Advise for a Newbie!

Hi there chaps/chapettes! Long time lurker here in need of a little advice. First up I have run searches and not really found the answers to my questions, so what I really need is some advice. My band and I are moving into a house together in Nottingham, UK in about 5-6 weeks. The house is quite a strange building looking like an average residential detatched 30's house (the Brits in here should know what I mean!). Anyway, whats really odd is that it has an enormous basement, split into several 'rooms'. We choose this house because of its basement and the posibabilities for rehersals. The landlord has been kind enough to allow us to make a few non permanent changes to the space to soundproof it a bit and my questions really are what would be the most affective way to treat the room we intend to use? I haven't got any details on dimensions as I haven't been involved in finding the house so this is very much a post to get a few suggestions back on simple generic solutions. Our budget probably won't stretch passed £300 at the very most, so most of the materials will be reclaimed. There is currently only a flimsy shed door allowing access form outside (as well as a decent interior door for access from inside) which i intend to replace with a thick heavy door with good seals, and will hang a douvet behined inside to act more as a draught excluder than for soundproofing! My thoughts are to lay some thick carpeting and underlay on the floor (currently just concrete), fit a heavy door with a good seal, and to hang some bass traps to manage the low end a bit. Would this make much of a difference to the leakage? The house is built into a steep hill side which is why it has a basement (very unusual in this style of building) and the main basement walls are brick. these are surrounded on three of the four sides by at least 6-8 feet of earth/mud/rubble before it reaches the neigbouring properties, so my concern is really to avoid leakage out the back of th property. Below is a VERY crap Paint mock up to give you kind folks about as much an idea as I have about the layout. the main space is large enough for the five of us and our gear with room to spare, and the ceilings are probably no higher then 7'. Thanks in advance guys, your all lovely people!

For general info, the REFERENCE section has quite a bit; until you have more detailed information on your space I'm not sure what to tell you. ONe thing is sure, 300 quid won't stretch very far so "found" materials will help. Look for anything HEAVY without holes in it - brick, concrete block, MDF, gypsum, lead, particle board, cement board, etc, all can be used to add mass to existing walls. Carpeting is only good for dogs and drums to sit on; use very much of it, and it will suck out all the highs and high mids leaving a boxy, boomy room - especially if that room is masonry walls. And no, absorption INSIDE the room will do pretty much ZIP for sound-proofing; it's still just as loud outside. Check out the first link in that REFERENCE section for more theory on mass-air-mass construction... Steve

Thanks for the reply Knightfly. The carpeting is simply to cover the cold floor so we don't freeze when practicing! I have no intention of using it as soundproofing! I have a basic understanding of the concepts involved in soundproofing and if I had the budget would probably do fine with the info already on the site, it's more how can I achieve some results on a very limited budget that I'm wondering. Thanks again for the reply and I'll have a re-read of the recources section. When I have more details on dimensions I'll post again. Ta for now!