Studio Designer Carl Tatz

Interview Excerpt

What would you tell someone who’s trying to build a room on a budget?

You can do a room really inexpensively until you ask for isolation, because that’s what takes all the money along with HVAC, electrical and lighting costs. If you’re going to do it right, building a studio is a big job because there’s so much detail required when the isolation comes into play. But if it’s just a bedroom or a garage, you can just drywall it and add some sound panels.

You want a rectangular room and you want to be set up length-wise in the room. Then get a modal calculator and figure out where your head and speaker should be. Grab the first reflections, which are the most critical, and soften up the back wall. That’s easy. But if you’re doing it in an upstairs bedroom in a way that you don’t wake the kids, that’s a whole other world. That’s when you get into a room within a room, and the price skyrockets.

If you need a tracking area as well, then you have to worry about isolation between the tracking area and the control room. Of course, everyone forgets about electrical, lighting, HVAC, and all those things that you want to do well or it will hurt the performance of the room in some way.

But there are a lot of studios in homes that only use some acoustic panels in the living room and they can sound okay.

You’re talking about burlap covered 703 or something like that?

Yeah, acoustically transparent fabric. Ideally you want 4 inch panels, either 4 inches of 703, or if you only have 2 inch 703, then you need to get them a couple of inches off the wall to kind of give you the same performance. Ideally you’d like to get some corner trapping in there too.

Having a drop ceiling can be a curse or a blessing. Some of the worst rooms I’ve ever had to work with had drop ceilings because they screw up all the modes and you never know what you have to deal with. Paradoxically, they can be a blessing because they can act as a bass absorber if that’s needed.

So there are two situations; there’s the guy who has an extra room in his house who just wants to mix in it. That’s easy and relatively inexpensive if he doesn’t care about bothering anybody else. When you start getting into isolation or a tracking room, it’s a lot more complex, time consuming, and requires a lot more money. Sometimes you see a client go all out for the control room and go a lot cheaper on the tracking room. There’s one room I’m doing where the tracking room has just one wall of isolation to keep the traffic noise out, a nice bamboo floor, a custom-built trap behind the drums, and some Auralex panels flying from the ceiling. That’s an inexpensive tracking room. In the future he can make that fully isolated if he wants, but this should work okay for what he needs right now.

When you design a studio with a tracking room, do you use the traditional windows or have you used sliding glass doors in between?

I haven’t used sliding glass yet. We make our own doors with 3/4 inch laminated glass. I try to use as much glass as I can to make things seem open, that’s why my control room windows go down right to the floor.

I haven’t used the commercial $5,000 acoustic doors because I don’t think they’re any better than what we do. I just get a regular external door jam and put the gasket that you see on the tops and sides on the threshold in the bottom. Then we’ll get a solid slab door, which costs about $80, and cut it out and put the laminated glass in it. If you have a double door with an airlock, then you’re great. Generally speaking, it works well enough.