Soundproofing advice

[kalt]

Heya Fellas- Just bought a new house and the Mrs. and I are doing a massive remodel. Amazingly enough, she let me have a downstairs room that I am going to convert to my home studio. I live in a quite neighborhood and have two kids and wanted to soundproof the room so as not to disturb anyone during a late night jam/recording session. I can take the walls all the way down to the studs and have been told to use mass loaded vinyl and another sheet of thick drywall. I've also been told to do the whole room within a room thing with hat channels and another sheet of drywall. Last, I've been told I can use a product called Green Glue and just stick another sheet of drywall over the existing walls. I'm looking for a bit of advice from fellow RT'ers that have done this and could point me in the right diction. Thanks!!

 

[barnesjd]

Awesome dude! I recently won my case with the wife and got rights to the closet in our spare bedroom. If I can get myself to quit spending money on gear, I'll be sound proofing it.

There is a pretty good thread on sound proofing already, albeit a very different situation:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=128272

 

[stdio]

I was in the same boat a few years ago but decided to wait till I actually owned a place. But seriously there is a great forum I used to frequent that was all about building you own studio jam room. You can spend crazy money with sheet rock, channeling, green glue etc. Best thing is to plan it all out before you spend a ton and realize it didn't do shit.

Basically the main things I remember is that you need to plan the dimensions of the room, angle the walls so the are not any 90 degree angles etc.
Also egg crates and foam on the walls does only 2 things........... jack & shit.

I can try to find some old links if you like.... it can be a huge project. Have fun and play loud!!

 

[Tone Monster]

Small room inside another room is the only true way to soundproof.

Head over to gearslutz.com for better advice!

 

[MichaelG]

I was in the same boat a few years ago but decided to wait till I actually owned a place. But seriously there is a great forum I used to frequent that was all about building you own studio jam room. You can spend crazy money with sheet rock, channeling, green glue etc. Best thing is to plan it all out before you spend a ton and realize it didn't do shit.

Basically the main things I remember is that you need to plan the dimensions of the room, angle the walls so the are not any 90 degree angles etc.

Yup, avoid small square rooms like the plague! Reverberations and standing waves issue galore......

Also egg crates and foam on the walls does only 2 things........... jack & shit.

egg-crates and foam (aurelex) are "room treatment" techniques for cutting down on sound waves causing reverberations and standing waves in your sound room. Not for sound-proofing at all.

Planning is absolutely key. If you are serious about soundproofing, buy and read this book, it will tell you all that you need to know. http://www.amazon.ca/Home-Recording-Studio-Build-Like/dp/143545717X. Rod Gervais builds recording studios for a living and this book puts together a lot of all of the techniques that you will read about on the internet like green-glue, iso-rails etc...

Here is the forum that stdio may have been referring to: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php

 

[rokker]

You wont get much of an stc reduction with the egg crating or foam...it only reduces reverberation.
Dcoupling with hat channel and resilient clips and the two layers of drywall with green glue imbetween will allow you to crank a 100 watter and barely be able to hear it on the other side of the wall...mass loaded vinly is very good too but very heavy.

I made a large closet into a nearly soundproof eoom by doing the hat chananel and two layers of drywall and green glue.
Then i covered the walls and ceiling with fabric covered rockwool.

I dont have enough space to run my wdw rig in there and moved elsewhere...make sure you have enough room. If you do the decoupling and green glue you will see a huge reduction in stc level. Probably 50-60 db.

One word of warning....if sound is not getting through neither will air...a 100w tube amp will make the room quite warm...if you have a band in there you may need some ventilation or it will be super hot in there.

 

[ibenhad]

On the cheap and temporary or perm if ya want is to use wire around the room from eye hook to eye hook and then use those metal clothes pins to hang packing blankets. Not the light ones the real thick heavy ones. Worked for my drummer and also made the room bearable for us to practice in. If you have the extra scratch do it right though.

 

[petejt]

I've got a super cheap setup of just mattress foam (yellow egg crate foam at half the price), and actual mattresses set around the room. It diminishes the reverberation a little bit. The room is downstairs and partially underground which helps a little.


There's some good advice already posted in here for construction. I asked a mate of mine who is a builder and he said similar things, particularly about having walls that are odd angles and never 90 degrees.

I'm marking this thread to read later- I'll be moving house in a few months, and hopefully will have spare room where I can do some of this stuff.

 

[kalt]

Thanks guys. So, I've taken all the drywall off and I'm down to one of two options as I see it. Option 1 is to use the mass loaded vinyl, cotton Ultratouch insulation and a layer of drywall (maybe Quiterock or just normal thick drywall). Option 2 is to use Isoclips to secure hat channel to and install new drywall to that. Option 2 is the most cost effective of the options but I do not want to skimp on this. Any thoughts as to which route is better I would certainly appreciate. Thanks!

 

[Shawn Lutz]

you need to build a room within a room, ceiling, floors and walls. Double sheet rock walls and ceiling with a gap between them. Float the floor in the same fashion

 

[ejecta]

you need to build a room within a room, ceiling, floors and walls. Double sheet rock walls and ceiling with a gap between them. Float the floor in the same fashion

This^..... no amount of blown insulation, foam, or wall treatments likes foam pads will "soundproof" a room. The only way is like Shawn said a room in a room. When I built my house we planned for me to have a jam room in my basement but in the end the "room in the room" wasn't in my budget so we instead used a lot of blown insulation in the walls and above the suspended ceiling, used solid doors with tight seals. That helped some but you can still hear a full band or very loud guitar playing upstairs. It's very tolerable upstairs and in the back of the house farthest away from that room it's very faint but what we did was by no means sufficient to "soundproof". The key isn't the sound being contained... it's the vibration the sound causes on the walls and ceiling. Vibrations are like water and they flow throw connected solid surfaces and carry the sound. The only way to insulate for vibration is air between non or very limited connected walls and floor.

