studioporn

earlier this evening i met with the artist to go over the paint/floor/lighting plans for the studio. she picked out some pretty swank colors and i think they're going to work really well in the room. we went to home depot and spent way too much time agonizing over laminate flooring. in the end, we just kind of accidentally wandered past a display that had some laminate flooring that was exactly the right tone for what she had in mind, is a really good price, and best of all, is in stock.

the plan is to start painting wednesday evening, which means i have to make sure all the main room is all prepared by tomorrow evening. on that note...

i got the corner bead material today. it was wide enough to span the frankencorner without any problems. initially i was a bit dubious as to the adhesion strength of paper-based corner beads which don't use any fasteners, but so far it seems to be pretty strong, and i really like the fact that this stuff isn't susceptible to the problem that the metal beads have where a dinged-up corner can wind up exposing the underlying metal. i need to do another skim coat or two of mud tonight/tomorrow morning, but other than that it's pretty much done.

the rest of the mud in the room is touched up and ready for sanding.

i spent a good chunk of the evening installing the foam rod and acoustic caulk along the base of all the walls. i'm slowly getting better at getting a not-too-terribly-sloppy caulking application on the corners. it's really tricky when all of the gaps are 1/4" or more--i'm used to dealing with much narrower caulk beads. i've gotten pretty good at cheating with the help of some putty knives.

i'm beginning to work out the details of the speaker soffits. more on that later.

Posted by Len at 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding's all done, so i figured i'd take a few pics before starting into the priming and painting.

Posted by Len at 02:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding of the main room is essentially done now. all that's left is to apply the exterior corner bead once it arrives, do some spot fixes, and then sand everything down. in theory the bead should be here tomorrow or tuesday at the latest.

i got another 20 sheets of drywall delivered yesterday for finishing off the iso booths and other areas of the basement. ii also rented a drywall lift to help with that task. i've been working on the vox booth today and making some decent progress. the smallness and weird-shape-ness of the space is making it a bit tricky to put the upper wall pieces up, but it hasn't been too terribly bad thus far.

tomorrow night i meet with the artist to go over room colors and flooring and lighting and all that fun stuff.

i've mentioned here and there that a couple of the supply outlets are still really noisy, owing to a combination of mechanical noise and excessive air velocity. it's also the case that the far end of our house is really cold, and the two aren't entirely unrelated. i ordered an air volume damper to control the amount of air coming into those registers off the trunk. i'm still looking for a canvas duct connector to help decouple the mechanical noise of the furnace from that duct run--it was tapped just before the canvas connector for the main supply trunk for the house.

i found a place that can do the laminate glass for me for the vox booth windows. they have 1/2" in stock, which will cover one of the pieces just fine, but they don't have anything bigger for the other piece. they're looking into ordering a piece of 5/8" or 3/4" for me. hopefully i'll know tomorrow whether that's doable, and then as soon as i have exact measurements for the glass i can go ahead and place the order. i think what i'm going to do, since i need to be very exact with the measurements and all and angling of the glass may make things a little tricky, is get scraps of 1/2" and 3/4" plywood to test-fit the dimensions before ordering.

still waiting for the door gasket material to arrive. still trying to track down a source for magnetic weatherstripping. still trying to track down other door/window assembly odds and ends like u-shaped neoprene setting blocks and all that fun stuff.

time to go put up some more drywall.

Posted by Len at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

whilst looking for something completely unrelated i happened across a scan of the window construction diagram from the rod gervais book i have and which has been an endless source of valuable information. i'll probably be following this plan verbatim.

Posted by Len at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after what seems like an eternity, the end of mudding in the main room is finally drawing near. mudding is a long, drawn-out process to begin with, but given various details of soundproofing considerations, this process was even more drawn out and the corners are even more of a pain than they are in standard drywalling. once the current coat finishes drying, all i have to do is put down one final coat on one side of each of the corners, do some touch-up work where needed, and sand everything down.

well, i lied. there is one more thing i have to do. the one outside corner in the room has proven to be a bit tricky, owing to a combination of there being 2 layers of 5/8" drywall, a 1/4" gap at the corner filled with caulk, lack of full framing support running the whole length of the corner, and the splayed angle mean that the standard metal corner beads just don't work here. i had to order a flexible corner bead today with paper facing and wide corner legs in order to handle this space. rather than using nails or other fasteners, this stuff is attached to the corner using regular ol' mud. which leaves me a little bit concerned as to the strength of the corner, but it's not like there are any alternatives. if i had to do this all over, i would have approached that corner a bit differently to avoid all these complications. but in the grand scheme of things it's really not that big of a deal.

