Xark,

If someone did want to start buying equipment to start a quality studio, what would you suggest they buy first?

Richey - Starting a "quality" studio is a BIG order! The gear you use is almost secondary. The most important thing about a recording space is the recording room itself. Next is the control room. I'm speaking of these as the actual rooms you record and listen in. If the rooms are bad, so will be the recordings! But I also understand the process of getting to the point of "building" your own studio.

I bought lots of gear before I had a space dedicated to recording and listening. I started buying in the 70's with tape units and mics. From there it progressed to more and more outboard gear, until one day a former girlfriend, (who had just turned down a proposal... Silly girl who has been married twice since and is single once again... Man was I lucky!,) asked me a question instead of saying "yes!" "If you could do anything you wanted, and knew you couldn't fail at it, what would you do?" My answer was to open a studio.

Hell, I'd been in plenty of them through the years, my discipline is acoustic engineering, and I had a crap load of gear that needed a permanent home. I found the perfect house. Plaster walls and ceilings. Hardwood floors. Almost 100 years old. I turned the first floor into studio and went from there. I had to reconstruct a lot of the space. Cutting an opening for the control room window. (3 1/2' x 6') I had to remove walls and add support for the floor above. I had to remove floors and rebuild them from scratch. Install sound reduction and sound control. I spent a year demolishing and rebuilding.

Then came the surprise. I thought I was ready to open a studio, but, even with all the gear I had, I wasn't really close to having everything I needed. (I'm still not, in my view. There's hundreds of mics I'd love to have. There's pres, compressors and other units that would be really sweet. Now it's just down to money. I've bought all the under $1000 stuff there is, that I want, and now it's all high dollar!) Computer problems also arose. They weren't really fast enough in 2001 and chaining interface units was a real pain. Running the software with a few effects plugged in was enough to make it crash. My first change in plan was to spend $20,000 on gear. I bought a digital console, an HDR, (hard disk recorder,) more mics, better pres. It was kind of a shock, but it was all worth it because I can't fail at this. (At least I can't as long as I have a job that's paying for it all!)

Actually, since then, everything I buy for the studio is paid for by the studio. I did finally get married to a really wonderful woman in 2005. But, like most women, she wanted a living room, a dining room and a bedroom! (OK... I agreed with her on the last one.) This meant I had to move the studio from the house.

There is an old garage building at the rear of my property. Concrete block that was insulated so I already had a good start. I spent the next 6 months building the studio inside of that building. This time it was really done right. (Not that the first studio was bad, it was a GREAT room for recording, and still is for playing, but there were limits to what I could do with the existing structure. There is always the thought that if something went wrong and I had to sell it, I wouldn't want to have to tear a lot of stuff apart to turn it back into a house. Out back, each room in the new studio is a separate construction. No room touches the building outside of it. Even the floors were floated so they don't actually touch the concrete floor below them. Each room is also separate from all the other rooms. Double doors, double glass, double insulation and a dead air space between them. It was another $5000 in construction costs, but it turned out great!

Guess what I'm saying here is that the first step in building a "quality" studio, is actually BUILDING it. A good room will usually make cheap or mediocre gear sound good and good gear sound great, where a bad room will always make good gear sound bad and cheap gear sound even cheaper. If you record in a basement or a garage it will sound like you recorded in a basement or a garage. If you want to make studio quality recordings, CONSISTENTLY, you need a studio to do it.

Is there any sort of resource you could refer me to that would tell you exactly what you needed to do and how to do it (building materials, techniques, etc.)?

Resource.... Hmmm....

I'm sure if you make a search you'll find something. SInce my discipline is acoustic engineering, I just know how to make a "soundproof" space, or even an aneonic chamber. (Which is really weird because they suck up all the sound that's made. It's just strange to stand a couple feet away from someone and watch their lips move but not hear anything!)

The secret here is building a room within a room. It WILL NOT be soundproof, but will cut the sound leakage in both directions WAY down. At least to the point where any extraneous noise will be WELL below the soundfloor.

Here's what I did with the old garage building:

The outside block walls were filled with vermiculite to provide insulation for sound and weather. Both sides of the block wall were sealed to eliminate air from passing through the block which is porus. (Air is your enemy when building a recording space as air carries sound, so you want everything as air-tight and sealed as possible. This is one reason for a room within a room as it gives you a much better chance of getting things sealed because you have two shots at it. Sealing the outside walls and then sealing the inside walls once built.) After treating the block walls, I used 3/4" furring strips mounted on the inside of all the outside block walls. On these strips, I installed 1/2" sound board, making sure that the tops, bottoms and seams where all boards meed were also sealed. This created a 3/4" dead air space, another thing that will help to kill sound.

