The Foley arm of the studio has been getting more & more busy recently and when the space below the studio became available I decided that the universe was telling me to take our Foley work to the next level.
Up until now we have been recording Foley in the music studio space that was built in ’99. This space has always been great for music and while this has worked well for Foley too, there are some limitations with using this space that we have had to work around. The only real way to fix these issues is to build new, purpose built rooms.
So, I got the keys in April and came up with a simple design that would get the 2 biggest rooms in the space and leave room for storage, a machine rack and room to grow (a little).
I engaged the very capable Joel Cabban to help / build / stop me from injuring myself / do all the heavy work (note: Joel is a musician himself. It is important to have people who are sympathetic to sound and acoustics on board)
And we got to work.
The results not only look fantastic but both rooms sound amazing. Joel and I managed to get the internal dimensions of both rooms to within 5mm of my initial specifications. Internal dimensions are crucial in small to medium sized rooms. Rooms modes have a massive impact on the bass response of a room, if you get the dimensions wrong and you will have endless problems with low frequency resonances and nulls.
The air-conditioning is silent, not quiet, but actually silent, and you can scream in an air con vent in one room and hear nothing in the other room. The acoustic isolation of these rooms is amazing, they are essentially boxes sitting on rubber and pin-board and clad in 10mm thick rockwool – as decoupled from the building as we could possibly make them. Only the very loudest external noises get in and only the very low frequencies at that – easy enough to filter out if it happens. The noise floor in these rooms is un-nervingly low and does take a bit of getting used to.
Near the end of the construction process I bought a chair shoe from my local school fete and put it in these rooms. The rooms soon became known as “The Shoebox” … perfect.
I have to say a big thank you to Joel Cabban, who was very patient with me and my fastidiousness/obsession about some of the design aspects. Thank you to Adrian Stopford, who helped out for several days with the gyprock, Joel’s plasterer mate (whose name escapes me) who did all the sealing of the gyprock, and Mint Air conditioning for being helpful and flexible.
Thank you also to everyone else who helped in some way or just gave encouragement along the way. You are all fantastic.
Update: The Shoebox quickly proved very useful not only for Foley (we have recorded eyes opening believe it or not!), but also group loop recording, voice overs, vocalists, acoustic instruments, sound effects and other sound design. There is lots more I want to try out in there. I really want to put a drum kit in there but just haven’t had the opportunity yet.