Introduction
In the year 2013 I was very into electronic music production. My preferences have since changed dramatically, but at that time dubstep had its hype moment with Skrillex and other artists in the genre making it big and inspiring countless bedroom producers to make their own music in, well, their bedrooms. I was one of them. I actually produced a few tracks that I find enjoyable still today even. I "played" a couple of gigs, some of them even in other countries - journies and hotels were paid, the artist fee was low but I didn't do it for that. I also followed a lot of other artists online, one of them was Noisia, a dutch drum'n'bass / dubstep trio who have since stopped their project. But they were big at the time. And one day the published a facebook foto album about their new studio build they were doing somewhere outside Groningen.
It was a surreal project. I was very inspired by it, and while I didn't have hundreds of thousands of bucks to spend and have my studio built by professionals, I wanted to do something similar myself. So I started looking for a location where I could build my own sound studio for mastering my audio.
The plan
I was very intrigued by the Noisia project. Their studio concept is what's called a RIR (room in a room), and I was certain that nothing else would be sufficient for my own purposes. I considered hiring a professional for the job of planning the studio, but I quickly realized that I just could not afford that at the time. So I made the ridiculous decision to do it myself. I had no experience in building anything, let alone a sound studio. But I was determined to make it happen. I started by researching the basics of soundproofing and acoustics, and then I started drawing up plans for the studio. I soon learned that what needed to be avoided is to have parallel walls in the room so that the sound waves would not be reflected in a way that would create standing waves. It was also important to have relatively thick walls, with different surface materials on each side to avoid resonance within the walls.
I started draring up rough sketches of the room, the bearing structures and tried to figure out how to make sure the walls were not parallel. I decided to use plasterboard for the inside walls, and then hang absorbers and diffusors on the walls to make sure the sound was not reflected back into the room. Once I had a rough idea of where I was going with the project, it was time to start looking for a suitable location.
The location
Through a friend of mine, I then found a suitable location in a air shelter basement of a factory building. The room was full of old stuff, so the first point of action was cleaning it all out. Luckily, the company had always some containers standing around which we were allowed to use to throw the stuff. That way, we didn't have to pay ourselves from getting rid of it, which was very nice because it would probably have cost a lot of money. Once we had the room empty, we could finally start the build process.
The build
Thanks to a lot of very good friends who came to help in their spare time for free, we managed to finish the build relatively quickly - all in all, it took approximately 2 months.
We made a structure for the room out of very large wood beams, which we then covered with plasterboard on the inside, and OSB wood on the outside. In hindsight, the walls were way too massive for a non-bearing structure, but at the time I didn't know that. We then filled the space between the beams with rock wool, which is a very good sound insulator.
Once the whole inside was covered with the plasterboard, the seams were filled with gypsum and then sanded down to make the walls smooth. We then applied a couple layers of paint until the walls looked nice and clean.
The last step was to put the wooden floor in, the ventilation system, as well as lighting and power outlets. We then hung absorber panels on the walls as well as one flying absorber directly above the listening position. We manufactured these absorber panels ourselves, using a wooden frame, rock wool and a fabric cover.
The result
Considering I had never built anything similar before, I think the final outcome of this project was pretty good. The room sounded very good, and I was also very happy with the way it looked in the end.
Even though the project of building the studio was quite successful, I would say it was not worth the effort overall. I spent a lot of time and energy on the build of this project, but then once it was finished it was underused. I think there were mainly 2 reasons for this: First, the location was not close enough to where I lived. I needed to drive there and would usually only do that when I had a full day to spend there which became more and more an exception. Second, I was able to achieve better and better results using just the speakers and headphones I had at home. In the end, it didn't feel like the effort of going there was worth it.
So sadly, the studio became less and less frequented, and eventually I decided to close it down, just because I felt like I was wasting more money paying rent for a room I was not using.
Nevertheless, it was a fun project, and I learned a lot from it and I still cherish the memories of building it with my friends.