in other news, i'm still waiting for the rubber door gaskets to be delivered. given the funky way in which the door stops need to be cut in order to make the gaskets fit, i need to waiit until the gaskets are delivered before doing any door framing so that i can size up the cutting angle and all that fun stuff. i'm also searching for a suitable magnetic weatherstrip product to run along the sides and top of the door to provide another seal.

i'm beginning to plan out the window for the vox booth as well. this will be a dual-window assembly, one on the booth side and one of the main room side (i'll put up a drawing at some point). whenever one puts a hole through a wall for a door or window, it's important to fill that hole with a material at least as heavy as the drywall which would otherwise be there; that way, the only weak point you have to address in terms of soundproofing is along the perimeter of the opening. when it comes to windows, it's also important to use different thicknesses for each piece of glass so that each side has a different resonant frequency. i'll probably do 1/2" for one side and 3/4" for the other. both will be laminated glass, as that is the best in terms of both safety and sound transmission. since laminated glass requires special equipment and stuff for cutting, i'm in the process of tracking down some local glass companies that can do this for me.

Posted by Len at 02:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

while i'm on the tail end of mudding and taping, i'm beginnig to plan out the door assemblies, which will be the next big thing. they're also going to be rather complex, what with the need for air-tightness and all that. here's my current plan for the assemblies (it's essentially the same going all around the doorway, so i've just drawn out the side where the door handles will be):

the main differences from normal door frames are the use of the rubber gasket along the doorstop (others have found that a particular type of GM trunk rubber works best here), and there won't be any doorknobs or latches or anything else that might involve making holes in the door, so instead there will be handles surface-mounted on either side of the doors and magnets to hold them in place when closed.

the trunk rubber is on order, i just picked up enough wood to do about 4 of the 8 doorways, and i'll be ordering the fabric to wrap the insulation this week--i'm going to order all my fabrics for this and various room-treatment purposes from one of the companies out there that makes fire-safety-rated fabric.

Posted by Len at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got rid of all the scrap drywall and lumber today and did a bunch of cleaning up and organizing in the garage. we actually have space in there now! woohoo!

i also popped a whole bunch more screws into the ceiling to provide better support. it was a little tricky on some areas trying to figure out where best to chalk another screw line so that i didn't screw through the resilient channel and into a joist (which would defeat the whole purpose of the channel), come too close to the screws on the first layer, or risk coming a little too close to some of the electrical wiring (a good portion of which is sitting just a tad too low for my tastes). for the electrical concern, i switched from 2" screws to 1 5/8" to minimize the potential for problems. the channel is about 1/2" from the joists and the 2 drywall layers are 1 1/4" together, so that should leave all the screw tips well below any wiring. i'm probably just being paranoid and the 2" screws would probably be perfectly fine, but i'd rather be paranoid than on fire.

tomorrow begins more mudding and taping. yeeeehaw!

Posted by Len at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

now that i'm seeing the light at the end of the drywall tunnel, i figured this would be a good time to run through the list of stuff that still has to be done on the studio, in roughly chronological order:

• get rid of drywall/lumber/insulation debris that's slowly overtaking the basement. i've scheduled a junk pickup for monday
• order another 20-ish pieces of drywall to finish the iso booths and other parts of the basement
• finish drywalling iso booths and other parts of the basement
• finish mudding, taping, foaming, and caulking (currently awaiting next acoustic caulk shipment)
• order glass pieces for window (they'll have to be custom-cut)
• install doors and windows
• decide on and order ceiling lights for main studio
• get the electrical work finished
• install trim/moulding
• paint
• fix remaining ductwork noise problems (registers over mix area are still really noisy)
• make absorption cloud and install over mix area
• build soffits for main monitor speakers (maybe--still pondering this)
• install flooring
• perform room analyses
• build necessary fixtures to tune room acoustics (hemholtz resonators, bass traps, absorption panels, etc.)
• install main studio audio wiring and panels (microphone, midi, headphone)

then of course there's the whole lounge thing, and the whole bathroom thing, and god only knows what else. maybe, just maybe, i'll finish all of this before chinese democracy is released.

Posted by Len at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

second ceiling layer is up now. all that's left is to go back and pop some more screws in--i'm confident the first layer is adequately fastened to the resilient channel, but i'm not so certain about the second layer--and then mud and tape.

Posted by Len at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i just have one more layer of mud to do on the ceiling before starting on the second layer. here are some hastily-snapped pics of how things look right now:

Posted by Len at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)