decide on are really important for the soffit design: The soffits have to be big enough that the speakers can physically fit inside them, for example, and the size of the front baffle of the soffit depends to a large extent on the size of the speaker.

So there's a few more things that you might want to consider in your room design.

Probably your first step before doing any of the above, is deciding on how much isolation you need for your studio. You should determine that in decibels: More technically, this is "transmission loss". In other words, if you have a rock band in there, playing at 115 dBC, then how quiet must that be outside the room? Is it ok (and legal!) for the level to be 70 dBC outside the bulding, or must it be 40 dBC? But it also goes the other way: how loud are typical ambient noises outside your place? Wind, rain, thunder, hail, aircraft fling over, traffic on nearby roads, railways in the area, neighbors mowing lawns, dogs barking, cows, birds, etc., Compare that with how quiet do you need that to be inside the studio, so those sounds won't get captured by an instrument mic or vocal mic, and won't annoy you and the musicians when you are trying to track and mix?

You should put a lot of effort into determining this number (isolation for your studio), because that dictates the overall design and construction of the walls and ceiling. It’s one thing to isolate a studio for 35 dB, and a very different thing to isolate it for 60 dB. Completely different techniques and materials.

Once you have that determined, and your isolation system designed, you'll know how much of your 80m2 floor area is actually left over, within the isolated part of the building, so you can figure out where to put the internal walls between the rooms, to maximize usable space and acoustics. Once things you should consider: your kitchen and bathroom don't need to be isolated from the outside world! Only the studio itself needs to be isolated from the world (and also isolated from the kitchen and bathroom, of course.... you don't want the sound of a flushing toilet to get into your vocal mics!)

Anyway, that should give you some additional things to consider in your design. But you do have a good-sized space, so you certainly can have a successful studio there, if you design it well and build it properly.

- Stuart -

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 12:35
by eightamrock
Stuart gave you some great starting points here, Id take the budget consideration very seriously. In my medium-high isolation project (about 40-50db) the budget is already over $50k (USD) for just under 575 sqft. Roughly $90/sq ft. I am also doing all the work myself, only had contractors pour the pad. Here is a links to Stuarts cost equation on my thread :D

Soundman2020 wrote:Source of the post CSf = ( ( ( Ibg * R29 ) + Yd5R ) / 0.5 ) +1

Where:

CSf = Final Cost of your studio
Ibg = your Initial Best Guess (roughly: how much you'd like to spend, absolute max)
Ri29 = A Randomly select Integer in the range 2 to 9
Yd5R = any 5 digits taken out of Yesterday's Date and strung together, at Random

... and "+1" on the end, because no matter how hard you try, it always costs one dollar more

That seems to get a pretty accurate result!

I call that "Stuart's Studio Cost Law".


I'd add that while all the obtuse angles and corner control room design seems like a great idea and have many different benefits (and draw backs!) when considering budget and "predictability" of dimensions for room modes, it is sometimes much more efficient to just use rectangles. Pick a ratio that you like for the control room, make it fit your space and go from there. It will be cheaper and faster to get the treatment done once you are finished building if you go this route. It will also be cheaper and easier to build, which equates to getting more time back as well. If you are renting a space today you likely want to get into your own space as quickly as possible. You have plenty of space to make rectangles work, you dont need a corner control room, and in fact you will get even MORE usable space out of your design if you do this as well.

Take a look at amroc. and bob golds calculators.

https://amcoustics.com/tools/amroc
https://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm

BEFORE YOU POUR THE NEW PAD, have your engineer friend do a draft of where footings might need to be. If that building is run down you may need new supports, if you do, it may need specific footing depths for support. Studios are easily 3-5 times heavier than regular buildings. Skipping this step can cause you much pain down the road.

Lastly, john sayers forum is still alive under a new URL. https://Johnlsayersarchive.com after his passing the domain and hosting lapsed. We were able to recover most of the knowledge, but many of the attachments and images were lost.

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 12:48
by Soundman2020
:thu: Right! Great advice all around.

And adding to the above advice about the slab: If you need very high isolation, then there's also the option of pouring separate slabs: one for the outer leaf, and one for the inner leaf, isolated from each other by a small gap filled with suitable resilient material. Probably not necessary, but you do have the option in this case, since you are going to be pouring a new slab anyway. Doing it in parts is very little extra cost, and can get you better isolation, if slab flanking might be an issue.

