SOUNDPROOFED STUDIOS TO LET

After eight weeks of builders,plumbers,electricians, and dust, I have finally relocated Atomic from Tower Bridge Business Complex to a self contained building in Ilderton Road SE15 1NT.

This new complex of 18 studios is a big step up from the last place having better soundproofing, video intercoms to each studio, CCTV and plush hang out areas. (not bad for eight weeks work) although I was drawing up plans and finding the right contractors for six months before work started.  This place looks much more hi tech than the last and is going down well with clients.

It's been a long time in planning after our old landlord (Workspace) gave us notice to quit after 10 years at Tower Bridge. 

They never really liked having a music complex on site and were always complaining about noise, so when they decided to redevelope the building and pay us to leave I thought it was a good opportunity to re build in a different way, being in a self contained building means we don't have the noise ussue now with Workspace and their bloody site manager complaining almost daily to me about musicians coming and going late at night. I don't know what they expected, 9-5 recording studios ?

The builder I used (Dave Prout) had never built soundproofed studios before so I had to watch every part of the build myself to make sure every hole was filled, every door was sealed, and the soundproofing materials were the  best quality, saying that, he did a great job in the very short time available as we had to make sure all the clients moving from the old premises to the new were not disrupted too much, or lost too much work, this proved a nightmare for a few days with so many people moving in at the same time and various unforseen problems along the way. (piano's, large recording desks, very large sofa's, etc.

Acoustics in each studio had to be individualy treated and a judgement as to the level of  " live" needed to get a good acoustic instument sound and a "dead sound"  in the control rooms.

A lot of  (expensive) acoustic rubbish is talked about from many acoustic design companies, as the sound and the room changes all the time, ie: if there are sofa's in the room, two or three people in the room, anything to change the direction of soundwaves bouncing, the sound will change, so some of the ideas acoustic design companies come up with can be very expensive and not always very successful as they cannot be varied to suit any changes within the room.

The best appoach to this problem I've found is simple.   If you have flat surfaces in a room the sound will reverberate and bounce between walls, by hanging a floor to ceiling curtain to at least one wall in the live room the sound wave "bounce" is reduced and creates a flat sound. The benifit of using curtains is that the acoustics can be ajusted by pulling back the curtains to suit the level of "live" needed.  This gives fexibility without the cost of  tons of (static) acoustic foam ( although this is of  benifit to the sound too) but less is needed reducing the treatment costs.

Next instalment soon.

Rob/ Atomic