Studio Fantastico

While earning my Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I decided to take on a side project. A freiend of mine from Winston Salem, NC decided that he wanted to build a home recording studio in the basement of his house. I was called upon to take on all aspects of the project. I designed, drafted and built everything in the studio, from the dual wall construction, HVAC and wiring, to the insulation, drywall, and door and window construction. The studio is designed to be sound proof and acoustically pleasing to the ear. Studio Fantastico is over 1000 square feet with a large live room for drums and multiple musicians, two isolation booths for vocals or other instruments, and a spatious control room with a custom designed and built patch bay system that runs to each room of the studio, as well as his living room upstairs. I have been working on this project for almost two years in my spare time, which is very limited, and I hope for the studio to completed by the end of my life, ha ha ha.

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Phase 1

Studio Fantastico-Phase One

Winston Salem, NC, 2011-2012

Phase one began with a blank slate. I followed the principles of sound proofing, mass, absorbtion, damping and decoupling, when designing the studio. I used a dual wall construction design which is two sets of 2x4 framed walls with a 1-1/2" space between the plates and studs. This decouples the rooms from each other so that there is no solid contact from one room to the next. There were also absortion clips that were used to decouple the walls from the ceiling truss. I also used decoupling clips for the ceiling in which I ran a steel hat track in order to decouple the ceiling from the ceiling joists. I used flex duct for the HVAC system which I snaked troughout the ceiling truss for sound proofing purposes. A total of eight new circuits were run for the studio and sound putty was used on all of the outlets and light housings.

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Phase 2

Studio Fantastico-Phase 2

Winston Salem, NC, 2012-2013

Phase two of the Studio Fantastico project was the most labor intensive part of the project. It involved adding the mass and the damping principles of sound proofing. I used two layers of 5/8" thick sheet rock for the mass and inbetween each layer of sheetrock I applied a product called Green Glue which is used for the damping of the sound waves. After all of the sheetrock was hung and finished I used acoustical caulk to seal all seams in the room as well as sealing all outlet boxes. The goal of this phase was to have the rooms paint ready and as air tight as possible.

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