Frame Decoupling Problem

Greetings! I have built a "room in a room" type construction for my Studio. However...I have 1 frame/wall that I cannot construct my inner "room in a room setup. This frame/wall (Labled in picture) is attached to the ceiling joist. When I attatch drywall, the drywall from the inner frame/wall will come into contact with the drywall on the frame that is attached to the ceiling joist. To simply put it, my OUTER frame drywall will come in contact with my INNER frame drywall. I'd like to know if there are suggestions on how I could decouple the frames/drywall. I hate to go thru the whole process of building my "room in a room" and have it defeated by 1 frame/wall. Thanx! Take care & GOD Bless! Stanley

Hi Stanley. Is there any reason why you cannot just build another stud frame in front of that one, as your inner leaf? Also, if there is no inner-leaf wall on that side of the room, then what is your inner-leaf ceiling resting on? - Stuart -

Greetings Stuart! Thanx for the reply. The room that the frame in question is in will be a Vocal Booth. It's a fairly narrow room. Adding the extra frame would eliminate not a lot of space, but enough that it would cause some problems with different things I would like to do in the room. I'm really trying to not have to add the frame but... Anyway, I was wondering if dampening might help. The frame in question is a frame on the inside of my basement. it's connected to another frame that runs along my slab wall, but does not touch the slab wall. As I said the frame in question is secured into the ceiling joist. I was wondering if I: 1.) Put some type of dampening material/pad (neoprene?) on the edges of the 2x4's where the drywall will be screwed 2.) screwed the first piece of drywall to the dampening material/pads, 3.) Put a 2nd piece of drywall over the first with green glue on the back of the 2nd drywall layer 4.) Ran the drywall and connected it to the other drywall on the adjoining walls with the 2nd layer of drywall ONLY touching the adjoining drywall. Would this help dampen the transmission? Just a thought... Thanx Stanley

1.) Put some type of dampening material/pad (neoprene?) on the edges of the 2x4's where the drywall will be screwed 2.) screwed the first piece of drywall to the dampening material/pads,

Unfortunately, that won't work. The screws short-circuit the neoprene, negating the effect. Each screw has to go through the neoprene into the stud, so it creates a directly coupled flanking path that transmits sound and vibration, bypassing the rubber. But what you can do, is to put Resilient Channel ("RC") across those studs, and attach the drywall to that. That's what RC is designed to do: it decouples the drywall from the studs, acoustically, and doesn't use up much space. Another alternative would be to use RSIC clips along with ordinary hat channel. That will work about the same as RC, or maybe even better. Either of those would be your best solution, if you can't afford the space for a proper second stud wall. But you didn't answer my other question about how your ceiling is going to work: of there is no stud framing on that side of the room, then how are you going to support the new ceiling joists? You could have the running lengthways down the room, I guess, but that means they have to span more than 14 feet, so they'll have to be pretty large: maybe 2x8 or even 2x10 (you'd have to calculate that). Is there enough ceiling height to fit in such large joists? Maybe some photos of that area would help to understand what you are dealing with. - Stuart -