Now for the nasty part... There is a specialized sound batt insulation made for recording studios and other sound deading applications. This stuff is expensive and when I compared the specs with regular fiberglass insulation, as well as calculating the total cost difference, it just wasn't worth it. It could make a difference in a single wall, single ceiling separation, (my former chief engineer used it when he built his studio in the basement of his home and it seems to work well,) but for my purposes, and because I was building a room within a room, it woudn't have made that much difference, so I chose ordinary fiberglass insulation. DO NOT USE FACED INSULATION!!!! The paper, foil or plastic that many insulations have applied to them actually transmit sound. While this "vapor barrier" is great for your home it greatly reduces the sound absorption capabilities of the fiberglass as well as providing a sort of diaphragm that will transmit sound. For the roof of the old garage I had to run nylon cord back and forth between the rafters to hold up the unfaced 6" insulation. It sucks working with fiberglass, but you'll save a lot of money and have something that will compare favorably with the specialized sound batting.

Once the building was completely sealed in this manner, (the old garage door openings were filled in with framed walls of 2x6 and also insulated and sound-boarded, one of the two walls had an exterior door installed,) it was time to start the interior construction. Each room was built separately. The walls were kept a minimum of 2" from the exterior walls and 2" from any other interior wall from an adjacent room. The studio, the control room, the vocal area, are all separate rooms and do not touch the rooms, exterior walls or roof of the original building that surrounds them. This also means that to go from the control room to the next room means you have to open two doors that are mounted back to back, each door installed in only one room. (The entry room, which is also my vocal booth has a door to the control room, a door to the studio, a door to the closet, a door to the bathroom and a door to the outside. These are all EXTERIOR doors with full weather seals as these seals also limit air movement and that's a good thing!)

The floor is yet another issue. In this case I had a concrete floor with a grease pit to deal with. The grease pit made a perfect bass trap. I also floated the floor so that it does not directly touch the concrete below it. It's on 2" rigid insulation covered with 1/2" OSB. The joisting is turned sideways so it's only 1 1/2" thick. The insulation keeps the "joists" from touching the concrete and the floor has the feel of a gymnastics floor in that it's almost bouncy. This also helps to absorb bass frequencies as well as acting like a giant shock-mount.

All electrical was run above the walls and drops down only where an outlet or switch was installed. All mic cabling was run low in the walls or under the floating floor. I installed XLR and TRS plates around the space for mics, phones and direct lines back to the control room. Having these lines in the walls eliminates a lot of clutter and the need for extention cables. Fewer connections are better. No where does a mic line cross an electrical line. If you have to do this make sure you cross at 90 degrees. NEVER RUN A MIC LINE PARALLEL WITH A POWER LINE!!! It WILL cause you issues.

Here's the last bit of real important information... This is what makes a room that you will not have headaches with...

The walls, ceilings and floor should NOT be parallel with each other, EVER! I know this goes against every tenant of good carpentry, but in this case you use a level to make sure your wall is out of plumb with the wall opposite it. I built the wall where the control room glass is, on an angle to the rest of the room. My ceiling followed the old garage roof lines making it a vaulted construction. I also installed hardwood on the studio floor and made sure that floor was not level as well. The more out of plumb, out of level and angles you build into your design, the more diffused the sound in the room will be. This will eliminate flutter echo and standing waves, two of the top enemies of recording spaces. (We don't have a single piece of acoustic foam in the studio space at all!) Corners are another problem area. A typical corner has two walls, a floor and a ceiling meeting at 90 degrees at all points. This configuration creates an area where bass collects and builds up and it will cause you recording issues. I have NO 90 degree corners in the studio at all. The vaulted ceilings angle away from the corners. The "crooked" floor is off the 90 degree pattern as well, not a lot, but enough. The walls don't meet at 90 degrees either because they're out of plumb purposely.

