Need Design for Studio..exciting!

Hey, Ive followed your instructions best i could and this is my post. Thank you in advance. OVERVIEW: I am planning a project studio in two ajoining offices. I plan to have a control room and a live room. My main concern is soundproofing. I do not want to destroy any existing walls just to add to what is already there. I am in the process of researching and planning soundproofing options. I have a few ideas of my own that i wanted to add a jagged wall or just adding weight by adding layers of sound deadening board and drywall. No construction underway as of yet. HOW LOUD AM I: My neighbors will be picky. They are right next door, I am in an office space with neighbors upstairs, and on both sides of the office. my drawings will have there placement in respect to where I am. I want to be able to handle any kind of audio production so there will be times where i will be loud and other times where i might not be so loud. ROOM DETAILS: The Control room is 13"x15"x8" with regular one layer of drywall and 2" seperated studs. The Ceiling is textured drywall. There are also two doors and one window in the control room. The live room is 15"x13"x8" pretty much mirror image of the control room. Check the Drawing for more detail. I do not want to lower ceiling too much as it is already only 8" and dont want to go to much lower. I am howerver willing to add layers to the textured drywall or sound deadening board or both. Budget: $1,000-$3,000 MAX Please if you need more info on anything just let me know.

In your research, you should try to find out what is within your walls and ceiling for framing, existing insulation and most importantly - what thickness of wallboard. If you just add more layers of wallboard to the ceilings and walls it will not be as effective as you could achieve. There will always be direct contact with the other side of the wall/ceiling through the studs/joists in the framing. the best scenario may be to pull all the wallboard out of the room, evaluate what you have and build upon that. You may be well served by inserting strips of wallboard within the wall cavity of the far side of the wall assembly (against the surface of the other room's wallboard. Most existing construction threads here contain some form of this practice and is termed as "beefing up the mass inbetween the joists" or the like.. Once you have a plan for that outside layer, you can think of options to de-couple the inner wall which is commonly referred to here as a "leaf". Each leaf (section of wall or ceiling) shouldn't touch the other leaves. You'll see a lot of work done with backer rod and acoustic caulking. Options you may end up considering are forms of buffered furring channels. RC (resilliant channel I think is the acronym..) with RC clips that are the actual buffer to the wall could work on your ceiling. There are other furring channels which can be used for the walls too. All wallboard is screwed to these mounts without contact made directly to the framing. now if you are willing to bring the demensions of the walls in and do additional framing you could frame interior walls with angles condusive to better acoustics (non perpendicular shape to the room). The things to learn about for this are - Fire blocking at the top of the wall frames. whether you're wiling to have an independantly framed ceiling and whether you can even do this based upon what utility runs are in the ceiling. Other weak, but neccessary parts of the room are windows and venting for air. These are strong concerns for any room and need to be planned out thoroughly or you're just wasting your time == money... At anyrate - that is all stuff that comes to mind after reading your post. I think others would appreciate more detail about the walls of your room. There can be much to learn about in these areas. Terms And Other Thoughts - not sound proofing - you're looking to Isolate the sound on either side of the room or outside world. You mentioned jagged walls - do you mean that you *are* interested in adding another interior frame? Or are you speaking of acoustic treatment? I've seen this term confused with those beginning threads. adding mass to the ceiling (layers) - you REALLY need to know what you have supporting the ceiling as you're adding 5/8'' drywall for example. It weighs over 70lbs per sheet and you need to know if the dead load rating of the frame can handle this. You may want to change the size of those images to a smaller size so it doesn't throw the presentation of the page out of whack. It's helpful to others who view and may not have a wide screen to view this with. Somewhere in the guidelines here there's a dimension specified for images, but I just tend to make mine small in size to keep the page load time down for slower connections.