Closet vocal/instrument booth

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abm123

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All right here is the deal.... I have a closet that is 5' by 5.33' and 8' tall. About 219' of surface area. I was gonna just cover the walls in acoustic foam basically but i wasn't sure if it would work. I want it for isolation from outside sound but especially to keep the noise from loud guitar and base (and bad singing) from getting downstairs to the rest of the house. How should i soundproof and or acoustically treat the room? I am not looking to spend a fortune but would love input on the matter. Also please tell me where i can buy the materials i will need.
 
if you are looking to soundproof a room, you are in for a BIG suprise from what it sounds like...............I am in no position to answer all of your questions, but hopefully someone will come in here and can tell you

by the way, you CANT get cheap soundproofing

check out this link to start

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=598

read up on that, and then come back and ask come questions
 
all right. I am not looking to spend a fortune is what i meant. I am willing to work hard but i dont have much money. what types of foam or what do i need. I dont need it to be "soundproof" i just need it to sound great in the room for recording and lessen the sound leaving the room.
 
ok, lets, start simply.

There are two things, absorbtion and isolation. Absorbtion keeps sound from bouncing around inside your booth and making it sound like you are in a tiny room. Isolation is what keeps your noise from getting out of the room and what keeps ouside noise, like airplanes and nieghbors, from getting in.

FOAM WILL NOT GET YOU ISOLATION.

Getting really good isolation is hard, even in new construction. Retrofitting it into an existing room can be an exercise in frustration since there are so many 'flanking routes' for sound, you only have one side of the wall space and there is a question of how much floor space you want to give up.

So a retrofit wall/ceiling construction might be
1/8 inch mass load vinyl
1/2 inch cement board board, mastic
5/8 inch gypsum board,
1/8 inch mass loaded vinyl
1/2 inch gypsum board

or a total of two inches lost from every surface. and a lot of money.

THEN you have to look at the floor, and you particualrly have to look at the doors and the door seals.
 
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Ever thought about hanging some heavy blankets in there not exactly "soundproof" but cheap and effective way to cut some of the noise and focus it on whatever you are trying to record.
 
well i am looking for great quality on my recordings over extreme soundproofing. I cant afford to do the massive retrofit you speak of. I was thinking i could coat the place in foam to absorb sound and get great recordings. Anyways wouldn't putting up foam help some because it absorbs sound? I seem to be in way over my head. I am not a rich person in fact i am 15 and just want to absorb sound in the room and at least muffle the sound to the rest of the house.
 
abm123 said:
well i am looking for great quality on my recordings over extreme soundproofing. I cant afford to do the massive retrofit you speak of. I was thinking i could coat the place in foam to absorb sound and get great recordings. Anyways wouldn't putting up foam help some because it absorbs sound? I seem to be in way over my head. I am not a rich person in fact i am 15 and just want to absorb sound in the room and at least muffle the sound to the rest of the house.
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The foam will make your room sound deader but it won't do much to muffle the sound to the rest of the house. The foam will help you meet one of your goals but not the other.

Since you are only 15 I really don't want you thinking that you are going to get something from your limited money that you won't

First of all let's talk about leakage paths. I think it is pretty obvious that if you went into the closet and left the door open a lot of noise is going to get into the house, no matter how much foam is on the wall. Well even when you close the door there is going to be cracks around the door, and the door itself on most closets is pretty flimsy. Good seals around the door and heavier door will be two good simple steps. But they will not do all of it by far.

I hope at 15 you know that sound is energy carried by pressure waves in the air. So what happens when one of these waves hit a surface like a wall? Two things happen. Some of the energy in the wave bounces off of the wall. The rest of the energy goes into the wall, causing the wall to vibrate, and on the other side of the wall it causes the air to vibrate again. If you think about it you must realize that when sound goes through a wall that air hasn't passed through all of the solid material, only the vibrations.

Now the purpose fo the foam is to prevent sound from bouncing off of it. In order to do this it has to let the sound travel easily into it. Once into it the foam will try to disrupt the energy by breaking up the wave, but by in large the sound that has travels through the foam and hits the wall still has most of the energy it had when it started. It then transfers the usual portion of that energy into the wall which then travels through the wall just like normal. The sound reflected from the wall is then further reduced by the foam.

So to rephrase the foam reduces the part of sound energy that will be reflected by the wall but not the part that travels into, and then through the wall.

The short answer to what DOES stop sound transmission through walls is having no shortcut paths and HEAVY material on your walls. Heavy materials take more energy to get moving so the sound that hits the wall can only move the wall a little
 
Here is how I handled the same thing back in the day.

To treat the inside of the closet:

Leave the cloths IN the closet

next

To try to keep sound in:

shut the door, flip a mattres up vertically and smash it up against the door (To hold the mattress up I used a small book shelf or an amp if available)

Total Price: $0


now if you have a budget

Go buy Event/Movie/Theme park tickets for everyone in the house. Buy a pack of moving men (its a bunch of discs that allow you to slide heavy things). Slide your workstation to where ever you want to record in the house.

Total Cost: $20-60 depending on family size
 
Innovations has stated the issues, and there have been a few practical things advised for dealing with the walls (ie. hanging blankets, leaving clothes in the closet, etc.), so let's look at one final thing to help reduce the amount of energy that can be transmitted through the floor. As Innovations said, sound is energy and it causes other material objects to vibrate and re-transmit the sound elsewhere. There is no practical and cheap way to eliminate this transferral of sound, but it can be reduced somewhat to make life more pleasant for other parts of the house.

For the floor, I would suggest that you get ahold of several thick blankets (the heavy packing blankets you can get a a moving company are quite good; U-Hal sells them for $15-20 apiece) and cover the floor in layers (at least 4 layers, minimum). If you place your amplifier on top the amount of vibration that gets coupled into the floor will be reduced and your parents will appreciate a noticeable difference. To take it a step further you could get one of the amp isolation skids that Auralex makes (http://www.auralex.com/sound_isolation_gramma/sound_isolation_gramma.asp) that reduces the vibrations from the amp to the floor, and use this in conjunction with the layered blankets. Again, you won't get perfect isolation but it will reduce the levels considerably.

Anyway, these are just a couple of practical and inexpensive things that can be done to cut down the noise. If you were in a basement, more could be done but it would involve some construction.

Good luck,
Darryl.....
 
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