Quabbin Hill Studios, Eastern Ontario, Canada

[JBaptista68]

Phase 1 of our build will include the Control Room and Isolation Room A. Total space is 1500 square feet with 300 square feet dedicated to office space where I have another business. We've still have about 800 square feet left for off the floor recording in seperate section of the building. Updating pictures of the build on our website.

Studio Build

[JBaptista68]

More work, more pictures. We were originally going to go with a smaller window but we felt that we needed to add some dimensional space to the room and that it would be better for interaction between the folks in the booth and the control room.

We've found good quality laminated glass (should land in the next two weeks) and we've designed a foam and silicon groove system that will seperate it from the structure yet keep sound from penetrating. Should be quite sound proof as we will have over six inches of air between the two panes of glass. Same staggered wall design. Everything is being screwed vs. nailing in order to add rigidity to the structure.

Equipment has started to arrive and we're benchmarking a few different DAW systems with the new ECHO Audio 12 channel interfaces. We're going to start with 24 channels of realtime recording and then add a third 12 channel unit for 36 total channels. We've been running a demo of Sonar in 64 bit mode on Vista and I must say that it is so far the fastest running and most stable compared to the 32 bit on Vista or XP. We're not sure if we're willing to make the sacrifice in terms of available plugins but the stability is important.

I will post some design drawings of the mixing area/console furniture we've designed. One of my other business is an automotive restoration business and we have some really cool paint options, so the plan initially is for a wild custom paint job on the console desk. Or at least a really shiny piano black.

[JBaptista68]

More design elements to throw up. Our budget doesn't allow for a multi thousand dollar argosy desk. We have the skills to produce our own.

Obviously, the console is integrated directly into the desk as well as all of our rack units, processing gear etc. It will also be the control surface for the DAW.

[Cameron Johnson]

Hey there,

Very cool! I was actually just in Mallorytown a little while ago looking at a boat I was thinking of buying... when you're finished - mind if I pop over and check this out?

Good luck on the project - I hope all works out well!

Cheers,
Cam

[JBaptista68]

Good to hear from someone in Eastern Ontario! I'll post it here once we're close to completion and you can definitely pop out and check it out.

[seven]

Cool space. I'm interested to see this come together.

Funny you should bring up your choice on the DAW. I just bought two Echo AudioFire 12s and have been playing with a Sonar 8 demo on 64bit Windows XP. Hardware-wise I decided on a dual Xeon motherboard and populating it with two quad 2.33Ghz CPUs with 8GB of RAM (to start).

I don't have my motherboard and CPU's yet but I tested the setup on an identical board with only one CPU and one of the AudioFire and it ran well. No complains so far.

I'm interested to hear how 3 AudioFire devices stack up.

[JBaptista68]

New updates. We've started the building of the console desk. We made a slight change to the design of the legs. We built L style legs by laminating several pieces of plywood together which is extremely strong. The underside of the console desk will have perforations and sound dampening to absorb some of the noise from the computers that will be on the shelf underneath. The nice thing about being able to build this desk ourselves is that we can control where everything goes vs. buying a pre-fab desk. The other nice thing (I know that my labour isn't free) is that we save a ton of money compared to buying something like an Argosy desk. The next decision will be whether we paint this the black from the original drawing or we do a crazy paint job?

[inlinenl]

nice desk : BUT .....

I hope those weels are not the premanent, otherwise get better ones .. and you're going to hit the stands all the time with your legs/chairs ... get them to the sides .. you need free moving space from the left to the right ..

but again, enjoy seeing you guys do it with your own hands ... respect ...

[JBaptista68]

The picture is a bit of an optical illusion. The legs don't actually stick out as far as it looks. Side to side is perfect as we designed it and then re-tested. The wheels are also deceiving as they are the high end industrial locking wheels rated at 200lbs each. Thanks for the suggestions!

[inlinenl]

Originally Posted by JBaptista68

The picture is a bit of an optical illusion. The legs don't actually stick out as far as it looks. Side to side is perfect as we designed it and then re-tested. The wheels are also deceiving as they are the high end industrial locking wheels rated at 200lbs each. Thanks for the suggestions!

well if you're planning on a wooden floor .. are your sure those wheels are not going to carve in ....

nice desk guys ...

