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FEATURE ARTICLE |
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OCTOBER 15, 2003, "THE
INDEPENDENT MUSIC STUDIO" ISSUE |
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BUILDING YOUR
HOME STUDIO RIGHT
Part 1 |
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BY BOB
DENNIS
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We recently reposted an article
called
BUILDING
YOUR OWN COTTAGE STUDIO which
has complete plans for putting a
good recording studio in your 2 car garage. It was a really nice set of plans, but
what about reality? The plans were pretty idealistic. What about real
situations where there's a more limited budget and you don't have the space that those
plans require? |
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World class percussionist, Muruga, moving
back to Michigan has given me a "real" opportunity to take those concepts of
studio design and modify them for the situation at hand. The challenge is to design
a good home studio for him that can be used for some serious recording. After the
studio is constructed, I intend to do some sessions there. |
| Before I get into Muruga's studio design, I
want to give you guidelines on two important points. |
The Golden Section And How To Use It |
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The Golden Section is a set of dimensions
that the Ancient Greeks used to make a 6 sided room have "perfect acoustics".
When you are in a room built with the Golden Section dimensions, you can walk
around the room and the sound remains the same anywhere in the room, at least as far as
frequency content. If you walked around a room that didn't have
golden section dimensions, you would notice that music being played in the room was
"boomy" bass in certain parts of the room and sounded "thin" in other
parts of the room. In a room built with Golden Section dimensions the room would
have no boomy or thin spots. |
The Golden Section
Dimensions are 1 to 1.6 to 2.6 |
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We are talking about proportions like the
height of the room to the width and length of the room. If your room was 10 feet
high, 15 feet wide and 26 feet long, it would have the Golden Section dimensions.
But if it was 16 feet high and 10 feet wide and 26 feet long, it still would
have the golden dimensions. |
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RULE 1 - Use Golden Section ratios in the design of any room that
has music recording or playback |
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Seems impossible, right. If you're
building rooms, that's very nice you can have any size you want. If you however are
trying to get an existing area working for you, and you would rather not have to move the
walls. What Do You Do prevent reflections off of non-Golden Section walls.
So here are three rules to use. |
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RULE 1a - If a wall or
ceiling is too close - make it absorbent
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This is a pretty easy rule to follow.
Let's say that you worked out the dimensions for the Golden Section and where
everything worked except that the ceiling was too short (e.g. your Golden Section
calculations say you should have the ceiling 9 feet tall, but you only have an 8 foot
ceiling). The answer is to make that ceiling absorb sound rather than reflect it.
This is real easy with a ceiling because most ceiling tiles absorb sound. |
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RULE 1b - If a wall or ceiling is too far - make it and
part of the joining surface absorbent
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Lets say you had the opposite problem, the
walls conform to the two larger proportions of the Golden Section but the ceiling should
be 7 feet high rather than 8 feet high. The answer is to make the ceiling sound
absorbing and also make the top 1 foot of the wall absorbing.
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RULE 1b - Keep as many of surfaces following the Golden Section as
possible - 3 minimum |
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Half of a Golden Section is better than no
Golden Section, but is less than 3 of the 6 surfaces make a Golden Section, you will get
no benefit from your Golden Section Calculations |
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The Amount Of Absorbing Material Needed |
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The
Golden Section dimensions
have a lot to do with making the reverberation in the room have the right tone. HOW
MUCH reverberation you want is another part of the picture. If you had all surfaces
absorbing sound, the room would sound unnaturally dry and quiet. Its rather annoying
to listen to music in a totally dead (fully absorbent) room - the music sounds dead
also. On the other hand, if you had no absorption in the room it would be like an
echo chamber being added to the music - maybe a good sounding echo chamber but still an
echo chamber. The answer is the 50/50 rule. |
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RULE
2 - Of the total surface area of the room, 50% should be sound absorbing
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It would be best to evenly treat the surfaces
such as using a "checkerboard" design of 12 inch sound absorbing foam tiles. |
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A Real Example |
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Brianbert Productions put in a room that is
to function as a "writing" studio and an audition studio. The dimensions
of the room are per figure 1 |
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FIGURE 1 - ROOM DIMENSIONS |
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In this room you have to be able to record to
16 track ADAT with a Tascam 2600 Board, as well as play keyboards, and do a vocal
overdub. The design I came up with is shown in figure 2. |
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FIGURE 2 - DESIGN |
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The dimensions were arrived at as
follows: a) The 8 foot height was considered the "1.5 dimension" of the
Golden Section which made the ideal dimensions 5.3 feet wide, 8 feet tall and 13.3 feet
long. We wind up with two walls, plus the ceiling height conforming to the Golden
Section dimensions. The placement of the absorbing material makes the room be
divided into the "control room side" (the left) where music will sound good over
the speakers; and an "overdub" side where there is a lot of absorbing material
behind the vocalist. |
The Musart Studio |
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Muruga bought a house in Ann Arbor, MI and
has a garage and the equipment to put in his own production studio. He is in the
middle of finishing production on 2 projects that he began in California. He has a
one car garage with storage shed on the side of it to use as a housing for his studio.
The floor plan of what is there is shown in Figure 3. You will get my design
of the studio next issue. The requirements of the studio are below the drawing of
the area. Get some ideas on how you would do it and check it against my design next
issue. |
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Figure 3 - Musart Ann Arbor Area |
Area must have 4 rooms. Studio, Control Room,
Isolation Booth, and Storage Closet |
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