Unique studio isolation booth questions/possibilities.

This is my first post here, so don't be afraid to hit me with Captain Obvious answers if I miss something. I appreciate your patience in advance: I got to go check out a room yesterday afternoon at our old YMCA in Butte, which is now the local Fine Arts Building. I will end up sharing this room with a few aquaintances, which is amicable, as it will reduce the cost of rental per month. The room is actually two rooms, separated by a 6' entryway. Ceilings are 8' tall. Dimensions of the main room are 35'x18', and the secondary room is 13'x16'. Main room is carpeted, secondary room is old wood flooring (gym style). The room is $300/mo (including power & heat + use of bathroom/water down the hall), which is kind of the kicker for the whole deal - I wish I could afford to just do it on my own! I pretty much have the splitting of cost thing down, as there will be 2 drummers looking to have a place to come practice, a drum teacher, and a guitar teacher, and myself looking to have a small studio in the place. Being a tenant allows 24 hr access, which is a plus for those of us wanting to make lots of noise at ungodly hours of the night. Here's the catch. It's on the 4th floor, with classrooms above and below it. It also has outside walls, which means possible neighborhood noise complaints from people playing drums/cranking amps. I am going to assume that between me and one of my drummer friends at minimum, I will have a good 1/3rd of the room to work with. Here's my plan/wish: I want to make isolation booths. I started looking on johnlsayers.com for ideas, but I'd like some input here as well. If I was able to start with a 'drum room' isolation booth that my friend could set his drums up in for the time being, it would kill two birds with one stone. Here's some pics of the rooms layout: I'd also like to help out with the rest of the guys I'm planning on sharing the space with, at least to help them be isolated too. Since I'm sharing this room with 4 other people, I had some ideas (I've yet to talk to them about this, so it's just tenative). Since there are two guys wanting to do lessons, the smaller room area could go as a 'teaching room' and minimal sound dampening could be applied. The equation of a drumset in there, being played while classes above and below are happening, is still problematic unless treated. I would like to make somewhat of an isolated control room, with sight into the other isolated (drum) booth so I can have eye contact with a drummer for example. I basically need to isolate this from the floor as much as anything. I actually don't know what goes on and when on the floor above us yet, but they were explicit about the classroom downstairs having classes often. Short of buying an isolation booth outright for $10k + (which I cannot afford, especially if I'm looking to share the room with people to defray the costs of rent), I think the most cost effective and personalized way to do this is to make my own isolation booths. I don't know how the ceiling is in the room below us, I assume the room above us has the same flooring also. I don't know in this case, as far as making isolation booths goes, if it's better to have clearance from the floor or if it's explorable to just build something on the floor. Since this is basically a rental, I want to be able to do this to where it's stand alone and no modification of the existing stuctures/walls/etc is wanted. It would be even better if this is something that I can take down and move later, assuming I am not a tenant at this venue for long term. I will probably update the standings of this periodically, as we are still negotiating how we are going to do this, and find out how much room we all actually need and everything (which would probably help you guys in helping me if you knew exactly how much room I was talking about). For now, I am going to say 18'W x 20'L x 8'H is explorable. We'll assume this is for me and my two drummers, with the idea of at least 1 drum booth, and a 'control' booth for me. I'll also try to come up with better exact measurements of the room so the other factors are considered. (EDIT) I don't exactly have a budget as of yet, since I'm at a pretty low level. If I had some ideas on what some of these projects could run on average, as opposed to ordering a booth for $x, I might be able to tell you what is definitly beyond my range. I am going to say that this project would be done little by little when funds allow...I estimate if I had at least one booth sized for a drummer, that I would want to say I will budget $1,000 to start off. Sorry I left this out at first. Any thoughts, folks? All comments welcome. I hope my lengthy description (as vague as it is) isn't too disappointing. Thanks in advance! Kevin George Butte, Montana (USA) www.myspace.com/executioner213recordings

i'd probably make the small 13x16 room your control room and then think about blocking off the windows. I'm not sure $1K will be enough to do much more than adding a door between the small and large rooms and blocking the windows, and a few treatments around the space to temper the room. if you have access to materials and skills, then maybe a couple of decent sized isolation booths could be created with decoupled floors and ceilings to reduce some of the sound leakage.

Thank you for your input. As it turns out, with the way we are going into the room now, the two guys who are teaching are going to take that area and use it for thier purposes. This leaves me and my two drummer friends with the 35x18x8 room. The guys who own the place say "the floor in there is concrete, and the fact that it is carpeted should lessen any problem with you bothering anyone downstairs". Mind you, they are not really professionals in the art of how sound effects things. To start off with, I'm probably just going to 'blanket treat' the room to cut down on reflections. We'll dodge schedules with the classroom below for our loud activities. When the time and funds become available, I'd like to build an isolation room first and foremost.

Ok, as an update on this.... We finally signed the lease for this room and can now start actually thinking about how to set things up. We brought a snare into the room and my buddy beat on it while I wandered around to see how things affected the area. On the floor we are on, the sound was highly noticeable. The door accessing the room has a very flimsy door...I could easily punch through it, which not only makes me worry about security but that it isn't absorbing a whole lot of sound. (I'll touch more on the security thing in a minute). Going downstairs, the sound is slighly evident and there is a chance we could bother some people downstairs in a similar way as an upstairs apartment with a stereo on. The most amount of sound heard downstairs is actually from the stairway upstairs (granite stairs, flat walls all the way down the halls), so this brings me back to the doorway being a weak point. For starters, I had an idea and want to know what it would be thought of here... Assuming I replaced the doorway into the room from the hallway with something more dense and secure, that will absorb much more than the current door. The idea I had though was: what if I came up with like a sallyport or something slightly similar...essentially, a small room/booth entryway that you come into, and another door on the opposite end of that which enters into the actual rest of the room. I got the idea from an entryway to a darkroom in the radiology department I used to work in, which was actually a spinning cylindrical door that had one opening inside a chamber with an opening on both ends. I don't want to get too complex with a spinning cylindrical door, but instead just a small room of sorts about the size of a small vocal booth. This would essentially be somewhat soundproofed, so there would be a barrier between the hallway and the room. Is this a stupid idea? Would it be better to just have two doors in that entryway that isolated the room from the hall like I've seen on this forum before? My next worry, as I mentioned before, is security. I will need to secure that door. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox secure, but I will sleep much easier with a door that can't be as easily kicked in. I want to get a good idea for what will not only be secure, but will aid in eating up some sound between my studio and that hallway. All along that hallway, there are small 'offices' for other people and though I will expect some sound for the immediate next-door neighbors...I don't want to have rampant complaints and a request to leave for being too loud. Any suggestions here will be greatly valued. My next step is the windows. I will need to find out if there is anything special in regards to fire code here for sure, but I'm sure there won't be anything too far from nominal where everyone else lives...so, I want some advice on these windows. They are single pane, don't close up very soundly, and are old (this is a historical building afterall). Will hanging dense blankets over them, for starters, help with isolation on top of eating some reflections, or should I plan for something much more drastic? Thats all I got for now. Thanks in advance folks!

i'd definitely do some more testing with a bass drum and bass amp as well as tapping metal/rubber to determine how much that floor is really conducting to the floor below or to the neighbors. plan on replacing the windows and doors to ensure security and sound isolation (as well as energy efficiency) and i'd make sure you cover any egress requirements when planning the replacement windows.