[JBaptista68]

Originally Posted by inlinenl

well if you're planning on a wooden floor .. are your sure those wheels are not going to carve in ....

nice desk guys ...

epoxied concrete floors

[jrhoden]

looks great so far

keep up the good work

[JBaptista68]

Work continues. We finished the trimming of the console desk and gave it a good sanding until it was silky smooth.

Next step was the first coat of stain. We are using a combination stain/urethane in a gloss that should give us a nice deep piano black type finish. First coat has been applied and tomorrow we'll put on the next one. Should be a total of three coats. One thing is for sure, when you've got a compressor and a spray gun it cuts your painting time by about two thirds.

[seven]

That desk is a nice piece of furniture. I can't wait to see it finished and filled with goodies.

[greatgreatriver]

Good work bro! Looks nice. Respect!

[JBaptista68]

Work has continued on the build. We've wired the various rooms and put in some future proofing for extra audio, video and networking. Insulation is in the drywall is half done.


We've got multiple feeds for audio, video for each of the rooms. 16 channels of balanced from ISO 1 and then 6 channels each for the large room and ISO 2. We changed our minds on the large window and instead opted for remote video feeds for each room back into the main control room.

[theshizon]

Originally Posted by JBaptista68

epoxied concrete floors

i just did some work at a new home that got their basement concrete epoxied. it looked amazing.
.. any research on how the sound in your control room will be affected by it compared to say a hardwood or parquet floor?

btw im out west in edmonton building a vocal booth
Vocal/iso booth contruction
heres my build diary.
id like some advice if you have any.

peace
p.s. canada rules

[JBaptista68]

I don't think it should be that much different than a hardwood. Obviously wood would have slightly less reflection than concrete but I don't think the difference would be that great. Maybe one of the experts in the forum can weigh in.



Since we're going to treat the rooms with lots of traps I don't think it should be an issue as we want to retain a little bit of life. Worst case if we think it is too much we can add a small rug to the floor and see what happens.

My other company Ultimate Performance Car, ships to Edmonton all of the time. We even have a local number there.

On your Iso booth wall, if you can, the double wall will make a huge difference in sound isolation.

[JBaptista68]

The drywall is up in the control room and iso booth. The next area is a double duty area that is both an iso area as well as a lounge.

Don't worry, the wall isn't going to be pink. This is the tinted primer base that goes under the red. Red is one of the worst paints for coverage. We're going to need lots of coats of paint.



Okay that is better, this is what the red looks like. It takes a huge amount of paint to make the red look even.


Here is ISO B, which is doubling as the trim prep room for now. We've got a huge amount of trim for the control room to cut.

This is what a whole bunch of bass traps look like in a pile. We've got an initial build of 48 traps for the two rooms and then more from there for the second room. Once the Control room is done we'll be going crazy with the bass trap build.

[JBaptista68]

So we're probably about 3/4's of the way now in our build and I thought we might share some of our learnings so far. This may come in handy if you're planning your build.

1) No matter what you do the quality of wood these days is horrible. Almost everything is warped. You need to look at each piece as you are assembling as they will probably be the opposite warp of what you want.

2) A second set of hands is really useful especially when putting up walls and drywall. One of the best things we could have purchased was a drywall lift. If you don't have one, either rent one or buy one.

3) Plan the spacing of your studs really well so that you reduce the amount of drywall trimming. Drywall is by far the most time consuming part of the build and the more one piece sheets that you put up the faster your build will be. We probably would have changed some dimensions had we thought that far ahead.

4) We have a good budget and contingency in our plan. One thing to make sure is that you budget for the little things. Screws, nails and other things will add up pretty darn quick.

5) Make sure you budget for the finishing items such as paint and trim. Once again these items add up pretty quick.

6) The last item is something that affects us all. The ability to judge time. We're doing this project ourselves and as such you can only work on it when other things aren't happening in regular business and family life. Your project will take longer than you budget. If you factored two months, it will take three. Count on it.

There you go, we'll keep sharing as we go...

[JBaptista68]

Most of the paint in the control room is done and now we're going to finish the trim and acoustic treatments. Once this is done we can focus on finishing the drywall mud and taping in ISO1 as well as our second room.

