Building a new DAW

As you may know, I’ve moved to a “new” (to me) home in Riverton, Utah. I now have at my disposal a 1000 square foot garage. Well, I’ll have it once I clean all the crap out of it, that is. We’re storing a ton of stuff out there, and I just can’t navigate the darn thing without tripping at the moment. Anyway, I want to build a new home recording studio in my huge garage, inexpensively, while preserving space for usual garage-ey things like fixing cars, building model airplanes, and the average noisy or smelly stuff.

I’ve made do for the past fifteen years in very tiny shared spaces where I couldn’t make much noise after hours. I couldn’t record without background noise and distractions during the day. This really limited my opportunities to record voice and other live instruments, so I restricted myself mostly to synthesizers and line-in guitar feeds. I did after-hours vocals on recordings, but my shouting in the basement aroused the ire and questions of my children more than once.

I now have the opportunity to build myself a great studio, within a rather limited budget of course. The garage is a huge two-story affair. The previous previous previous owner (yes, I meant to say that thrice) helpfully built a stable inside, which was then closed off by the next owner for storage. This stable is approximately a 10×10 room.

I like the possibilities. It’s indoors, I won’t disturb my family or my neighbors if I’m noisy (though playing the drums at 3AM, even on an acre of land, might elicit some unhappy phone calls), and I can start small using what’s already there without breaking the bank.

Here’s the preliminary to-do list. Ultimately, my goal is to have a professional-looking studio back there, a few hundred dollars at a time.

1. Get a handle on indoor and outdoor lighting. Right now, I have just a single 100W lamp illuminating that space. It’s very, very dark at night! I’d like to have some floodlights inside (since it’s a working space anyway for other projects), lighting outside at the doors, a very electrically-quiet lighting setup inside the stable (probably just an incandescent lamp or two and a portable light for music stands), and a few homey lamps and stuff around near the couch outside the booth for hanging out when the weather is nice.
2. Figure out heating/cooling for the stable. I already own a window air conditioner which would be perfect for this small space (it will be turned off while recording, of course), and a small space heater would do for the other times of year.
3. Insulate the stable. Insulating the entire garage would be way cost-ineffective right now. Which, of course, means mid-winter hanging-out in the larger garage is out of the question for the time being, but the booth itself will be the right temperature regardless of the time of year.
4. Do some modest soundproofing for low-frequency sounds. I think what I can do in this case is hang a second wall of sheetrock inside the isolation booth to absorb more of the low-frequency vibrations from drumkits. If you have suggestions for getting a 60-70dB reduction immediately outside the room, I’m all ears! The key for low-frequency vibration absorption is just lots and lots of mass… concrete walls would be ideal.
5. Figure out an engineer’s window into the sound booth. I think it should be double-paned with dead space, and there are schematics online for several options.
6. Outfit the engineer’s area with a couch, old stand-up style arcade system, old throw rugs, and everything else to make it as comfortable as possible for people to hang out while others are recording in the sound booth. Or just hanging out, period. I have lots of spare rugs, chairs, throw pillows, and other accessories from combining two households.
7. Build a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and figure out the wiring into the sound booth so that I can do most of my work from inside that heated/cooled space. That’s a topic for another blog post, but I want it to run Linux with Audacity/Ardour/JAMin rather than keep treading the Cakewalk Sonar upgrade bandwagon… and many of the commercial plugins work fine with Audacity, which means some of my investment there won’t be lost. I also want a dedicated workstation because using a family system that gets upgraded regularly results in a system that’s broken for audio work more than half of the time.
8. Build storage cabinets for the audio gear. I have lots of spare microphones and cables I won’t be using all the time.
9. Build a KILLER monitoring system. Just make it absolutely beautiful to listen to.
10. Work on improving the rest of the garage to make a comfortable all-weather working space.
11. A toilet. This is low priority, I can just use the one in the house, but would be a nice addition to the working space.

So what else would I need for a really nice budget studio in a brand-new space? Once I have a dedicated location to do my recording, where kids won’t get into it and I won’t have to fight to get a quiet space alone, I’ll be able to finally do as much recording as I like.

Addendum: I realized I was probably going to get a number of questions regarding my move from Windows XP and Cakewalk Sonar to Linux and Ardour. The simple fact is, the stuff works now and is much more flexible and stable than the Windows alternatives. The downside is, you have a smaller hardware compatibility list, so you can’t just buy random hardware X and expect it to do the job… you have to research first and choose one that’s supported. Low-latency audio has been around in Linux for years, and there are enough musicians using it on a regular basis for it to be a serious choice for the semi-professional musician.

It’s really not about the money. I won’t talk about how much money I’ve spent on audio recording stuff over the years because it’s depressing 🙂 It’s really about having a reliable, stable, flexible system that will get the job done competently. After losing a week of audio work last year due to a Windows XP file-handling glitch, I want to be done using it.

Another advantage of Linux is that I want to go 64-bit with a very large memory allotment for this workstation. If I can avoid hitting the hard disk at all for most of the audio streams and samples, I’ve eliminated a huge bottleneck and freed up a lot more CPU cycles which would have been consumed with I/O otherwise. With the extremely cheap cost of RAM, I could go for 16GB of RAM on my DAW when I build it later this year. Most of my existing projects are 16-bit 44.1 or 48KHz, and only occupy perhaps 2-10GB total for a given project. Moving to 24-bit at twice the sample rate means an increase to 6-30GB per project.