Cutting the sound out in a sound studio

[63dot]

I have a friend who has an electric drum set in an apartment. All parts are electronic so there is no noise when the set is played unplugged. But when run through an amp, the sound gets out into other rooms.

To soundproof, he put up a set of walls and floors/ceilings inside the room and their is dead air space in between the room inside the room. It's a room within a room. He is a carpenter so he knows how to build anything.

Everything is cut out except for some of the bass response which leaks to other rooms.

Is there a better way to baffle the sound between walls of the inner room and the surrounding exterior room?

 

[mbpnewbie]

quick google turned up this
http://www.greenspec.co.uk/html/products/list681b.html

 

[63dot]

quick google turned up this
http://www.greenspec.co.uk/html/products/list681b.html

That should work. Hopefully not too expensive but I have a feeling it's not your regular Orchard Supply Hardware or Home Depot faire. I have seen a lot of amateur studios and they never took the expense to buy the right materials.

 

[Tomorrow]

headphones?

 

[63dot]

headphones?

That's for himself jamming on the drums. He just wanted an option when others came over to jam. But actually, all could also wear headphones, too. In situations where more than one person was wearing headphones, it was usually in a recording only situation.

 

[Tomorrow]

Check out this product and others like it. It's expensive, but it really works well.

 

[63dot]

Check out this product and others like it. It's expensive, but it really works well.

That sounds like what I have seen on a three pronged approach with my drummer friend having done the walls inside a wall thing.

He needs to find proper insulation between the walls vs. just dead air to cut lows properly, and finally he needs to make the studio walls non parallel to reduce initial sound in the studio. This seems to be the professional approach and it's expensive if one wants to cut out the greatest amount of highs, mids, and lows.

 

[Tomorrow]

The stuff in that link doesn't go inside the walls - it works because of the angular shape. It's similar to using the angular walls you described.

It's far more effective outside the wall than anything you could possibly put inside a wall. Internally insulating a wall works okay for apartments or hotel rooms, but it's pretty much useless against keeping music from crossing a wall.

 

[Keniff]

Check out this product and others like it. It's expensive, but it really works well.

With all respects, that is just 'sound treatment' and not 'sound proofing' you may as well use somethiing like This, and I've know people that have, and it works just as well for a fraction of the price!

@ the OP (63dot) you mentioned your friend was a good carpenter/builder, I was curious if he built this 'room-within-a-room' Totally out of wood?
If yes, then it might work ok for acoustics, but even with a floating floor design, the sound will travel through the wood/room one way or another.

Maybe he should consider building or buying something like This?

 

[63dot]

The stuff in that link doesn't go inside the walls - it works because of the angular shape. It's similar to using the angular walls you described.

It's far more effective outside the wall than anything you could possibly put inside a wall. Internally insulating a wall works okay for apartments or hotel rooms, but it's pretty much useless against keeping music from crossing a wall.

The angled foam is for the inside of the studio, I know that. What goes between the walls is a specific blanket looking insulation, and to install it, it's glued in and not nailed in. Why this is exactly I don't know. It's a step up from just any insulation and made for between the walls for recording studios. Like the angled foam in the studio itself, it's not cheap.

And then I saw more on the issue of the door into the room. That is one part often left out and a porthole for the sound to go through. Those low frequencies are the hardest to knock out.

One website put it well when they said, rooms are designed for people, but recording studios are designed for sound. I didn't like the sterile sound of recording as a musician, but the end results were amazing. Digitized reverb is much easier to control and manipulate than natural reverb.

What is hard in a foamed out professional studio is that mistakes made while playing really sound terrible and is very unforgiving. But it puts any level of musician up to a higher level of precision. It's a good thing when the final product comes out, but also makes it so hard to replicate live without those controls.

 

[63dot]

With all respects, that is just 'sound treatment' and not 'sound proofing' you may as well use somethiing like This, and I've know people that have, and it works just as well for a fraction of the price!

@ the OP (63dot) you mentioned your friend was a good carpenter/builder, I was curious if he built this 'room-within-a-room' Totally out of wood?
If yes, then it might work ok for acoustics, but even with a floating floor design, the sound will travel through the wood/room one way or another.

Maybe he should consider building or buying something like This?

The egg crate is great for reducing unwanted overtones and echoes inside the studio and is the cheapest viable option. The sound room in the link is pretty good for mids and highs, but dead air between walls, while cheaper, doesn't cut the lows.

It's better than nothing, and I have tried those and they are pretty good for reducing most of the sound. I have recorded in a TV studio and they had one foot or more think concrete walls and that cut out any sound, but of course the building was designed that way, with the high cost in mind, non parallel walls and a high ceiling with tons of insulation and aluminum sheeting. The engineer's recording booth was behind very thick glass and he had to communicate with us through a speaker system. Of course, this is not a possibility for an apartment room.

Of course, within the context of an apartment, the floating room has to not damage the existing room, and that's been adhered to strictly. He can't find a way to stop the lows and I think so far, certain yet expensive insulation and door is the key.