Best way to Sound Proof?

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JesusFreak

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Hello Everyone,
Me again, I mentioned in a previous post that I am converting a standard two car attached garage into my home studio. The size is 19x19.

I would just like some advice on how to make it to where my neighbors aren't bothered, but I also don't want my room sounding dead. I've read some information on the SAE web site about panel absorbers and bass traps and all that stuff and I think my brain went into overload. I don't want to spend 10,000 dollars converting my garage. I just want the best and basic way I can both sound proof it and make it sound good on the inside as well.

As always, any advice or personal experience is appreciated!

God Bless!
 
When converting our garage I went through the multitude of advice on the web and was overwhelmed myself. I basically took the general view and made my own assumptions based on our budget (which was zilch). Basically what we had to do was build a smaller room inside of our garage. We did this using soundboard from Home Depot (pretty cheap, leass than $10 for a 4x8 sheet at the time). We hung the sheets from the ceiling and walls using long eye bolts so there is no framework or wall touching wall, it floats. Everything had to fit very squarely together and we used heavy duty rubber stripping in between the joints and corners. Inside of that there is all sorts of junk (foam, blankets, etc.) but it doesn't help much. The floating soundboard does all the work. We had to rig a ventilation system because the room ended up being pretty air tight. We haven't heard a word form anyone in 3 years playing there, people have actually commented that they had no idea we were there and there are houses almost directly connected to our garage (we are in a very tight little beach community). So there's how we did a very ghetto soundproofing job, but I haven't seen any better unless it was professionally done. Hope this helps some and let me know if I can give you any more info :)
 
Thank you sooo much Barometer,
You have no idea how much better I feel after reading your post. I was starting to get stressed out on all the things that I might have to do to get it right. Just a couple of questions though. I'm having a hard time picturing your ceiling. You say you hung the sheet rock on bolts so it was floating? Could you elaborate a little. I have the basic idea but some specifics would help. Also, what did you do to the inside of your room to get rid of that dreaded "DEAD" sound? Again, thanks for seriously helping to relieve some stress :-).

God Bless!
 
JF - I would not worry too much about the "dead" sound. Its a lot easier to liven up recording made in a dead room then it is to mix out outside noise - or the sound of your neighbor's shotgun coming in through the window. :D

Seriously, my studio is a basement so I started off with a much easier task. All I will say is to remember that floor and ceiling are just as important as the walls.
 
JesusFreak said:
Thank you sooo much Barometer,
You have no idea how much better I feel after reading your post. I was starting to get stressed out on all the things that I might have to do to get it right. Just a couple of questions though. I'm having a hard time picturing your ceiling. You say you hung the sheet rock on bolts so it was floating? Could you elaborate a little. I have the basic idea but some specifics would help. Also, what did you do to the inside of your room to get rid of that dreaded "DEAD" sound? Again, thanks for seriously helping to relieve some stress :-).

God Bless!
Click to expand...

No problems, like I said, I can relate to the stress of all the reading about these subjects. But it must be done to fully understand.

Our ceiling is hung from long eyebolts (about 8 inches). We attached the long eye to short eyes that anchor to the original ceiling so the thread side is down. We cut holes just to fit the bolts in the soundboard (it's kind of like really dense insullation, not sheetrockwhich is too heavy). 8 holes on each sheet for decent support. Then we carefully lifted the boards horizontally until all the bolts were through the holes and the boards were still about 6 inches from the original ceiling. We covered the holes with washers and nuts that were larger than the hole. The walls are hung the same way exceptvertical and their tops are just above the hung ceiling to ensure a good seal. Hope that made sense :confused:

Inside we dampen with whatever we could find, blankets, foam, even carpeting. All the hung boards are covered with something and the floor should have carpet to get the ring out. And as RWhite said, it's easier to liven up a deader sound so I don't worry about that much.

keep asking questions if you have 'em, I don't want to go off making everyone read extra long posts. ;)
 
Definitely. Dead is good - that's what reverb is for. Dead is what you want, unless you're recording a 3 piece jazz trio live to 2 track :)
 
Sleep on the floor and line the walls with your mattresses. That's what I did.
 
I saw an excellent electronic music movie called "Better living through circuitry", and there was an interview with Scott and Ken from The Crystal Method. And they swore the best way is two use 2 layers of different thickness sheetrock. And I'm pretty sure that was without anything in between them. But I would think it would be better to put a baffle in between the layers.
 
