The early stages of the studio build. The door and window to the old control room (which is now a drum studio) have now been blocked off by an inner wall.
Damp & Rotten
When we first moved in during the summer, the place was a disaster zone. It had suffered from major damp for many years, everything was rotting, damp and smelling, and it was full of old stuff that was being stored there.
The first thing we had to do was fix the roof upstairs as it's an old iron roof that's full of holes. We hatched a cunning plan to build a simple roof out of thick polly sheet inside the original roof so it would catch all the drips and send them out through the eves - it actually works! Next we had to pull up the damp, rotting, wooden floor, and pull down the plasterboard ceiling sheets that were hanging and broken, and the fibreglass insulation. We also had to reconnect the power to next door, and get some lighting sorted out.
We rehearsed regularly in our stripped out room, with the constant wiring of the dehumidifier. We decided that we'd put a new ceiling up and floor down, and gradually started thinking about turning it into a small studio as well, as our guitarist (Strings) is an experienced recording and mixing engineer. Strings' design for a recording/rehearsal studio in our limited space seemed simple enough at first, but as with any project like this it ended up being more complicated, expensive and time consuming than we had thought.
The Design
Strings' design brief was to convert a reasonably small space (half of an old recording studio) into a full recording/rehearsing studio with a control room and live room, and do it on a microscopic budget. It also had to be fairly easy to build as we would have to build it our selves, and none of us are builders!
Strings' design visualisation
Strings' design visualisation to check that we could fit a killer whale in the studio just in case we ever needed to.
The band want to do conventional multitracking recordings, but also record their rehearsals live. Space was very limited so the design incorporated a compact control room in one corner, surrounded by an L shaped live area. The live area will have a dead end and a live end.
Stu screwing something
The control room is a very important part of any recording studio. It houses most of the recording equipment and is used for monitoring and mixing. It needs to have reasonable sound isolation from the live room. Getting a high level of sound isolation requires expensive materials that take up space and building techniques such as floating floors, walls and ceilings, and that wasn't an option for us. In any case, extreme isolation is normally not really needed. So we compromised on this in order to keep within our budget. The walls our built as two partition walls, one inside the other, that come in contact with each other in as few places as possible to reduce sound transmission. They are stuffed with Rockwool to reduce mid and high frequency sound, and are covered in high density plasterboard to reduce the mid to low end sounds. The walls are angled to help reduce parallel surfaces that cause reverberations and standing waves. The angled walls also help increase space inside and outside the control room. Two quadruple glazed windows, and a door will help to block sound while allowing access.
Control room door viewed through the main studio door
Sound block boards fitted to the outside of the control room. The wall box and loom have been installed.
Inside the control room - lots of Rockwool!
Ceiling beam covered and low energy lights fitted
Control room during demo recording - no windows yet, and the door doesn't close, but we get by.
Mixing our first demo tracks in the unfinished control room. There is no acoustic treatment in the control room yet which makes mixing very difficult!
