Studio Build - Planning

A Studio Build…

For the last 4 years we’ve been building an 1100 square foot recording studio. This is not my job; I’m the wife, but I was home, while my husband worked. Thus I had to learn and translate all that weird knowledge in his head to those I was working with. This is a record of that journey.

Planning

This is the part I had the least to do with. But essentially you enter the space through double doors into the vocal booth. This space had sight lines through glass doors into both the control room and tracking room. Turning to the right is a large open tracking room with windows and a view. Back in the vocal room entrance, if you walk straight ahead you enter into the control room that has an amp closet off to the side. The room layout made the best use of space in the rectangular allotment. The control room’s walls are all angled so as not to have any parallel walls/reflections. We wanted the spaces to be functional, so we ended up taking out the walls in the tracking room that would have created a drum room and piano room. We felt that having the larger space and that potential sound was more useful than the three room design.  I’m glad we did; we recently had 9 people tracking a scratch track with a grand piano and two drum kits in the room. Everyone was comfortable. The vocals were in the booth running the session with my husband in the control room and the guitar amps in the closet. It’s nice when things work the way you hoped.

My husband’s description is as follows: “Sound of Cypress Studios is an 1100 sq. ft. project studio, fully sound isolated and equipped with a beautiful 22x28 ft live room with 16 ft. vaulted ceilings and adjustable acoustics.  Other recording spaces include dedicated dry vocal room suitable for singing and ADR work as well as an amp room with re-amp returns allowing guitarists to perform remotely from the live room.”