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Who am I
Hi all! I've recently joined the forum - what a great place!
Let me introduce myself first. My name is Tom. I'm a 30-year-old guy from The Netherlands. I've always been involved with music, one way or another. I started out with playing piano, having had lessons during most of high school. Somewhere half way through I picked up electric bass. I then studied bass guitar at a conservatory. That is also when I started producing (mostly electronic) instrumental music. For the last 3-4 years I've been playing mostly acoustic guitar. I work full-time as a mobile app developer these days and music has become more of a hobby again.
My girlfriend and I have been fortunate enough to buy a freestanding house with a freestanding garage on the same property. The objective is to transform that entire garage to a studio. We expect to get the keys to the house end of June this year. Although I won't start building the studio for some time (we plan on renovating the 2nd floor first), I would like to prepare as best I can!
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Purpose
Producing and creating
I produce (semi-) electronic music, something I mainly do in Ableton Live with synthesizer plugins. I often incorporate electric (bass)guitar and my hardware Moog.
I also produce hiphop with a group of friends. This is usually done on the spot, where some of us take turns in adding ideas to the beat while others hang around the room, writing lyrics. At some point, we start recording vocals.
Mixing
I like being in control and that includes being in control of the process. So I usually mix my own recordings/productions. I'm not so much interested in mastering (yet).
Recording bands/groups
Something I'm not doing yet but do often dream of, is recording bands. However, I see that many bands nowadays do multi-tracking (recording one instrument at a time) which can be done in a single room I suppose.
I often fantasise about this growing organically up to a point where I could dial back my main job with one day a week - but this is not something I want to lay (financial) pressure on.
Goals
I want to be able to have an acoustic drum kit in there without disturbing the neighbours. I also want the large room to not disturb the neighbours either - so I basically want to sound isolate the entire building (if that's sensible/possible). I of course would love the room to sound good - I hope the size of it is adequate (one of the reasons to let go of a live-/control room was size constraints).
The plan
The garage in question is built with cavity walls. It is about 55m2 in surface area and has a flat roof, with two skylights in it.
- floorplan_garage.jpg (41.13 KiB) Viewed 33 times
- floorplan_garage.jpg (41.13 KiB) Viewed 33 times
At first I really wanted to create a layout that includes a control room, live room and iso booth. Also because it just look cool as hell. But I later realised that this would compromise the control room too much - while I expect to spend the vast majority of time in that control room. So, I am now pretty set on it becoming a single room studio with a separate iso booth (large enough to also record drums).
Right now I'm still very much in the preparation stage. I've finished reading Rod Gervais' book and I've started on Philip Newell's book.
I plan to have a proper HVAC system in there and a dedicated circuit/breaker box, with a "star layout" (I understood that this is best for studios).
I would love a window in the drum booth to be able to see the performer while recording.
Questions
- 1) Any feedback on my single-room layout? Any oversights?
2) Is it true that the brick walls will be the outer leaf?
1) And that it's best to beef up the brick wall from inside the garage with double layer gypsum board?
2) To then build a room within (including an air gap of 2" between the leafs), constructed of a single wall (outside-to-inside: ~100mm insulation and then double gypsum board)?
3) Will this structure yield enough transmission loss to keep my neighbours from hearing drums / bass guitars? (from my experience rehearsing with bands, I think 108-112dB is the max. volume)
3) I'll probably need to decouple the drum/iso booth from the main room
1) For the walls/ceilings that seems somewhat straight forward - but what about the floor?
2) In general - how do I best construct a floor over the concrete slab?
4) Is an air-lock necessary to the outer world?
5) Is an air-lock necessary between the drum booth and main room?
6) Based on the first plan, with the control+live rooms, I estimated the material costs for the walls only, to be around 6K euros. Is that realistic? If you'd have to guess: what would the entire single-room studio build roughly cost? I plan to do as much of the building I can myself (and some handy friends). HVAC and some of the electrical will probably have to be done by a contractor.
Some rough material cost numbers:
Plasterboard (9.5mm) per m2: 3.25 EUR
44mm x 94mm x 1000mm wooden beam: 2.50 EUR
100mm thick fiberglass per m2: 6.35 EUR
Thank you for reading - any and all feedback will be greatly appreciated!
Cheers, Tom
