Planning a small home studio, commercial facility, home theater, performance or acoustic room requires answers to many questions before assembling your construction team. The process of documenting your ideas allows everyone to understand your vision and needs.
These FAQs have useful information to help start the project on the right track.
The first step is to acquire the building for the studio. The number of rooms and square footage will have significant impacts on the design and cost considerations. Download our questionnaire to begin the documentation.
Building department approval comes with a zoning review. There are codes and noise ordinance laws to consider before choosing where to build a studio. Residential zoning could be problematic for conducting a commercial business.
See the Building Dept 101 blog post.
The most complicated question to answer out of the gate is, ‘how much?’ Without knowing much more about the scope of the work, how can you possibly expect to know the costs. The budget vary to such a large degree due to the complexity of the design or the build. Is this going to be a residential or commercial build, ground up or a retrofit? Look closely at the amount of square feet you want to develop. Review the project’s documentation as it is compiled, and this will help in creating estimated costs.
See the Building Dept 101 blog post.
There are a number of steps involved to build a recording studio. Taking proper steps in the right order will optimize the process, saving everyone time and money while creating a masterpiece.
Studio Construction Service, Inc. is licensed as a general contractor in the State of Tennessee. It’s critically important to hire a general contractor who is licensed, insured, and bonded in the state where you intend to build. If is is an out-of-state scenario, SCS can act as a design consultant assisting your general contractor, to ensure studio design specifications are implemented.
A one car garage is roughly 20′ x 10′, or 200 sq/ft, which is exceptionally small. When building room inside room construction, there’s a loss of internal space. A room that size is too small for bass frequencies to develop (125 Hz wave is approximately 9′ in length). You must consider this and more in the planning the use of your space, and ultimately what can be expected from it. This room size would be more appropriate for an isolation room.
Different levels of production have different requirements. A voice over studio does not need the same space requirements as recording a drum kit or an orchestra.
Low frequencies require physical space for those wavelengths to develop. In order to create control rooms and tracking rooms with accurate frequency responses, certain physical minimum requirements need to be met.
Here is a frequency response chart from detailing frequency dimensions.
Given the number of steps, and complexity of building a recording studio, plan at least three to four months for a relatively high end, medium sized studio (500 sq/ft). Be mindful of the fact that the design and project development have been known to take equally as long.