Garage studio's weakest link.

C

Chadwick

New member
I'm converting my garage in to a studio. I'm building a control room and a live room and individually floating them within the garage. The garage exterior has about 1 inches of stucco. My concern is that the roof consists of 1/2 plywood and composite shingles and I've decided that there's no way I'm going to add mass to the roof by cutting material and attempting to hang between the studs. I have the old fashioned 2x3 framed plywood garage door and I'm going permanently seal it in and increase it's mass by adding more plywood to the outside. The question is how much should I add to the door before it becomes a waste of time and material since the roof layer is so thin. Is it harder for the neighbors to hear when the sound is coming from the roof (which hardly has any pitch at all) then one of the walls? There will be plenty of noise coming from this studio. Live drums, bass, guitar. Any advice is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill
 
If you have a good ceiling that will help a lot. You'll probably have more trouble with leakage than not enough barrier. Don't make it so airtight that you run out of oxygen! And it's good to have two ways out of a building in case a fire blocks one way.

As far as that garage door goes, if your going to seal it anyway, you can put in a drywall wall on the inside. That'll be much denser than plywood.
 
My reasoning for using plywood on the outside is pure lazyness. Like the roof I have this phobia of having to fit material between studs from the inside. I want to avoid having three leaves of mass (reminder this is a room within room design). I was kind of wondering if I could sandwich some drywall between the existing exterior ply and a new sheet of exterior ply and seal it some way. I have a large overhang over the garage door. The only time I see any water exposure would be from an occasional wind driven rain. I'm in Southern CA. So it doesn't NORMALLY rain too often. But then again would it help keep the sound from the neighbors? The garage door probably only needs to have the same mass as the roof does unless the fact the roof faces up helps keep the noise from the neighbors.
Thanks for the input!
Bill
 
Cool.

Somewhere on Ethan's site he explains the advantages of one big room over a contol room plus a slightly smaller room.

If I were building a studio, I'd do it that way.
 
Yeah, I've been back and forth between 1 room or 2. Everything you do is a compromise when trying to fit a studio in a garage. Who know's maybe I'll change my mind again. I still have plenty of work on the outside garage structure before I start the inside room or rooms which = more time to think about it.
 
My studio is in an old garage. The kick is pretty much the only thing you can hear outside and it's failry quiet. I can't hear it in my house which is only 30' away. Not too bad. I didn't do anything out of the ordinary for construction. Just hung drywall and caulked the seams.
 
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