Once all the gear, (guitars hang on the walls, drums and keys are set up in their own areas, amps take space too,) was loaded in, the "empty room" reverb disappeared. There is a lot of life in the room, but it's not obnoxious and provides a signature that many other studios don't have. I've had other studios record tracks at my studio to get that life into acoustic instruments. Most of this doesn't matter that much if you're close micing everything. It's actually easier to record in a dead space, so you could cover the walls ceilings and floors with something that will absorb instead of reflect sound, and not worry about having to build everything out of square, but for me, having a space with life is an advantage. I can easliy kill it off with gobos and close micing techniques, but if you have a dead space it's not easy, and nearly impossible, without spending a LOT of money, to add life to it.

I'm sure you'll probably have some questions, so ask away. Photo from one side of the studio attached. This is before I installed the hardwood floor.

Are all the walls just regular sheet rock? Did you use a special paint for them?
Do you consider the fact that you must have doors (unavoidable) a weakness?
Do you have access points for the cabling incase one needs to be replaced/repaired or you get something new that you have to run cable for?
You did all this for $20,000 or less? How long did it take you? Did you do it by yourself or did you hire any contractors at all?

I did say to ask questions, didn't I?

Are all the walls just regular sheet rock? Yes, just 1/2" rock. I know there's a special material that replaces sheet rock, and in the instance of apartments or homes where "shared" walls are an issue, it works great. But I had a separate building with separate rooms built between them. Sheet rock works just fine in this application and it's a LOT cheaper!

Did you use a special paint for them? No special paint. I did texture the walls so they weren't flat and slick. The texture helps to break up high frequencies by bouncing them in all directions.

Do you consider the fact that you must have doors (unavoidable) a weakness? Well, you do have to have a way in and out. This is the reason I used pre-hung exterior doors. They're solid core and have all the weather stripping installed which helps to reduce air transmission. The doors into the studio from the vocal area have windows. (Double pane of course because they're exterior doors.) This allows someone in the vocal area to see what's happening in the studio. Also having two door, (which require opposite swings,) installed back to back greatly reduces the issues you have with only installing a single door.

Do you have access points for the cabling in case one needs to be replaced/repaired or you get something new that you have to run cable for? It would be a good plan, but, no I don't have any access points. As far as cable, the only thing that's going to go wrong, if it does at all, would be an end connection. Each cable was fully tested before being enclosed in the walls, so the only thing I have to worry about are the XLR/TRS connections on either end which are accessible. As far as something new? I've never used more than 15 channels for simultaneous recording. I have 18 connection points for XLR. The headphone lines are all TRS, and there are 8 of them, so I can usurp any one of them for an additional input if needed. (Though I've never needed to.) Everything goes to patchbays in the control room, so adding anything new isn't an issue. Nothing is so "hardwired" that it can't be changed. Versatility is important in the studio. You never know what input will end up going to what pre, so you need patchbays to make changing your connections easy and reliable.

You did all this for $20,000 or less? The garage conversion cost me $5000 in materials. I spent a number of years in the construction industry, so I had the tools and the skills. I figure this saved me about $10,000 in labor and markups that would have been associated with hiring a contractor to do it.

How long did it take you? I started with an empty garage in October of 2005. I completed the conversion at the end of February 2006. 5 months of coming home every day and heading right out to the construction. All day every weekend. This also included running electrical, gas and phone lines out to the building. (About 45' from the house.) If we hadn't had a thaw in December, I would never have been able to dig the hole to bury that stuff. Last October, my brother moved here from North Carolina. He did some more digging and we ran water and a sewer line to the studio so now we have a bathroom too! That project took a month alone. (Including the ceramic tile we installed for acoustic experiments. We've put mics in the toilet bowl. Flushed and turned off water before setting the mic. We're not stupid! But we did get some interesting sounds.

Did you do it by yourself or did you hire any contractors at all? I did it all, except for taping and finishing the drywall in the studio space itself. It's a fairly large room and I HATE working with drywall, especially taping and finishing, so I hired a finisher to get it done in 2 days instead of the week it would have taken me to do it. The bathroom, my brother helped with, though I could have done that myself as well.

Is it covered by your homeowner's insurance policy? That's a lot of money in a small space. God forbid, but if a natural disaster occured or it burned to the ground, are you covered?
Did you have to get a buisiness license and all that?
I ask because once I am an established attorney, I am thinking of getting into this as my fun/side business with a couple of friends of mine.

Aside from the cost of the construction, there's about $80,000 worth of gear and instruments in the space, so I have an extra policy because it's a business in the home with "excessive" value, as well as to protect myself from clumsy clients. A license isn't required in Colorado because it's a private business by invitation only. This means that, while open to the public, I don't have "walk-in" traffic off the street. Everythi