So, getting on with the visual diary of the build of the new room.
The front of the room was looking good and we had the desk in place – giving us a feel for how much space we had. As budgets shrink and premixing is becoming more prevelant, I felt strongly that I needed to make the room dual operator friendly, hence the big desk as discussed in the first build diary post. Due to it’s size (3 x 1.2m) I really didnt want to committ to the back wall until it was in the room and I could get a feel for it – and where the clients were going to sit!
So, next came the back of the room. It was a totally irregular shape, so I felt a bit of symmetry was in order. By cutting off the back corner of the room, I could get a more “understandable” or “consistent” acoustic behind me, and the pay off being a small space to use as a machine room; Luxury!
The other decision had to be where to draw the line of this rear wall. There is a door on one side preventing me from making a true “coffin shaped” trapezium based room, so I erred as close to it as I could get. The wall finishes in line with the centre position of the room. This created some modes to deal with later on, but visually it orients you in the room and I felt it was a necessary trade off.
First came the new frame for the wall, slightly more complex due to a door – Ive never hung a door before, so that intimidated the crap out of me to begin with.
Frame went up easily…
Door got hung…bit of a gap around it, but I figured that would “come out in the mix”…(sighs)
The wall then get some 13mm gyprock on the facing side. I then stuff it with batts and gyprocked the inner wall as well.
Then came the paint!
Once the grey paint was done on the side walls, I took down the projection screen (which arrived in the meantime and was mounted, simply to get it out of the way) and put up some small absorption behind my speakers to minimise some comb filtering off the wall behind them
Once that was done and the screen remounted, I was absolutely dying to put up some of the acoustic treatment that had arrived some time earlier. RPG acoustics make some great diffusors, the ones I was advised towards were the full 7inch high skylines. The come unpainted/flocked in natural white, and that was our ceiling colour, so I went straight to them, found a mirror and a willing helper (thanks James and Tim) and found those points of first reflection on the ceiling and put up the skylines. With those in place, the screen up and the paint on, the room was starting to feel like a place to work…
More acoustics analysis came next and some home bass traps needed to be made up… More on that next time. Thanks for reading!
Lookin good mate! When are you hoping to be operational?
This should be the last week of aesthetic tweaking and acoustics tweaks. Building some wall panels tomorrow, putting up curtains and Tuesday mounting a ceiling cloud. That should balance out the mid range and we’ll be ready to rock n roll!