- Stuart -

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 18:12
by gullfo
i would also factor into the equation using the space above the bathroom / kitchen for the hvac equipment unless you can put it into the new garage. fresh air will be needed :-) and i'd try to go with a full 4.2m on the outside wall with a truss roof frame. and 3.8m ceiling on the inside of the studio rooms. definitely if pouring slabs - separate ones for each rooms + one for the bath + kitchen.

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Wed, 2023-Sep-20, 18:35
by HoboRec
Wow that's some serious feedback, thank you so much!!

Here we go with some explanations and further question.


Soundman2020

On your plans, you are showing everything as only a single "leaf" walls, but in reality you'll probably want to do it all as "two leaf" walls, in order to get good isolation between rooms, and good isolation to the outside world. That takes up more space, of course, but it's necessary if isolation is important /and it usually is!)


Yeah, I thought I'll start with a simple sketch and figure out the construction after I have an idea about the layout of the rooms. I have built decoupled walls before in earlier studio builds and know the importance =)


You also show a set of double doors between the booth and the live room, but double doors isn't a good idea in a studio: it's hard to get them to seal properly when they are closed, and good seals is really important for isolation. In the final build, you will have two sets of double-doors there, back-to-back, which complicates things even more. I'd suggest doing that with sliding glass doors, rather than hinged doors. You can get pretty big sliders if you need to have large access opening between rooms, and the sight lines are fantastic.


Good point! Yeah I'd really like to have a large opening to utilise the full volume of both rooms soudwise. Where do one start looking for suitable sliding doors for this purpose? What are some key factors to look for?

I'd suggest flipping your plan around a little, with the iso booth on the left, under the higher ceiling, and the "utility" rooms (kitchen/bathroom) on the right, where the ceiling is lower. Having a lower ceiling for the kitchen and bathroom is not a problem. They don't need height, but the iso booth does.


The reason why I put the utility rooms where they are was to create a buffer between the live room and the street that runs right outside the entrance. It's not a super busy street and there're no neighbours across it but there are occasional traffic from cars, school busses and horses outside that I don't want in my recordings. Also the ceiling height would allow for me to make a loft with some sleeping places above the utility rooms.

30k for 80m2 seems a little on the low side. That's around USD 375 per square meter. For a typical home studio with existing structure, the average range is around US$ 500 per square meter. I'm not sure about building materials costs in Sweden: maybe it is less expensive to build there... but I'd suggest revising your budget upwards.


Haha I figured this would be the case. Yeah from what I can find building materials are pretty much cheaper here than USA for example. Just as an example a cheat of drywall is about $8 here. And I will get further discount on that. My fiancé is a magician when it comes to tracking down bargains for renovations like doors, windows, kitchen stuff ans so on. We have about $50.000 in our savings so there is a buffer. All studio specific things like acoustic treatment will be on top of the budget and will be financed by "my business". I already have all the gear like console, outboard, microphones and things so nu furhter costs there.

A big part of studio design is the control room speakers:


In the studio where I work now we use flush mounted Dynaudio M3. I love those, but will probably be too big for my room. I've boon looking at getting a used pair of Dynaudio M2 and flush mount those. I also have a pair of Amphion One18 at my home "office" right now that I love, but they can't be flush mounted. How would I go about that? Is it a possible scenario to have Dynaudio M2 in the wall and the Amphions as near fields in a good way?


Probably your first step before doing any of the above, is deciding on how much isolation you need for your studio.


I live in a rural area and neighbours are not too close. We've been playing drums and electric guitar at home, recording in our kitchen and our closest neighbours are fine with that. 70db outside would be totally fine. But with that said, I'd like it to be relatively well isolated, mainly because of occasional traffic just outside the entrance as I mentioned before. And I guess having the utility rooms the way I have them now would help?


If you need very high isolation, then there's also the option of pouring separate slabs:


Already been thinking about this to be honest. I would be pretty easy to at least have the control room separated in my current layout. Not sure if I can split up the existing slab to isolate better between the live room and utility rooms. I'll investigate.



eightamrock

Hey, thanks for also pushing the reality check button on the budget. As I wrote to Stuart, there are some more funds to take from. But we're really going to try to keep it down. And we have been building and renovating a lot so we know where we can make good deals.

