Isolated drumming booth

Hello. I am a drummer living in London. I live in a flat, and so I have been playing my electric kit to keep the noise levels to a minimum for my neighbours. However, I would like to find a way to play my real kit without disturbing the neighbours. I have been doing some research online around some of the potential solutions, including Esmono, WhisperRoom, StudioBox, etc. I have several questions for those of you who have experience with this: 1). Is there really a way to FULLY isolate the noise of my drum kit (including bass/kick vibrations in the floor)? 2). If so, which solutions can you recommend? Any companies that are London-based? 3). How much would one of these isolation booths set me back financially? I don't have the time/expertise to build one myself, so not very keen on DIY solutions. Also, this will be in the middle of my living room, so ideally I'd like to find something that is not a massive eyesore (i.e. windows would be good). Any guidance would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

Is there really a way to FULLY isolate the noise of my drum kit (including bass/kick vibrations in the floor)?

Well, it depends on what you mean by "fully isolate". You'd have to define that in terms of decibels of transmission loss. Consider that an average drummer can whip up a sound pressure level of around 115 dB(C) without breaking a sweat, and can get close to 120 if he tries hard. Consider that normal conversation level is around 60 dB, and a quiet room at night can be around 40 db. So, in order for your drums played hard to not be audible at all, late at night in a quite room just on the other side of the wall, you need a reduction of around 70 to 80 dB. Consider that an average stud wall in a house will get you maybe 30 to 35 dB. Consider that the laws of physics say that you need to double the mass of a sound barrier in order to get a 6 dB increase in isolation. Each time you double the mas, you get another 6dB. Figure out how many times you need to double the mass of a 35 db wall to get it to give you 80 db, and you'll start to see the problem. Taking all that into account, you should be able to see the issue. Fortunately, there are acoustic construction techniques that will get you much more isolation than what "mass law" dictates, but they are not easy or cheap to implement. There are ways to get 70 or 80 dB of isolation, but it is not not a trivial matter to do so. So, short answer: Yes, what you want to do is possible. But!... it is expensive and complex to get the kind of level you are talking about. There are no easy, cheap ways to do it. Despite what you might read on some musician web sites, mattresses on the walls and egg-crates on the ceiling are useless. The best thing you can do with a mattress, acoustically, is to sleep on it, so that you are better rested for playing your drums.... Apart from that, it has no acoustic uses. The best thing that you can do with egg crates acoustically, is to eat the eggs for protein, to give you more stamina to play the drums better. Apart from that, the egg crates have no acoustical uses.... :) The type of commercial booth you mentioned will help, but it will not get to the levels you are talking about. For example, consider that you need 80 dB of isolation to achieve your goal: The standard Esmono "Free Sound" booth that you mentioned is advertised on their web site as giving 35-40 db of isolation. Not even close to what you need. Their top-of-the-line model gives you 45 db, which is not bad, but still nowhere near what you need. If you were hammering away inside one of those at 115 dB, there would still be roughly 70 dB outside, which ain't quiet by any measure! The specs from the other manufacturers are in the same ballpark. So, that's a long convoluted way of showing you why the commercial booths will probably not achieve what you need for your case. They are not design or advertised as being able to do that. To do what you want (make a drum kit totally silent outside your flat) requires some major modifications to your flat, which involves tearing out the existing walls, floor and ceiling, and installing specially designed new decoupled double walls, floor and ceiling that involve really large amounts of heavy mass, large air gaps, and thick insulation. That will work, but it won't be either cheap or easy. Sorry to disappoint, but there are no simple, cheap, easy solutions to dealing with drum kits. If you look around this forum, you will find construction details of what other people in your situation have built, and you will see the extremes that they had to go to, to get the isolation levels that a drum kit needs. drums put out a huge amount of energy in the low frequency area of the spectrum, which is exactly the area that is the most difficult to deal with. If you want to switch to playing the piccolo, then we can help you out a lot easier! But the drums kit is the most difficult of all instruments to deal with. I'm sure you have also looked at other places on the internet, and you have probably come across any number of seemingly magical solutions that promise to fix your problem. The truth is that there is no such solution. the laws of physics cannot be "magiced" away. Physics says that there are only two ways of totally stopping sound: put an immensely massive barrier in the way, or remove the medium through which the sound is travelling: In other words, you can put mass around your room (two foot of reinforced high density concrete will work, or a couple of inches of lead), or you can put a vacuum around it. There are no other ways to totally stop it. The "Mass-Air-Mass" method (which is what I was hinting at above) will get you close, but costs money. So beware of all those places that you find on the internet that talk about "magic" solutions. The only "magic" in them, is that they make your money disappear... I hope I haven't discouraged you too much! But it's probably better that you hear the truth up-front, rather than get false hopes from the magical promoters of acoustical snake oil. Bottom line? Drum isolation is possible, but not easy, and not cheap. - Stuart -

Stuart - Firstly, many thanks for the detailed response. Very helpful info. As I feared, there is no effective "drum booth" that I can quickly buy and set up in my living room. Too good to be true... I guess the only caveat is that when I said "FULLY," I really meant to say "quiet enough that my neighbours don't get annoyed if I play at a reasonable hour." However, based on your email, it sounds as if a whisper room or esmono will still be very loud and bothersome to people outside the booth. I guess I'll have to find a very different solution... Thanks again, Thomas

Hey Thomas.

