Recording - September 2014 - 18

By Michael Nickolas

Four Steps
To A New Studio
A new house, a new studio-and building tricks you can use
"Never say never... but you just said it twice!" So goes a joke I heard once.
We never thought we would move from our house, at least not until the time of
life for retirement and downsizing. But "the best laid plans...", right?
Circumstances directly affecting our quality of life and my ability to make a
living with my studio caused us to get proactive and make a change. This article describes the steps I took in preparing an existing space in our new house
for recording use.

1. Hardwood floors provide a more natural and bright sound than you get
with carpeting.
Step One-finding a suitable space
In his March 2014 article "From The Outside In", Paul Stamler went into
detail describing room dimensions, standing waves, and the equation that
defines them. When house hunting, I didn't bring a tape measure and make
actual calculations, but I did look at each house with a few generalities in mind.
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RECORDING September 2014

I wanted two rooms, a control room and a room
for tracking live instruments and vocals. For easy
wiring purposes they needed to share an adjoining wall. I wanted roughly rectangular-shaped
spaces. Rectangular rooms can have fewer problems than square rooms-both sets of walls the
same distance apart are a recipe for serious standing wave issues. If it was at all feasible, I really
wanted rooms without parallel walls. Non-parallel
walls disperse the sound waves so that they do not
travel back the same way they came. This lowers
the chance of creating standing waves/resonant
frequencies and flutter echo. For a discussion on
problems created by parallel walls, see Paul's article mentioned above and Bob Ross's article on
Room Acoustics Fundamentals, available free on
the Recording website's Resource Library:
http://is.gd/RECMagRoomFundamentals
We bought a house with two rooms that came
pretty close to these expectations. The control
room is roughly rectangular (13'10" x 9'5" with
a 7'6" ceiling) but the two shorter walls of the
room are not parallel; they slope inward toward
the ceiling. I chose to set up my studio facing a
shorter wall, as research taught me the best
sound is achieved by orienting so the monitors
are pointed towards the wall furthest away. The
tracking room of the new house is more square
than rectangular (11' x 11'5" with a 7'6" ceiling), but also has two inward-sloping walls that
face each other-see Picture 10, for example, to
see the curvature very dramatically.
Step Two-hardwood floors
Unfortunately, the two rooms had carpeting
that was absorbing mid and high frequencies. I
could easily hear this just speaking in the room.
It was muddy and boomy. Fixing this problem
would have required that I dull down the bass to
match the losses in the highs and mids-in other
words, putting in many bass traps and achieving,
as a "victory", a totally dead room. Fortunately,
there was another solution that would lead to a
much better result: rather than dull down the
lows, I could improve the highs and mids simply
by pulling up the carpet and installing hardwood
floors.
In my experience, hardwood is a very desirable "start from here" flooring for studios. It
allows you to start with a live reflective surface
that you can then tame with just the right amount
and type of absorption to suit your needs. Wood
floors sound more natural and bright than carpeted floors, and area rugs can always be used
as an option, if needed. Putting in hardwood
wasn't a cheap proposition, but it had to be done
to get this right. Picture 1 shows the hardwood
floor and the angled back wall. By the way, this
job cost me $2500, but your numbers could be
wildly different depending on your room size and
where you live and whom you hire.
Step Three-wiring the rooms
For wiring between the two rooms I'm using
wall plates removed from my old studio. Picture
2 shows an example of these. I don't need a

http://is.gd/RECMagRoomFundamentals

Recording - September 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2014