We figure we will probably have to build over 60 traps before we're done so we built a quick jig and then designed a mock-up trap to see what would work. We like a really clean look so we decided to make something where we could paint the enclosure and then stretch the fabric inside the trap before adding the insulation.

Here is a picture of the jig.

The jig holds the trap in place so that it is easy to use the brad nailer and put it all together. We've used as thin an MDF as we possibly could so you need to be really careful that the brad nails don't pop through.


We worked out a few bugs in the system and developed a bit of a groove. It took about half the day to make 8 traps.

Each of the bass traps gets a simple inset boarder that we use to attach the cloth and also hold back the insulation. Makes for a really clean looking trap when it is done.

Here is a picture of the finished prototype trap. We attached two small pieces of wood on the bottom that keep the trap an inch away from the wall. There have been some recent changes in the building code so it is almost impossible to find 24" insulation here so we're going with 16" wide insulation and upping the quantity of traps.

You can also see some of the trim that is going up. This really finished the room quite nicely. The finished traps will be painted in black and then the cloth inserts will vary. We have different coloured cloth that we are using for each trap. A spray gun makes quick work of painting the traps. Part of the reason we are going to build all of the traps now is that we can paint them all in our ISO room and not make a huge mess elsewhere.

I also thought some abstract art would look great in the studio so I've unleashed my two creative geniuses. My daughters 3 and 6 have started to create some really cool looking pieces of art that will be featured in the different rooms.



It is starting to look like something which is exciting. Still a long way to go however but I'm really happy with the colour combinations for this room as well as how the trim is looking. More to come soon !!

[JBaptista68]

Here is the first finished bass trap. I'm glad we built a prototype as we learned quite a few things before jumping into the final set of traps. We put up the first trap and it actually fell off the wall because we had installed the eye hooks in a weaker spot than it looked. The re-design has a small brace on the back where the actual eye hooks attached.

[JBaptista68]

We added more traps to the front wall today. Here are some pics. More to come including the building of the overhead cloud and the balance of the traps.

[JBaptista68]

A little bit of progress this weekend, the weather is starting to get nice and we've got quite a few other chores here on the farm.

We just built the first overhead cloud. The one that will be going over the mix position in the control room. We're kind of working from front to back to build and place acoustical treatment, then we'll evaluate and see if we need more.

We used a slightly thicker MDF for the main frame and then each section is designed to accept one piece of the 3" mineral wool. The whole thing was covered with some thinner MDF to act as a small lip so that we can staple fabric to the inside. Painted black to match the other frames and we can hang it tommorow. I think this is another job for our handy dandy drywall lift.

Here are some pics...

[Trev@Circle]

Good work man (though you might find you need some more serious bass trapping in those corners)! I wish I had the patience/inclination to get my hands dirty!

[JBaptista68]

Thanks man, we've got 10 more traps to put in including two on the front ceiling/wall, 2 more in the back corners and then 6 in the other ceiling/wall combos. I hope that will be sufficient but if not, we will have to re-evaluate the situation.

[JBaptista68]

More acoustical treatments happening but we need to do some prelimary work for our first project so we moved in some gear and buttoned up the room so that no dust can get in. Temporarily set-up some of the gear so that we can do some basic layout work. Here are some pics of the front half of the control room. The next step is to finish ISO1 (tape and mud) and then ISO2/Lounge can get drywall. Nice to do something other than drywall for a change. The room is full of furniture that won't be there after the other rooms are done. I also wanted to have an audio source available as I put up the rest of the absorption and trapping. At the mix position I have to say that I am extremely pleased with how it sounds and it can only get better when the rest of the traps go in.

[Cameron Johnson]

*knees wobbling*

looking wicked, my friend. I can't wai tt'ill it's done so I'll have an excuse to pop into Mallorytown again!

[JBaptista68]

Thanks, the rest of the place is still a giant pile of dust and I need to get the rest of the drywall hung in the ISO2/lounge area. I just needed to do something other than drywall/mudding for a bit. Time has been at a bit of a premium as my media business is crazy busy so we tried to get the control room as close as possible so that I could at least do some basic song structure and rough tracking.

[seven]

That is looking really nice.

How does it sound so far?