Building My Studio: Part 2 (Getting Started)

In my last entry, I discussed the thought process one should go through in planning their studio, and explained what my thoughts and priorities were. Once you have all the general ideas and plans, it's time to get serious about what you need to do to convert those ideas to a useable workspace.


Layout and ergonomics are extremely important. Acoustically, it is best if your monitoring position is approximately 38% back from the front wall, and that your speakers point down the longest part of your room. Before you drive a single nail, you should know what type of desk you'll use, where it will go in the room, where your monitors will go, where your instruments will go, where your friends and clients will sit, and so forth. Make sure that you think through everything you need to do in your workspace, and that your rough plan and ideas take these issues into consideration. check out GIK Acoustics, Realtraps, Auralex, and John Sayers Site for mountains of information that will help you with this.


Once you are confident that your rough plan and ideas are "on track", it's time to get down to details. Room shape, dimensions, and overall volume are very important factors that can make or break the acoustics in your studio. If your room dimensions are all divisible by the same number, you are going to have problems with room modes and nodes. In laymans terms, what this means is that you can have an unusually large build up or lack of certain frequencies in your room at different areas. For example, a room with 12x10x8 dimensions is not ideal because all of the dimensions are divisable by the same number (2).


My room dimensions were pretty good, but the front of my room was not symetrical, and for accurate monitoring, it needed to be.





My room was not the same length running the entire width of the room. A little over 2/3 of the room was about 8" longer than the rest. My solution to this was to modify the left front wall, by building a second wall over it. But, instead of evening the entire wall, I only did approximately 1/3 of the wall. This resulted in a wall that was symetrical, but was about 8" longer in the center of my room. I felt that this would help with the bass response in the room as well as help combat room modes and nodes by having different dimensions in different parts of the room. On top of that, it added a little more character to the room. In this photo, you can see the wall, which was the first physical step in the construction of my studio.



After turning one doorway into a wall, and one wall into a doorway, the walls were all correctly framed and I turned my attention to the floor.




I laid contractor grade plastic on the floor to help keep any moisture from creeping in. Around the edges, studs were laid on the floor to "frame" the floor of the room and also secure the plastic sheeting firmly in place. With all this done, I was now ready to begin serious construction.



I'll go into detail on some popular floor construction methods, and how I did MY floor in the next installment of this series. Stay tuned!