OK. Here goes.

We have a few threads up with some interesting photo timelines, and yeah many of our friends like them, I've had a lot of great feedback from many folks saying how they enjoy seeing how long time professionals put studios together, but I kind of get the feeling that something is missing.

I have no idea if this will work or be a really boring disaster but if you don't try you never know.

We don't have a film crew or a post production team, but we have a couple of cameras. I got a DVcam that was destined for the trash that I rescued (don't care if it gets wrecked with construction dirt), a Go-Pro session, and a DSLR rig with a Nikon D7100 on it, I just built (on site) a PC for putting the videos together (i7 8700K and QuadroP2000). Lighting will be a bit of an issue, there will be a bit of grain on some footage, but, hell, lets give it a go.

I'll throw up videos onto YouTube probably about one a week, and try and keep each one themed on a stage of the job. They will all be inserted here and an explanation of what is going on written.

We're not going to narrate the videos or put a soundtrack to them, they will just be quite raw at the moment. If this is popular, and folks find it interesting we have another job coming up that is right after this (It already has a thread on here) where we may be able to think of doing better presented videos.

The studio.

The studio is for a team of people and it is being built in an old conference room of a nice beachfront hotel (which is closed for the winter). The team get to live in a deserted hotel for three months.

We have two rooms to do, Control room and a hybrid 3D sound experimental space and normal recording room.

The studio is designed by Philip Newell, and I (Joules Newell) am putting the meat on the bones of the design and project managing the build. I'm also on the build team doing all the ancillaries (Electrics, Data, Vent, and infrastructure) and much of the filming and editing.

We are running a team of 5 people and have 63 working days to deliver the acoustics and about another 20 or so days to do the whole install.

We started about 4 weeks back with the delivery of two 44 foot semi-trailers full of building materials. There are more materials than we can fit in the building, and we needed some serious machinery to off-load it all and get it into place. all 30 tons of it.


We will start with a video of the process of handling all the materials. it's an important part of the project and one that if we don't get it right we end up spending days moving tons of materials about instead of building a studio. Many people don't even consider the logistics of the arrival of two semi-trailers of stuff.


So here goes (nothing) A video of a pile of materials and a forklift - This is only the second trailer, one arrived the day before.

So.

Once we got the gear in (it's no good if you can't get the gear in) we started with the floors.

We have an eight layer sandwich construction on some (carefully calculated) Mason Industries Waffle pads.

We got both floors down in two days.

The first week was really just getting the gear in, getting ourselves organised and putting the floors down.

The next couple of weeks we threw up the basic floating isolation shells.

By the fourth week we were onto the first stage of application of acoustic materials.

The control room shell had taken its basic form and the studio area was well on with absorption and a special Unistrut rigging frame to take the 3D speaker array.

We take the safety of what we build very seriously.

We test samples of all materials for fire resistance on every job.

Here is the last two minutes of a 5 minute fire test on the cotton waste felt.

As specified it did not spread fire beyond the applied flame, it also self extinguished on removal of the flame.

The test source being a high temperature gas flame.

Here we're getting started on the electrical and data installs.

Red sleeves in all the junction boxes signifies the live feed cable, for information purposes.

We've moved over to Wago connectors from screw down connectors as we get better readings from them over time.

All Data is Cat6a.

This has been amazing to watch. Congrats, guys!

Happy for you living the dream! Can you explain how the studio will integrate with the Hotel when its open season? Do you have total sound isolation from the rest of the building? Or do you have the whole building and the guests will work at the studio?

Yeah, the studio is kind of separate from the hotel (but accessible through the hotel) The old conference room was an addition to the main building, it also has a separate entrance.

Even so, the building had major modifications before we started.

To begin, the roof was too lightweight and too low, they had to raise the walls and the roof by up to 1.5m and the new roof was pre-cast concrete slabs with poured concrete over that.

Then there was the dividing wall, that had to be built from solid concrete blocks, both to isolate the studio from the control room, and further to support the pre-cast slab roof.

That work started just before Christmas and was complete in week 2 of January.

We arrived in week 3 of January.

We're into week 5 of the build now. (end of Feb 2018)

Outer acoustic treatment (the acoustic shell) is done.

We're starting on the second stage acoustics and the first-fix electrics and vent.

OK,

We're another week into this. There is a bit of overlap on the videos from Friday of week 5 as I wanted to put all the bass-trap build on one video.

This week we put all the acoustic control systems in the control room, fitted a Unistrut grid to take the fabric panel, acoustically transparent finishing material and the LED lighting.

We also did the window tunnel, and the LED lighting driver packs.

Some of the team had an argument with a pallet of acoustic dead-sheet, and the weather was generally nice while most of Europe froze.

The weather is good, the food is good, and the job is going well. (it can't last)

I love that you folks are videoing this as you go along, its great to see the process from start to eventual finish

Anxiously awaiting the next instalment.

Good luck with it.

It's quite fun learning filming and video post from scratch along the way too.
(I've been a keen amateur photographer for a few years now)

I've never done video before despite spending years working with clients that specialise in it. My attempts are quite embarrassingly bad (for me) for a start, but as we go along here we are picking it up a bit.

The first few weeks my old (7 year old) 2nd gen i7 laptop wasn't up to video editing, so it was a case of work a few weeks, get paid, and buy components to make a video editing workstation.