I guess the only caveat is that when I said "FULLY," I really meant to say "quiet enough that my neighbours don't get annoyed if I play at a reasonable hour." However, based on your email, it sounds as if a whisper room or esmono will still be very loud and bothersome to people outside the booth.

Well, with that re-definition of "fully", you are probably looking at isolation in the range of 50-60 dB instead of 70-80, which is quite a bit easier to accomplish. That's a hundred times less power that you have to stop. So those manufactured booths might just be getting close to the bottom end of the range that you need. Or you could probably design and build one yourself that would probably do the trick (but you did mention that you are not much into DIY solutions, so I guess that's out the window, unless you hire someone to do it for you. You don't happen have any friends who are really good carpenters, do you? :) ). The reason I say that the manufactured booths are getting close, is because there are also walls around the room that you will put the booth in, and they help to reduce the level even further. In total, the booth plus the living-room walls might just work together to get the isolation that you need: "...quiet enough that my neighbors don't get annoyed if I play at a reasonable hour." HOWEVER! Big caveats coming up! Don't get too excited yet.... Don't rush out and buy a booth! There is an acoustical problem often referred to here to as the "three leaf" effect. In simple terms, what that means is this: I mentioned the "Mass-Air-Mass" (or "MAM") technique of construction that could get you to your goal of 70 dB if you do it right. MAM means that the wall you build to block the sound has two "leaves" with air in between. Each "leaf" is just a massive surface, usually built up from several layers of something heavy and dense, like drywall (a.k.a. plasterboard, sheetrock, gypsum board, etc.), or plywood, or MDF, or bricks, or concrete, or lead sheeting. etc. The leaves cannot be allowed to touch each other (if they did, the wall would not work), so they are built on separate frames. Between the two "leaves" is an air gap. You seal up the leaves airtight, fill the air gap with insulation (fiberglass or mineral wool), and voila! You have a two-leaf MAM wall, which is a really good acoustic isolator, at a reasonable price. It gives you isolation way better than what "mass law" predicts, except for really low frequencies. So you might think "Well, if two leaves is good, then three leaves must be better, and four leaves is fantastic!". But it doesn't work like that. Acoustics isn't intuitive, and sound sometimes doesn't behave the way most people expect it to. It turns out that if you add a third leaf to a MAM wall, you can actually REDUCE the isolating properties of the wall in the low-frequency end of the audio spectrum. That isn't intuitive, but that's what happens. Add a forth leaf, and you can reduce the low end isolation even more. 3 and 4 leaf will improve isolation at high frequencies, but they can make it worse at the low end. So what does all this have to do with you and your drums? Well, the best of those manufactured booths use two-leaf walls for isolation. This is a good thing, if you use the booth in a large space, such as a ball room, convention center, meeting room, stadium, gymnasium, etc.. But if you put that booth in your living room, close to a wall, then the wall can act as a third leaf, and probably a forth leaf too, since your living room wall itself is at least a one-leaf wall, and most likely a two-leaf wall... Ooops! So, in other words, there is the very real possibility that if you put one of those booths in your living room, thinking that the booth walls plus the living room walls will reduce the sound levels outside to silence, it might not actually work that way at all. It will certainly reduce the level of high frequencies by a spectacular amount, so your cymbals and hi-hat will most likely be totally inaudible outside. But the three-leaf or four-leaf system that you created might, in fact, "help" some lower frequencies to get through easier than they did before you put the booth in! Low frequencies as in kick drum, toms, snare.... So it might happen that the low frequency "booming" from your kick, toms and snare will be heard outside even louder. In fact, any sound that happens to be at the same frequency as the resonant frequency of the entire four-leaf wall system, will get through the wall totally unattenuated: it will be as if there were no wall at all, for that specific frequency. Hopefully, the resonant frequency of the system will be way down below 20Hz, which is the lowest sound that we humans can hear, but chances are that it will be much higher. If it happens to be at around 80 Hz, then that's more or less the same as the kick drum.... draw your own conclusions. Obviously, this is not a good thing, and not what you would expect, intuitively. But it does happen. Occasionally people in town houses or semi-detached houses, who have very noisy neighbors, figure that they can stop the noise by nailing some wooden slats to the common wall (shared wall, party wall: different names for the same thing), then nailing a sheet of drywall on top of that. Only to discover that the sound of the TV or radio next door now comes through LOUDER than it did before, and they cannot figure out why! The problem is