This is a terrible room...but it will have to do

[marshall409]

OK so my basement bedroom opened up. I want to eventually get some recording action down there, but for now, I have to make it quiet! My house is terrible, I can hear everything. The upstairs has plaster walls, and the cheap bastards who lived here before finsihed the basement so terribly I honestly think i couldve done a better job myself. The walls are standard studs, just like I helped construct in my dads basement, but the walls are this cheap cardboard/plasticy fraction of an inch thin shit. I've tossed a shoe aside and it went THROUGH the wall. It's crap! Needless to say, I need help. Tearing off the porrman's substitute for sheetrock is doable, but beyond that, I can't do much. And it has to look decent and be a possibile normal room in the future. The floor is floating on a sturdy wood structure on top of cement and then a plywoodish layer on top of that + that cheap grey carpetting ou see in kindergarten classrooms. The roof is normal framing except instead of sheetrock, they opted for yet another cheap substitue. This hideous interlocking tile crap of a similar material to the walls. I wish I knew what this crap was actually called. Anyway, my main focus right now is to make this room suitable to practice in to take some relief off my drummers basement(and his parents lol). Any links to a solution? Thanks alot.

Adam

 

[SonicClang]

That's called "wood panneling", it's fake wood of course. It's actually a fire hazard in my opinion. In my opinion it should never be used in the place of drywall, but it's OK on TOP of drywall if you really like that look (but who really does???). I have a friend who was living in a trailer home until their real house was finished being built and if the walls weren't skinned with drywall her whole family would have died, but the drywall gave them enough time to escape when something electrical went bad. The whole thing went up in flames but their dog woke them up. She had a new born at that time.

That panneling offers absolutely nothing for sound proofing. You need to tare it down, insulate the walls, run any electrical outlets you'll need, and finish the walls with drywall. Perferably you should use resilient channel on the studs and mount two layers of drywall to that, making sure the drywall touches absolutely NOTHING but the resilient channel. Caulk the perimeters of the drywall so it's sealed or you'll have sound flanking the wall and finding other ways to get past.

If you've never done drywalling, you'll learn quick. Go to your local home depot and go to any clinics they might be holding for construction, you're going to need all the hands-on learning you can get. In my opinion the hardest part of drywalling is the mudding.

Read through this site and www.johnlsayers.com and absorb as much as you can. If you're going to try making the room sound proof, you can't half ass it. You might as well use regular construction if you do because it's either right or wrong, there isn't much gray area in studio construction.

 

[marshall409]

Thanks

Thanks alot. I have also wondered about the safety of this panelling stuff. As far as I know, its the only thing on those studs. But we did have a fire inspection because of new laws about the wood burning stove/fireplace thing in the basement. Thanks also for the link. Anyone else have anything?

Adam