I should get round to showing my WFH studio which is far from complete - and I started a year before you did.
Please do share as it progresses.
Alright, here goes. We started in November 2019 so this shows you the last 18 months' work all in one go. My wife and I live in a flat (the white circle on the right) and as musicians we cannot rehearse nor record at home because of the noise we make and the noises we hear. We found a small commercial premises in our building for sale.
After clearing it we moved a doorway. The steel track is there to show where we will build two walls to create a rectangular studio. Where the old doors are will be storage space and where the camera is will be a place to park our bicycles.
Behind the moved (open) doorway will be a miniature kitchen and then a toilet with its own sink. The plumber discovered that the building had been made with non-standard size fittings so much had to be ripped out and replaced. We didn't want white tiles anyway.
Someone we had recorded a CD for introduced us to Jozef, a lovely builder and handyman, who built these two walls and has done most of the work you will see.
To make this an isolated (technical speak for soundproof) studio we have to build another room inside the rectangular room. You can tell by the shadows that the steel studs do not touch the outer room.
The studs are shorter than the height of the room to allow for all the isolation hangers that Slavo is installing here. They will hold the new ceiling while keeping it acoustically separate from the original ceiling. The gap between the inner and outer rooms is filled with insulation.
The inner room's walls and ceiling are made of a layer of OSB and ...
... multiple layers of fire-rated (pink) plasterboard. We got John Brandt (
jhbrandt.net) to design the room for sufficient isolation (60dB reduction is the target) and to give us a room with acoustics suitable for recording and mixing.
The toilet with new tiles, waiting for its sink.
Worktops in the toilet room and kitchen area for their respective sinks.
HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning). H and AC are handled by the air conditioner and V is handled by this ventilator. Large ducts are used to keep the air speed slow and quiet. The ducts go through 4 silencers (you can see two) to further quieten any noises in the air so that recordings will not be interrupted by motorbikes, ambulances nor the need to open the door to let fresh air in. Peace and quiet at last!
A lick of paint.
To complete the isolation phase we need doors. While I wait for them to arrive from Spain I started on the ceiling acoustics. A drop ceiling with handmade acoustically transparent tiles and the entire space above filled with insulation apart from where the other two silencers and the air ducts are. The 6 square holes in the drop ceiling are for lights.
I wanted something a bit more inspiring than an office ceiling so I made 7 hexagons.
And that brings us right up to today. I am making the next thing to hang from the ceiling, called a cloud, so that there will be more than 40cm of insulation above my head when sat mixing.
The difference between psyclist's studio and ours is that he will be recording his voice which means down to about 80Hz. Music goes down a further 2 octaves to around 20Hz so both the isolation and acoustic treatment have to be thicker.