that they took a two-leaf wall, and made it into a three-leaf wall. So the isolation characteristics of that wall got worse at the low end, not better. It would have been far better to attach the drywall directly on top of the existing drywall, or even better still, remove the existing drywall, build that other frame a couple of inches away, and put the same drywall back on that! Principles of acoustics. Most people don't understand acoustics (I was one of them, until I discovered this forum and started researching and studying in depth!), so they end up doing the exact wrong thing, then wonder why it didn't work, or even made things worse. Even most musicians and sound people don't understand this, which is why there is so much bad advice on the internet. If you want to find out if you can trust someone's advice on acoustics, ask them to explain to you the principle on which an MAM wall works. If they don't mention "springs" somewhere in the explanation, ignore their advice... :) (The air in the gap between the leaves acts as a spring) Anyway, I'm not saying that this dreaded three-leaf effect actually will happen to you if you buy a booth and put it in your living room, since there are abut 27 kazillion factors that go into it (including the position of the moon relative to Mars, multiplied by the direction that the wind was blowing in Africa last week!), but it might happen to you. The best way to find out, is to find out! By that I mean maybe you could get a booth on loan first to test it, or rent one, or buy it with the express condition that if it does not work for you, you can return it for a full refund. Or something like that. But get a real booth in your real living room, and try it out. If you position it far enough away from the living rooms walls (a meter or so, at least, all around) then that will help to minimize the three-leaf effect. It might be worth a try... BUT! More caveats (you must be getting sick of me and my caveats already!). Only two more, in fact. 1) Structure. 2) Impact noise and flanking. By "Structure", I mean: Can your living room floor take the weight of a booth? Those things are heavy: They have to be, in order to reduce sound levels (remember "mass law"?) So your living room floor might not be able to handle all that extra weight. Your neighbors downstairs might not appreciate your drum sounds wafting through their ceiling every now and then, but I'm sure they'd appreciate it far less if the entire drum kit came through their ceiling, with you and the booth attached! You might want to find out how much one of those booths weighs, and then get a structural engineer to inspect your building and tell you if your floor can handle it or not. This is a rather important point! By "Impact noise and flanking" I mean that even if your floor can support the weight of a booth, and even if it does isolate fantastically with no three-leaf effect, then you might still get impact noise and flanking. Since the booth will be in direct contact with your living-room floor, and you will be doing your very best to destroy those gorgeous new drum heads by beating the living daylights out of them(!), :shot: the actual impact of your "sticks and kicks" will probably be transmitted directly through the frame of the drum kit, down into the floor and structure of the booth, and on into your living room floor, from where it can "flank" into the building structure, and end up being heard anywhere in the building. "Flanking" here is kind of a synonym for "bypass". In other words, sound can actually bypass the MAM isolation of the booth, if there is any mechanical path that allows the vibrations to be transferred directly. That may or may not be an issue, depending on the design of the booth, and your floor, and another kazillion or so factors (moon, Mars, wind in Africa, price of fish in China, etc). Once again the easiest way to test it is to install a booth and beat your drums to death while someone else walks around the building listening for flanking noise (or irate neighbors yelling unkind things about your drumming skills...). Of course, close all the doors and windows in your living room while you are doing the test. Once again, if there is a flanking issue, there are ways to deal with it. Such as a good drum riser in the booth, "floating" the booth, etc. Some are relatively easy and inexpensive, others not. Bottom line? With your re-defined meaning of "fully", a really good booth plus your living room walls might just do the job, with a bit of luck. Provided that your floor can handle the weight and that flanking is not an issue. But "try before you buy", since there are many pitfalls that might make it not work. - Stuart -

Stuart - Again, this is very helpful information. Thanks for the thorough response. I'll look into it! Cheers, Thomas

whoh.... words.... :mrgreen:

Ro wrote:

whoh.... words.... :mrgreen:

yeah - that's what i thought! :)

:shock: :shock: :shock: Holy %&*$ Stuart, hahaha

What's up, guys!? I don't get it. You think I should have given him the long, detailed version, instead of the brief, summarized version above??? :) :blah:

Dunno, but I'd say you have a lot of spare time.... the wordcount in your profile just goes bazurk, it's way beyond quota :) It's great you spend so much time and detail to answer questions here on the forum, really. But this one's just crazy, haha. you should win an award for that!