Drum booth, sound isolation

Hi, I live in Montevideo Uruguay and I'm planning to build a drum booth, so as to reduce the loud noise coming from the drums which annoys my neighbors. What materials would be most effective in isolating and absorbing sound? Living in Uruguay, many products are hard to get, or don't even make it here. Any help locating them, or providing alternatives would be appreciated, What features should I have in mind on the design? I know that it will be impossible to reduce 100 percent noise coming out, but I still want it to be reduced as far as posible. Ideally, if sound volume coming out is low enough, I would mic up the drums and play it on headphones or through the monitors at the desired level (for people outside the booth). My idea was to make it from rectangular panels which can be folded to be stored. the front panels would at least partially transparent (made from acrilic, perhaps. Some sort of roof would also be needed. I had something like this in mind: http://www.proaudio.com/images/Perdue_DrumBooth.jpg (didn't know how to upload the picture directly) Any comments will help Thanks, Ignacio

Hi Ignacio, and welcome! :)

I live in Montevideo Uruguay and I'm planning to build a drum booth, so as to reduce the loud noise coming from the drums which annoys my neighbors. What materials would be most effective in isolating and absorbing sound?

Rather than start with materials, you should start by identifying how much isolation you need, then look at what materials / techniques will provide that amount of isolation. So you should start by measuring out how loud you are when you play normally, in terms of decibels, then measure how quite you have to be in order to not disturb your neighbors. Subtract the "how quiet" number from the "how loud" number, and that is "how much isolation you need". So before you do anything else, you need to get a sound level meter and make those measurements. At a rough guess, you'll need something like 60 of 70 decibels of isolation: a drum kit played loud puts out about 115 dB, and you likely need to get that down to about 60 dB or less, to be acceptable. An acrylic drum shield with a lid, such as the one you show, will get you about 15 dB of isolation, very roughly. Effective isolation requires very massive (heavy), rigid (stiff) materials, such as concrete, brick, thick wood, thick drywall, thick laminated glass, and similar things.

My idea was to make it from rectangular panels which can be folded to be stored.

That probably isn't practical, due to the size and weight of the panels you would need. Acrylic drum shields are not meant to isolate to the level you are talking about: they are only meant to reduce the levels a bit on-stage or inside a practice room, so that the drum kit does not overwhelm the other instruments so badly. They type of isolation that you are talking about requires a lot more than a typical drum shield can accomplish. If you search the forum for "isolation booth" or "drum booth", you should find plenty of information on how to do this, and several examples of what other people have done in order to isolate their drums. - Stuart -