Isolation First

Hi, I'm slowly developing my basement practice space/studio, and am looking for some advice about how to achieve reasonably good isolation from the first floor. Room treatment is also a serious issue, but with a baby on the way I have to make it a priority to reduce leakage out of the studio, so that's what I'm asking about here. People walking around upstairs transmits into the studio too; I hope this will help with that. Right now I'm in the research phase, and I want to do it right. My greatest fear, next to an un-soundproofed studio in a house with a baby, is that I'll build something expensive and time consuming that doesn't really work. Room Details: http://www.luannocracy.com/Studio.skp has a sketchup plan. I would have posted directly on this site as requested, but it is over 500K and I expect it would be rejected. * Some of the joists are missing from my plan, but I can produce more detail on request. * The walls are 4" concrete block; on two sides they are sister walls to the actual rock foundation of the house. In some places they do touch beams and floor joists, and in others it looks like they actually wedged 2x4 into the gap so the sister walls could reinforce * I left out all details of the basement outside the studio; more on request. For example, the sister walls continue nearly all the way around so, except in one place far from the studio, I can't actually look at the gap between the foundation walls and the sister walls. * Currently I have a dropped tile ceiling. * I have enough mass-loaded vinyl to cover the entire ceiling. I (now) know MLV on top of tile is not particularly effective for isolation :(, but in case it can be useful somehow, it costs me nothing. * There's a steel beam up there somewhere, running parallel to the joists. It's such a pain to move ceiling tile with MLV on top of it that I'm not sure exactly where it is. * There is a special 4" high by 1" deep baseboard channel around the outside walls that routes any potential floodwater into a sump system. We have a Sani-Dry whole house dehumidifier that's targeted at the basement. Its ducting is not currently very effective; will be reworked soon. * The floor is concrete slab covered with smooth vinyl tile. How loud are we? I don't know yet quantitatively; I just ordered a meter, but due to band schedules it may be some time before I can really test it. Our volume has fluctuated over time, but being able to hear the vocals through a pair of SRM350s practically speaking constrains how loud everything else can be. My actual budget is T.B.D. I think $15K would be a stretch but might be doable, although we'd prefer to keep it far below that. I'd be comfortable with $5K. My actual question is rather open-ended (sorry): what sort of design would provide effective isolation while not soaking up too much room width in the narrow direction, and would provide a platform for incremental improvements (e.g. bass traps) toward making this a "real studio"? Thanks very much in advance for any advice you can offer. -Dave[/quote]