After that it has been a case of very quickly learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro to throw together the footage we accumulated. As we go along I will slowly pick it up. (I tried DaVinci Resolve too, but stuck with Premiere) At the moment I'm making all the beginner's mistakes and having fun laughing at them.

Filming should become better too as site conditions improve. The DVCAM is struggling in low light and is too narrow a lens in the confined spaces, the Go-Pro is very prone to shake if hand held, the best camera at this point is the DSLR, although the GoPro is great to stick places and leave running. The DVCAM however is the easiest to handle, so lots of different options still being explored at the moment.
DVCAM ingest has to be done the old way through a Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle. Still the camera was free... Mustn't grumble.

It is really a case of us getting to know how the filming gear works out on a site, and how we can film ourselves without disturbing our own workflow.

I've been a sound engineer for close on 30 years now, and used DAW's for the last 20 of those.
It's real interesting to cross over to do some (rather poor) video editing and get back that sensation of stepping into a big scary new world of huge unknown possibilities. It's harder still doing so in the full view of a lot of professionals (friends included). But great fun.

We even turned a spare hotel room into a video edit suite.......

Wow! We're talkin' some luxury here!

Typically, over did it. But I usually hang on to computers for 5 years or more, so it's good to be a bit future proof.

Core i7 8700K @4.5GHz (6 core)
16 Gb Corsair Ram DDR4 @ 3000MHz (overclocked)
MSI Z370 gaming motherboard
Crucial 512GB M.2 SSD System drive
Nvidia Quadro P2000 GPU (pascal series, and does 10bit colour)
4 x Seagate Firecuda SSHD in Raid 0 for working video files (500 Mb/s)
1 x Toshiba 3TB archive / backup drive
TP-LINK Archer T9E AC1900 Dual Band Wireless PCI Express Adapter (for Hotel Wi-Fi)
Samsung LU32H850UMUXEN 32-Inch 10 bit 4K QLED monitor.
Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle - Connected to Hotel room TV.

Adobe Creative Cloud (Premiere, and stuff)

And NO SPEAKERS !

Yet still manages to do terrible videos... LMAO!

Here is this weeks contribution.

No big advances this week, just lots of small steps and fabric frames.

Esto es una maravilla!!!

how much $$$ rough. for the whole project?

Hard to say as it depends on what the whole project would really include.

There's the acoustic build. the design, the external building, the gear, the months and months of planning.

This place will have an odd hybrid purpose where the studio room is also a hybrid studio and experimental 3D sound control room.

There's also the building itself which is re-purposed, but had to be modified and the owner used some of their own works team to do that so it can't be properly costed.

They had to cut off the entire air conditioning system for the hotel and move all the refrigerant pipes, block up doors and open windows, raise the roof, change the roof from metal to thick heavy solid concrete, and build a solid concrete dividing wall. Not insignificant works at all.

Philip (Newell) had been dealing with all that preparation for almost 12 months before we landed on-site with our circus.

We're also living in the (closed) 4 star hotel which saves a load of cash for the customer (quite sensible)

What do I really know?

Well, lets put it this way. the acoustic build including just materials and labour would cost less than a fully loaded 48 channel high end mixing console.

You could blow more cash on a big Avid S6, a fully specified SSL Duality, or a large frame AMS Neve.

I can't be more specific as the whole thing is so project specific and so complex in how different parts are overlapping and there are "free" (still has some residual cost) bits like the accommodation that would probably be €15,000 or €20,000 if we were in a commercial open hotel but have considerably less as there is a 300 room hotel sitting here closed up for the winter.

Our remit has now extended to include technical install (Cabling, racks, support structures and gear) and in a complicated manner this is now being done in the middle of the acoustic build (it's more efficient to do technical stuff with the walls open) so the end date is extended but we are still 100% on time with the original project, we just have a tech install to do in the middle of it all now.

@0:43 An example of how a well designed acoustic space can even make a fart more musical.

We have to calibrate the ventilation extract somehow....

Meanwhile.

Some still shots to give some more close-up detail of where we are up to this week.

Four deliveries have been delayed, so we're taking Friday off for a bit of beach time. (it would be rude not to)

Hopefully the deliveries will be here tomorrow, but this is Ibiza, deliveries are hopeless, one of our deliveries have been on the island since Monday, but still hasn't made it here and nobody can tell us where it is.

We had a few days worth of stuff to do, but have now run out of things.

The stuff didn't come on our trucks at the start as it was decorative finishes and was still to be decided by the customer at that point.

Any project here on Ibiza is likely to run into delivery issues, this one is two weeks late now.

Still....... Could be worse, a long weekend on a Mediterranean island in spring. . . . Not exactly torture.

Higher resolution versions of the pictures can be seen here

One of the deliveries finally got here before 9am today so we got on with the stone front wall.

Here is this week's installment.

Some week 9 Pictures

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_DSC1651

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A really classy looking space!

Here we go.

This week we are doing the fabric for the control room and pulling all the cables for the immersive sound system in the recording space.

Some photos for now.

Still moving on. The control room construction is finished.

The studio is couple of weeks away yet.

Wow!!!
Thanks for sharing this with us

We're still buying Ye Olde Mac pro's (Cheese grater version)

The trash can Mac Pro still sucks.

Well, after a week or so with no video. Some stuff was just so repetitive it didn't warrant filming and the Easter holiday got in the way, here's some video update.


We're one week from completion of the acoustic structures and a further three weeks from completion of the technical install.

The crew is down to three after the end on this next week.