There's nothing between my soundboard layer and the original structure of the garage and people swear they can hardly hear a thing when we're sealed in. But I did read some good stuff when I was researching about baffling, we just had a really TIGHT budget (zilch) ;)
 
Ok i record/play in my basement my parents are upstairs,
Im thinking about soundproofing this way, but i want to keep
that live feel so i don't want to deaden it. How well would it work if i just covered the cieling in the soundboard.
 
If your goal is only to isolate sound going up this may not be the best method, though I think it would work. You may want to look up some baffling techniques to push the sound around your basement more the way you want and have less of it 'escaping' through the ceiling. :)
 
my goal is mainly to just stop the sound from goin up stairs some it doesn't have to be completely soundproofed but lower it atleast 15/20 db. My basement is built almost completely into the dirt its a square w/ a hallway off the top right corner goin to the stairs
 
Hmmm.....I'd have to know a little more about those stairs, seem like more sound might go upstairs that way than directly through the ceiling. I don't know about lowering 15-20db, but the point of hanging a separate ceiling below the actual is to get not only another layer of wall there but to create the space between the real ceiling and the hung ceiling. This space gives more soundproofing because the sound has to bounce around in there weakening the sound more before it goes through the second surface. That's the jist anyway :)
 
There is a difference between "sound proofing" and "acoustic treatments". Sound proofing is much harder and more expensive in the end to do.

In a basement, your main problem is (excuse the pun...) "head room", literally. You cannot raise the ceiling, so you have to create an air pocket that is lowered from the ceiling in the basement, which starts making the room indeed very short!

You could go a long ways by affixing a dense material like particle board first, resiliant strips on that, then 5/8" sheetrock. It would probably be good to insulated between the particle board and the upstairs floor with rock wool as thick as you can fit in the cavity between the floor joists. Rock wool has the sound absorption of about twice it's thickness compared to fiberglass insulation, but will cost about what twice it's thickness in fiberglass would cost per square foot.

Without the air pocket, and dense layer, smaller air pocket, then drywall, you will probably contain little sound. Air and density is your friend in sound proofing. Also, you may have to investigate possibly using a double door going downstairs. Ventilation/heating ducts would need to be wrapped in thick rockwool as they will carry sound upstairs quite easily.

As for that garage. The suggestion about building a room within a the garage is the ONLY idea that is going to work. You MUST build a ceiling too. Raising the floor 6" wouldn't be such a bad idea either. If you use staggered stud design in building the walls, you will go a long way towards eliminating transference via the wall studs. Staggered stud design is easy enough. Use 2X6" "caps" for the walls (bottom and top) and 2X4" studs. You would space the studs every 8" on the "caps", with every other stud being flush with either side of the wall. This way, the drywall on either side of the wall will not share any studs, thus significantly reducing transference via the studs. Cool eh? You could use wider "caps" to create yet a bigger cavity between the two walls, which will lower the frequency that will get "trapped" in the cavity if you choose, although, depending on how much space you have between the existing garage wall and the new wall, this may be unneccesary. Make sure to insulate the cavity of the new wall, and certainly it won't hurt to insulate the existing garage walls too, and if they are not finished in drywall on the inside, they should be. Remember, the more dense layers and air pockets you have, the better absorption you will get!

I watched a friend try to "sound proof" a brand new garage he built about 5 years ago where he didn't follow ANY of this advice. The first time his band practiced there, the cops showed up from a complaint from somebody a block away! You could not hear anything about about 400Hz outside the garage, but you could hear 100Hz over a block away quite clearly! Too band for him. His band don't practice there anymore, and he is the owner of one very nice storage space with no bay door. :D

Good luck.

Creepy
 
Barometer- I'm surprised your system works so well with so little material. You can't hear the drums outside? What did you do about the garage doors?
 
As I mentioned there is a room hanging inside our garage, including the door side. That wall is hanging about 3 feet inside the garage door (had to due to the type of garage door, it needs the room to open). I did make an exception on this side because we needed a door frame so we could enter the inner room. So there's a studded wall with another layer of soundboard just a couple inches from the hanging wall (between the hanging wall and garage door). We framed a soundboard door on this and made another soundboard door that slides into the small gap between the two built walls. The garage is by no means soundproof, but it sounds kind of like someone is playing a radio at listening volume, even the drums. When we first set it up we didn't believe it either until some people saw us coming out one day and couldn't believe we were practicing in there. No complaints in 3 yrs so I guess it's working OK :D
 
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