You have plenty of space to make rectangles work, you dont need a corner control room, and in fact you will get even MORE usable space out of your design if you do this as well.


I like what you're saying about making it quicker and cheaper with rectangles. The thing is that at an earlier studio I had, my window in to the live room was on the side wall. Where I am now I have the window in front of me. I really don't want to go back to having it on the side. The only way I could get the dimensions I wanted and have a good view in front of me was this way. Or do you have an idea in mind?


gullfo

i'd try to go with a full 4.2m on the outside wall with a truss roof frame. and 3.8m ceiling on the inside of the studio rooms. definitely if pouring slabs - separate ones for each rooms + one for the bath + kitchen.


Hmm, not sure how that would connect to the existing house. The house is a really old house typical fot south Sweden. The walls are not higher than 2m and relatively high gable roof. So to not have it as low as our "home house" the skillion roof idea feels easier. Also it will look more like the existing structure. That way we don't need to apply for permits to build.

Also thanks for the sketch!! Really cool to see it that way. And also pretty much as I planned with decoupled wall framings and all.

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Fri, 2023-Sep-29, 12:54
by HoboRec
Soooo some progression with the planing here. Or setbacks, depending on how to look at it haha.

First of I want to ask a little about control room design. If I like eightamrock suggested, build out the whole thing in rectangles instead of angled walls, is it possible to get a good controlroom with the listening position on one of the long walls? The reason I ask is as I mentioned before that I really don't want to have the window with the view of the live room on my side. I worked like that before and it resulted in me looking out the window during long tracking sessions and getting tired in the one ear that was pointing towards the speakers in a weird way.

This is my I really liked the layout I came up with in my original post. But that leads to the next problem.

I've been talking to the authorities about permits and stuff, and apparently I'm not allowed to make that high slanted roof like I wanted. I have to build it with a truss roof frame. Which is what gullfo suggested. But I can't make the walls that tall, they have to be like 2,2-2,4 meters. This means that if I want to build the control room with a ceiling height of about 3,3 meters it will slant toward the back of the room because I don't have the height for it there. Would it even be possible to work out a functional control room like that or should I re-think the whole layout?

Here're some sketches to show the issue.
Screenshot 2023-09-29 at 10.23.18.png

Screenshot 2023-09-29 at 10.22.59.png

Screenshot 2023-09-29 at 10.22.32.png

Screenshot 2023-09-29 at 10.25.27.png


Any input or suggestions are highly appreciated

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Fri, 2023-Sep-29, 14:42
by gullfo
the CR mass layers need to enforce symmetrical response. that's one reason you can build it as a rectangle and then use angled surfaces to define the acoustics. with angled boundaries, you need to ensure the symmetry all around as some of the acoustics will be the boundaries and are essentially "fixed" in that regard (because you have doors, windows etc) and limited space for treatments (even if you do inside out walls). but having an off-angle boundary ceiling in the CR will only bring heartache later.

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Fri, 2023-Sep-29, 14:49
by HoboRec
gullfo wrote:Source of the post the CR mass layers need to enforce symmetrical response. that's one reason you can build it as a rectangle and then use angled surfaces to define the acoustics. with angled boundaries, you need to ensure the symmetry all around as some of the acoustics will be the boundaries and are essentially "fixed" in that regard (because you have doors, windows etc) and limited space for treatments (even if you do inside out walls). but having an off-angle boundary ceiling in the CR will only bring heartache later.


That's what I was afraid of. So how about rectangles sideways? Shorter distance to the back wall but seems like the shorter side walls will get less early reflection points since they are then further away?

New studio in south of Sweden

Posted: Sat, 2023-Sep-30, 16:49
by gullfo
why not have the CR with the mix desk facing the short wall, and a nice large window (or TV) on the side for interaction with the live room? in fact a large TV can be used in the front of the CR and another in the live room (where ever) and be almost the same as looking through a window. and if you get a proper video controller switch and have some admin interfaces around, you can use the same video inter-connection for all sorts of things - lyrics, video capture, options for multi-screen views around the rooms. etc. audio via headphones and talkback speakers.