Studio Design Part 2

So we have finished our recording studio! You can read all the planning materials on our Studio Design part 1 post here .

Our recording studio has 3 rooms: a Control Room, a Tracking Room, and an Overdub Booth. Here are pictures of the room before we got started.

The Overdub Booth before we got started 

The walls had a lot of work that needed to be done

The Tracking Room before we got started

The Control Room once we started painting

Another shot of the Control Room

We spent a week straight painting all the rooms. 

The Tracking Room Painted

Another shot of the Tracking Room Painted

Entrance to the Tracking Room Painted

The Overdub Booth being painted

Once all the painting was done, we had to address the acoustics. We go into more detail in our previous post, but one of the biggest problems in a control room is low frequencies building up and resonating in the room. It takes a very thick, dense material to absorb low frequencies. We found an insulation company in Nashville called SPI that makes 4" thick rigid fiberglass insulation, exactly what we needed. 

Since low frequencies become problems most often in corners, we decided to line all four corners of the room with triangular cuts of the rigid fiberglass. We also had to build a wood framing system to hold the insulation together. 

First we had to cut all the wood at 45 degree angles to fit into the corners of the rooms.

The we used a right angle (which was actually a box for a pedal of mine...) 

Lastly we added the faces to the right angle cuts and then the frames were done.

The next stage was to cut the insulation into triangular pieces and stuff them into the frames. Lastly we covered them in burlap and stacked them so they would reach from the floor all the way up to the ceiling.

The rigid fiberglass triangular pieces used in the corners

The burlap was then wrapped tight and stapled around the wood frames

You can see me in the corner running lots of tests on the room to check and make sure it was acoustically balanced.

After all 8 large triangular bass traps were built we moved on to building rectangular bass traps to hang on the walls and ceiling. These were much easier to build, make a wooden rectangular frame the size of a piece of insulation and then cover it in burlap and pop the insulation in. 

The frame for a bass trap

The burlap pulled around the frame.

The insulation being pushed into the frame

Some of the bass traps were used to hang on the walls using mortar screws.

Some were used to hang on the ceiling to prevent upward reflections.

Once we got all our bass traps hung and corner traps placed we had one more big goal ahead. The overdub booth needed to sound bigger. In acoustics, the way you make a room sound bigger is to make the walls feel further away. This can be accomplished with certain types of diffusers, which scatter sound.

Using a very specific Mathematic formula called a Quadratic Residual formula, the height of each post on our diffuser was determined.

Each square block represents a 1.5 inch wide square of wood. Each number represents the corresponding height below the diagram. We then cut enough of each length to make 8 diffusers, over 1000 cuts! 

Us gluing each piece of wood on one at a time

A completed diffuser

All 8 diffusers painted and on the walls

So with our bass traps and corner traps and diffusers all built and hung, all we had left was to install the track lighting (florescent lights are terrible!) Get the wiring run, and tidy up a bit.

So now what you all have been waiting for... here are the final photographs of our recording studio.