Prior to Live Performance

[vanblah]

I wasn't sure where to put this really, but since performing live is (or rather should be) what you should do after practicing I figured I'd put it here.

We have a practice space that is about 35 x 20 feet. The walls, floor and ceiling are concrete. In front of the walls is a 2x4 stud wall with drywall. The studs don't touch the concrete walls, and I'm not really sure how they are attached since I didn't actually build it.

We would like to build a room within a room in this space. I'd like to drop the ceiling from 12 feet to 8 or 9 feet. The resulting room inside the room would be 25x17x8(or 9). My questions are this:

Should we use a layer of 1/2" drywall on the outside of our new room, then a layer of R19 (can't afford mineral wool), and then another layer of drywall.

OR:

A layer of black siding, a layer of rolled roofing, a layer of R19, and then a layer of 1/2" drywall.

OR:

Could we just save money and do just one layer of drywall and R19?

The exterior walls are already in place, and the room is huge so we don't have to worry about the decoupling part. We can come in from those exterior walls at least a foot in every direction.

Please feel free to ask me if I've left out an important step.

[pounce]

it appears that you are talking about soundproofing for a practice space as opposed to getting all funky about a perfectly tuned recording room. if that is the case, generally speaking mass is what will be your friend. fwiw, there is a product i also like called tectum, and it's made near me in ohio. it's an acoustic absortion product available as a contruction material. it looks a lot like if you took a lot of spaghetti that was cooked and let it dry in flat 4 x 8 foot sheets. when you put this on a wall with firring strips so that it is away from the wall by a quarter of an inch or so you get a lot of sound absorption. so it will help both the space and the outside so the neighbors hear you much less.

obviously, things like doors, windows, and hvac are the real weak link with respect to sound leakage. how you address those will be important (as forgetting those will likely mean any other efforts wrt soundproofing are moot).

the last time i was involved in putting something like this together, it was all about layers of wallboard, homosote, insulation, and then repeat all of them again. the walls must have been about ten times thicker than normal walls in a house. we measured the noise reduction between rooms and it was very very respectable. there were no complaints from the neighbors, and it looked nice when we had it done. it was just a matter of mass. we did try to put hard then soft layers, and use a few kinds of material so that the combination of materials aborbed as many frequencies as possible.

[clicktrack]

Another product of note is the Quiet Rock line from quiet solution:

www.quietsolution.com (http://www.quietsolution.com/html/quietrock.html?gclid=CLjn2PfdsokCFTzqJAod2mkbEA)

I investigated this product and was hoping to use it for our truck, but, at the time, they didn't have a readily available distribution network in canada making it *extremely* cost in-effective. They do, however, provide some interesting ideas about after usage...particularily the idea of "short-circuiting" the wall structure by hanging pictures, and how their product avoids this. (How true it is, I can't tell you, but they seem to market this heavily).

Pounce is dead right. Mass, mass mass mass mass is the key. For doors, if you're going big, you'll need to use double-doors in order to provide the linkage solution.

Some people even go as far as separating the floor with rubber. If you do go down this route, don't buy the specialized rubber that is purpose made for this. Using your standard rubber hockey pucks apparently get you the similar separation without the cost of the purpose-built rubber. Think of how many hockey pucks you can get for the price of one of those specialty pieces?

John L. Sayers hosts a website that specializes in home studio design and rooms-within-rooms. There's a lot of discussion techniques in his forum that discusses exactly this topic. Take a look at His Studio Construction Forum (http://www.johnlsayers.com/).

Cheers!

Click

[Swafford]

Unless total sound proofing is the goal, this seems like a lot of over kill to me.

Our former space was an auto/motorcycle garage (aptly named The Garage). It was pretty big, 2.5 old cars wide 6 long, concrete floors, dingy basement, ancient wood building with tar paper and crappy shingles, high sloping roof. The outside walls were falling down, so to avoid getting the necessary permits he would need to fix the building proper, our cheap ass landlord built a building within the building and blew standard insallation between the new walls and the old (about 8-12 inches between them). We insualted the ceiling and windows with the shit you buy at Lowes, threw down used carpet and throw rugs and boarded over the windows with plywood, and placed cheap ass 'sound' foam on the boards. The trophy was a 70's Yamaha RS 100 sans motor we hauled up on chains and hung from an I beam originally used for engine pulling. I once asked Len, the really old school land lord who restored vintage european and japanese bikes, to sell me the Yamaha and he said "Don't ever fucking ask me about that bike again". I guess it was hot or something.

Anyway, we had 10 years of rock parties, mostly till the sun came up, with never a noise complaint and all agreeing it was a great sounding room. That was one nasty carpet. My wife wouldn't go in the place.

Good luck!

[vanblah]

Total soundproofing would be impossible on our budget. However, we are sharing the space with artists (of the visual type) and they demand their peace and quiet.

I sometimes bring up Warhol's Factory and Velvet Underground but they aren't having any of it. Heck, Mozart composed operas while other people practiced around him on various instruments and songs. It didn't bother him ...

Maybe we're being too nice.

These are all good ideas.

[Johnny]

That Quiet Rock looks interesting, particularly the video clip on their home page involving the drummer. Anyone here use the stuff?

[clicktrack]

I seriously WANTED to use their stuff...they just couldn't get it to canada at a reasonable price (at the time) and wouldn't deal to make it worth my while.

We ended up using a standard construction that the truck manufacturer uses in a few of his mobile truck designs: Outer skin of aluminum, 2x4's with 16" centres filled with Roxul, 3/4" ply, another layer of roxul, 3/4" ply, interior treatments (some of which are slot absorbers, others are fabric-covered frames filled with Roxul) This gets us considerable isolation without *significantly* using up some of the truck's available GVWR. Our estimations are that the quietrock would have weighed in slightly more, which again would have been a concern.

But if anyone in the US has a chance to use it, please do let us know...I'd be interested in hearing about the results.

Cheers
Click