The time has come for me to move forward.
For years, me & my wife had been planning to move to the countryside and almost a year ago we finally made the move and bought a new home from
Kuhmoinen, Finland.The new location of nearly 200km from the location of my current room is most likely to change a few things, but the business has been growing steadily and I'm doing a lot of unattended sessions, so I look at the future with trust.
I've been working for about 4 years at
Studio Kuu's room B in Helsinki, the last year commuting back and forth. The new room will be built inside a cold farming house that practically only works as an outer shell and a fine roof. The mastering room itself will be built on a dedicated frame and a new concrete slab.
I will try to do an update at least once a week. I'm targeting to move in by early January, but only after I'm sure the room is functioning as I expect it to. I've hired a pair of excellent carpenters for the job, and they will be building it to the state from where I can continue with the acoustics. My carpenters are a father and a son that also happen to play in the same band - a guitarist and a drummer!
First, I would like to show off a few photos of the actual location. These photos were mostly taken in August.
..Entering our yard, the construction site to-be on the left.
..The yard from another angle. Our house is on the left. This end was built in the early 1900's, the other end before the mid 1850's. Healthy, old house with a history, just as we wanted.
...We've got a sauna. What'd you expect?
..There's a pink noise generator behind the sauna. It was a dry, hot summer so the water level is pretty low compared to the one in April:
Here's a few drawings of the actual plan (small and pixelated for a purpose). The acoustics design was done by
Janne Riionheimo, who has done quite a few smaller rooms with excellent results.
The actual space is 34 square meters in size to begin with. After the basic, insulated room is built, we're at about 28 square meters, and after the internal walls and acoustic treatment is in place, the size is about 22 square meters.
I would have wanted a slightly bigger room, but here comes the part I liked about the space:
The height is 3,5 metres at maximum (minus those clouds), and the angled roof and the sloped front should be working out excellent.
..This is the front wall, exploded.
..And the back wall.
What I wanted was a fairly live but a controlled, well-behaving room. A big plus in this construction is that there is no need to do any kind of soundproofing, which makes controlling the low end much easier as there's less of it that gets trapped inside the room. Thus, a smaller room like this should be working out just fine. This was one of my key design goals. I'm targeting for a listening distance of about 2,3 metres, or whatever sounds the best.