<<Converting an Industrial Unit Into a Recording Studio- On a Budget>>

[Cuesound]

Hello everybody!

We are a collective of six engineers based in London that have decided to build our own studio. During the design process this forum has been a great asset, so many thanks to everyone who replies to threads and helped people out.

The studio is located in an industrial unit in East London, and we are on the ground floor with no one above or beneath us. The room is 13 metres (approx 42ft) long, 6.3 metres (approx 20ft) wide, and the height starts at 2.6 metres (approx 8.5ft) on the control room side, and slopes to 3.3 metres (approx 11ft) on the opposite side. All four main walls are brick walls, and the ceiling is constructed by joists going for the entire length of the room, with plywood on top of them, and one layer of plastered plasterboard underneath. The floor is made out of solid concrete. The entrance door is located on one of the shorter sides, and leads to the hallway of the industrial complex. The other short side has a window, and leads to the back of another industrial complex with no windows on it. Because of that we don't really have to worry about sound travelling through that back wall. We don't have a proper cad drawing of how we are doing it, but I've included a crude version of how it's going to look. Keep in mind that it's not to scale because of design changes, but everything is roughly in the right place, and should help giving you an overview.

The first problems we encountered were two rolled steel joists (RSJ) that run across the width of the room at two different places. There was no concrete around them, just one layer of plasterboard, so they pretty much provided a hole straight through to our two neighbours on either side. After filling the holes with concrete, we realised that the concrete walls only goes as high as the ceiling joists. At some points the joists run on top of the wall, but at other points they don't, which means that one layer of plasterboard on our side, and one layer of plasterboard on our neighbours side is all that is stopping sound travelling between the units. This is actually a problem we are still dealing with, so any advice would be appreciated.

There was already a stud partition in the room (see pictures 13-16) when we started renting the unit. We decided not to move it, but to use it as the inner frame from the control room side. I'm going to refer to that frame as the inner frame for the rest of this post. It's placed underneath one of the RSJ's. Looking back, moving the frame in front of the girder would probably make a few things a bit easier for us, but room size wise, and the fact that we could cover up the girder made us make that decision. It's still possible for us to move it, but that would seriously shrink the air gap between the inner and outer frame. Still, the gap is massive (2ft), so it does give us some leeway.

We had a long discussion between us to try and decide wether to build stud partitions with plasterboard, or a brick wall. In the end we decided to build a dual frame stud wall, with two layers of 12.5mm plasterboard on one side, and one layer of 8mm plasterboard plus one layer of 12.5mm plasterboard on the other side. We have a lot of space, so we decided to go for a two feet air gap, which will be filled with 300mm (almost 1ft) of 16kg/m3 (1pcf) insulation on each side.

For the outer frame, we connected the top stud beam with screws through the ceiling plasterboard and into the joists. We then cut away the plasterboard on either side, to sever that connection, and also to get access to the proper ceiling. In fact, the ceiling plasterboard for the entire air gap between the frames has been removed, and we have put bricks and concrete between every ceiling joist. This was done to try and “extend” both walls as high as possible. The wall placement does make the inner frame in particular quite interesting because of the RSJ that runs above it. See pictures 4-6 to see how we did it. The wall never touches the girder, but is connected to the ceiling joists with the help of those wooden braces. The RSJ is in contact with the joists, so the benefit of this is questionable, but we thought such a design would make it easier for us to build a room within a room in the future. We have two acoustic doors that we bought off another recording studio, so we are going to install one door on each frame, and try to create some kind of airlock. The window design has been taken from Rod Gervais' book, and consists of one piece of 10.8mm laminated glass, and one piece16.8mm laminated glass. Both frames are finished up to where the door frames are going to be, and we have started screwing plasterboard to the outer frame, and apply mud to it. You can see the pictures to get an idea of where we are at the moment. Most pictures were taken today.

However, over the last couple of days, the brick question has resurfaced. The reason we are thinking about bricks again is the prices we have been getting for green glue, which we intend to use between the plasterboard layers. Basically we could build a brick wall for £80 more than what we will have to spend on green glue. We were thinking that the brick wall would probably give us much better isolation, so that it might be worth to do it. The fact that one of us now feel quite confident about building it also helps, as labour would probably cost us quite a lot, and used to be part of the equation.

We can't really afford to build a room within a room at the moment, so our philosophy has been to try and make it as easy as possible to do so when we can afford it. This would only be for the control room side. The live room is simply too big for it to be realistic.

In addition to the live room and control room, we are building a drum booth in one of the corners (See pictures 11-13). We managed to get a soundproof removable wall, made out of several partitions, on ebay for a really good price, so we are going to do the outer wall with those. They look like the kind of things you might see in conference suites, and their weight is ridiculous, which bodes well for their performance as isolators. They interlock with each other, but for the angles, we have had to do stud work. We also decided to place them on top of a stud frame to make it easier for us to secure them. Like I mentioned they are really heavy, and we really have to make sure that they are secured properly. We are doing a stud layer on top of them as well, where we will connect the joist hangers that will support the joists that are going straight into the wall. The two brick walls that form the corner will not be covered by these partitions. Inside this “shell”, we will build a stud partition room. This will be a single frame wall. We have a third door that we got from Realworld studios, which we are going to use for the drum booth. It's 1.5m wide, and has quite a big window in it. This makes it really heavy, so more stud work is going to be used to create a strong enough frame.

Hopefully this gives you guys an overview of what we are doing at the moment. This leads me on to a few questions we have been asking over the last couple of days.

1)In regards to bricks, would it be feasible and/or beneficial to build anything with them at this point? One solution we were thinking about were to build a layer of bricks that would be airtight to the plasterboard on the outer frame. Would this act as a single leaf? Are there any other solutions that might work better?

2)The inner frame of the main partition is a strange one. After looking at the pictures and reading my explanation, do you have any advice on how to make it as good as possible?

3)When reading about soundproofing it's usually not specified wether the plasterboard wall should be plastered or not. Is that normal practice, or would that negate the effect of the green glue?

4)Since we are not building a room within a room on either side, the two frames have to be connected to the the side walls, and to the ceiling joists. Are there anything we can do to decouple the two frames and help isolation between the live room and control room?

5)When building the drum booth, would it at all be beneficial for us to do a floating floor, and if so, what kind of prices are we looking at? I have read a lot about floating floors, and the general consensus seems to be that it's not worth it, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

6) We assume that the office partitions are going to perform quite well, but unlike a regular stud wall, the studs in this wall aren't covered by the material it supports. Is there anything we could do address that weakness?

7)What can we do to help reduce transmission between us and our neighbours? We have thought about putting bricks and cement on top of the existing wall, so that it extends all the way to the ceiling. Where the joists are in the way, we could build some kind of “shelf” system to reinforce the wood with brick and cement. Could that be a solution?

If anyone has got any advice or comments that doesn't answer the questions, it would still be really appreciated. There are so much to think about when it comes to studio construction, and with our budget (which is £2500-3000 for building), every little piece of advice can be very helpful. Hopefully we have provided all the necessary information, but if anything was unclear or not mentioned, please ask, and we should be able to provide an answer. We're aiming to update this thread as we get things moving along, and perhaps ask more questions, as we are sure there will be more of them as we do more work.

[Cuesound]

Photo Updates

[jwl]

Do you have Rod Gervais' book? If not, get it right away.

The first thing to do is to be clear about a 2-leaf design: what it is, and why you want it. Rod discusses this at length in his book.

Isolation is about mass, airtightness, and proper construction techniques. A well-built brick wall can give you quite a bit of mass.