 

[joepete77]

It also depends on budget and location of your place. Obviously a place in the city with neighbors/business near by will be harder to deal with then in the country. If you have the money and are building a pro studio then I can understand dumping 100 grand into it , but if its just a music room for you and your band/friends to have a good time then it might not be necessary to go all out. As gearheads its easy for us to get caught up in the minute details and go overboard. Anyway, congrats and good luck, hope u post some pics of progress along the way!

 

[ibenhad]

This thread is probably worth you checking out.

http://www.guitarampboard.com/forum/vie ... =53&t=6289

 

[MichaelG]

Thanks guys. So, I've taken all the drywall off and I'm down to one of two options as I see it. Option 1 is to use the mass loaded vinyl, cotton Ultratouch insulation and a layer of drywall (maybe Quiterock or just normal thick drywall). Option 2 is to use Isoclips to secure hat channel to and install new drywall to that. Option 2 is the most cost effective of the options but I do not want to skimp on this. Any thoughts as to which route is better I would certainly appreciate. Thanks!

Definitely option 2 over option 1, and use 3inch mineral wool insulation in the stud cavities. This wall design is your option 2) and is a pretty good value for money spent (http://www.soundisolationcompany.com/education/soundproofing-101/best-wall-soundproofing). Two layers of 5/8 inch drywall with green-glue provides really good isolation, and for me in Canada was still *far* cheaper than QuietRock. If you can do this on each side of the stud wall, even better. Same site offers advice for similar ceiling and floor isolation. Since you are in a basement I doubt that you need to pay as much attention to the floor as you do the ceiling. Sound can leak out through very small gaps (thus defeating your intentions) and so it is important that you need to pay attention to, for example...
- putting putty pads around each electrical box
- it is important to use the isolation clips for the walls and ceilings... this will greatly reduce the "flanking noise", or the vibrations that will travel through your framing...
- gaps between electrical boxes and drywall, seal with acoustical caulk
- gap at the bottom of your drywall where it meets the floor... stuff with compressed mineral wool and seal with acoustical caulk
- gap between the drywall and the door casing, stuff with compressed mineral wool and seal with acoustical caulk
- Use acoustical caulk in the joints between adjacent sheets of drywall
- Wrap any pipes/ducts in the ceiling space with sound-isolating wrap (http://www.soundisolationcompany.com/solutions-products/accessories/duct-and-pipe-wrap) or you can get flanking noise
- etc...

The door is by far the hardest part of your room and is where the majority of sound can still leak out. A simple solid-core door is not enough... you can buy high-STC doors but they cost a small fortune. I built what Rod Gervais calls a "super-door"... solid core door with additional layers of mass-loaded-vinyl green-glue and 3/4 ply. My door also has 2 levels of seals.. all of the door hardware (threshold/jamb-seals/hinges/door-sweep for the bottom of the door) I got from the company http://www.zerointernational.com/ and it is good stuff. A super-door is heavy so you have to build a really solid jamb and use really beefed-up hinges.

My basement studio/man-cave is a double stud-wall design. The inside/outside walls and the ceiling were built with 2 layers of 5/8inch drywall with greenglue inside. The inner studwall and ceiling is properly decoupled from my house's framing and so no flanking noise. The door is a super-door as I mentioned above. Overall I get excellent sound isolation but the door is still the weakest part of the room. I didn't isolate the flooring from the concrete slab flooring and it hasn't mattered as I do not get flanking noise through the slab. Within my audio room I can still hear some foot-falls from the main floor, but otherwise practically nothing else. In the main-floor living room I can hear lower frequencies leaking out like high-volume bass drum hits etc, but it is masked if the TV is turned on. On the second floor of the house nothing is heard at all, and this is despite the fact that I am playing with enough volume to make my ears ring.

There is a shit-ton of information on the internet but it's tough to use it all properly to create a design that will work for you. If you don't plan and implement it properly it could be really hard to fix once everything is built and you possibly discover that it wasn't effective despite all the money you spent. Get that book I recommended because it covers all this stuff and gives you the knowledge to create that plan and build it right.

Good luck!

Edited... I used 5/8inch drywall in my studio and not 1/2inch

 

[River City Studios]

I enclosed a stall in our 3 car garage about 8 years ago to make a home studio. We too had kids, which were small at the time. There is a ton of information you can grab off forums like the John Sayers forum that someone mentioned above. Also, gearslutz has a studio construction section on their site as well:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/studio-b ... acoustics/

I hit both when I did mine and ultimately found what others have said already: The only way to "sound proof" a room is to decouple it (room within a room), which was way too expensive for me at the time.

So, I built walls with as much mass as I could afford that went something like this:

5/8" sheet rock - 3/4 sound board - 5/8" sheet rock - studs which were over stuffed with fiberglass insulation - 5/8" sheet rock - 3/4" sound board - 5/8" sheet rock. Each layer was sealed with silicone caulking between the joints.

Worked out pretty well. Is it sound proof? Hell no. But can I put a JCM800 2004 at a relatively high volume setting (6ish) and not piss off the neighbors and wake up the kids? Totally. You can barely hear it in the house or from the street which is about 50 feet away.

Good luck. Post pictures when you're done!

 

[kalt]

Thanks Fellas, VERY helpful!