A little overview before getting started: my name is Victor, I have been playing drums since I was quite young and since a couple of years back I've been interested in setting up my own recording and rehearsing space. I was in the process of building my own studio in my home country five years ago, however due to some political sh** hitting the fan back home, I left to start a life elsewhere. Suffice to say I'm ready to get back into drumming and revive the dream of having my own studio.
Now, five years ago I didn't know about this forum, so I feel like I am starting from scratch but with proper access to knowledge this time! Thank you all for the information that you provide here!
Anyways, now to the good stuff. My project is centered around transforming a basement space (what is now being used as a wine cellar) into a decent enough room to record drums. As of now, I don't think there is a need to separate the live room from the control room, although the space is there to do so in the future. I would rather start off with a treated room for the drums that sound nicely where I can record from within, as a personal project, and later on think about expanding that and making the control room from an existing room adjacent to the wine cellar. Another important thing is that I want to attenuate the sound as much as possible to avoid disturbing neighbors as well as anybody else inside the house. Good thing is that since the space is in the basement, we have a couple of thick, cement walls that will help.
Currently I am still in the researching phase for the whole project. I am going over a bunch of threads in the forum and taking heed of all the advice (beeros05 story was particularly enlightening), however I must confess that I am pretty much a newbie in all of this.
I have taken the liberty of designing the space in Sketchup, hopefully you guys can take a look at it so you can see what I am working with, and then I will move on to the questions.
In the previous image, we can see the layout of the room. This is the outermost structure, which gives us a total length of approximately 7.43m, a width of 2.88m, and a height of 1.95m. This results in 21.39m^2 and 41.72m^3. In the next image, I have taken into consideration some limitations of the room such as some drainage pipes and the strangely shaped wall used to house the wines.
As we can see, we have two sections where we have a couple of water pipes running across both the length and the width of the room. I have yellowed out the space that completely walls off the pipes, so if we were to take the yellow areas as the limits of the room, the pipes would not affect the internal structure. Fortunately, the pipes aren't either too big or too many, so hopefully we can make use of that yellow space and just insulate around the pipes.
On the opposite end of the room, in red, there is a 32cm thick wall (not too sure of the material, could be brick or clay, unfortunately I have no idea. All I know is that it is pretty sturdy). This wall is rather interesting because it is full of holes used to store the bottles of wine. I am not sure if this will be useful for the build, although I guess not. I do not think we can count this wall a leaf in the mass-air-mass design. Behind this wine wall however, we have a very good cement wall that is part of the foundation of the house, so it is just cement engulfed by ground. The next image aims to take a look at the structure of the outer walls.
Hopefully this image gives a better look at the context of the room. Thankfully, we have a couple of really good walls due to being in a basement. Relative to the image orientation, the left and rightmost (labeled water pipes and wine wall) walls are very sturdy. These are cement foundation walls and there is nothing but earth after them (this is probably very wrong as I know nothing about construction, but we are underground and I imagine the cement of the walls runs out somewhere
)On the wall closest to the bottom we might have some issues. It is still cement, but it is in contact with my neighbor's basement wall as well, so this might be a relatively weak point in the overall structure. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing how thick this wall is.
In the top walls (next to the Door label) is where I believe I will have the most trouble. The wall with the door gives way to a room and it is only 7cm of concrete thick. Banging on the wall with my hand obviously does not feel as sturdy as the foundation walls, and the vibrations can be felt from the other room. Then, we have a green section that is adjacent to the stairwell. This concrete wall is also very sturdy, and is a minimum of 30cm thick. Following that wall, we have another thin, 8cm thick concrete wall which gives way to another room, which additionally, has a small hole in the wall near the ceiling (66cm long, 33cm wide). This hole might be trouble, but I've been thinking could be good for the HVAC (still need some more research around this area).
It is worth noting that the floor is also concrete.
The wall layout of this space makes me bring up the following question:
Can/should the concrete foundations be used as the outer leaf for a two leaf wall? Between the two leafs we would have the water pipes and the idea would be to place insulation in this gap.
I am attaching two more images with a 3d perspective just to give a better feel for the room. I will also attach actual pictures as a comment to this thread.
Now that we have some context...
I would like to take a well though-out approach to completing this project. I would rather take my time, take acoustic measurements (REW or whichever other tool), get an understanding of modes and frequencies, and adapt, than to rush it and botch the project. Of course, since I don't have much knowledge, this could take some time, but I think it is a good opportunity to do a full step-by-step guide for anybody in a similar situation and back every design and construction decision with facts and data. Of course, this is where I come to this forum and to you guys because I am kind of at a loss with the amount of information here. I am not quite sure where to start! I have a couple of hunches, like measure the dB level in the room when I play, however I will not have a drumkit with me until 2-3 weeks. Currently I only have a snare and some cymbals on me.
Some other information: the drainage pipes occasionally make a sound from the water rushing through them, but it is not a big deal. What worries me the most is the humidity. I would like to measure the humidity of the room given that it is a basement, and well obviously, because of the water pipes. I would not want any mold issues or damages to the gear, however I suspect that this won't be an issue due to this house being built like this for over 25 years and not having any humidity issues in the past.
I guess the first tangible objective would be to come up with a design that would minimize the sound escaping from the room. Hopefully the thick concrete walls already in place will help with that. To achieve this goal, I guess my first question would be what I asked previously, whether I can use the thick concrete walls on the left and bottom as the outer leafs of the structure and the airgap where the water pipes are, and prop up another wall as the second, inner leaf? What about the rightmost wall with the holes for wine? This one is also backed by a concrete wall, but how will this "wine wall" affect that mass-air-mass model? Finally, regarding the weakest 7cm and 8cm thick concrete walls, what can we do here? This area needs the most attention also because the door is there, and most of the sound will likely escape through here.
I am looking at a budget of 5k euros (hopefully, but can be adjusted over time if necessary) to get the space in good conditions. This includes sound proofing and treatment. Hoping this is within reason!
Quick summary of the situation:
Goal is to transform a space in the basement into a recording/rehearsing drum room
There are water pipes in the room. Humidity might be an issue, will look into measuring this.
One of the walls was used as a place to stash different bottles, so it is full of holes. Cannot make any changes to this wall.
The ceiling is a bit low at 1.95m.
Most of the walls are strong concrete, but there are some thin ones that will be problematic.
Sorry if my thoughts are all over the place, hopefully someone can help to steer me in the right direction. As of now, besides research a lot more, is there any data I can start gathering to help with the design of the room? If I am missing any information, let me know and I will be happy to provide it! I am looking forward to keeping this thread as detailed as possible for anyone that bumps into this!
