John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi,

I have just signed up on this forum and have a new project that you may be able to give me some valuable advice on.

I am moving into my new flat/apartment this week and have alocated a room for use as my studio. The room is directly above a neighbours house and so I need to make sure that I can use the studio at all times of the day (and night) without disturbing them!

The room is on the first floor and will mainly be used for mixing and some vocal and guitar tracking. The floor is made up of wooden floorboards.

My understanding so far is that I need to put a barrier between me and them! What I am thinkiing of doing is to take up the floor boards insulate the gaps between the joist with rockwool, then add a subfloor isolated from the joists by neoprene and then laying the existing floor boards on top of this airtight floor

I was just wondering if you could give me your opinions on this and if I could make this even more effective? Or if I have it all wrong?

Cheers

Simon

You're off to a good start. Trouble is that if sound gets out of your studio room and into the rest of your apartment, it'll go thru the floor elsewhere. So it'd be best to try to isolate the studio room completely; not necessarily building double-walls and all that (unless you have the space- if you do, I highly recommend it) but make sure you seal it off as well as you can.

And if this is an existing apartment, don't forget to protect the HVAC system that feeds that room.

Good luck!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Had me going there for a bit, til I remembered that in the UK the "first" floor is the first floor ABOVE the ground floor...

Is your room a structural part of the downstairs neighbors' flat, or is it somehow suspended separately?

Also, we need much more info in order to suggest appropriate ways to go. Things like exact existing construction, BUDGET, type of music being done, volume levels expected, type of instruments to be recorded, etc... Steve

Hi,

I have no moved in - still in boxes!!!!

Yes! The first floor is above the ground floor, and I have since found out that the room in the property below is actually the store room for a shop. There is also one wall which seperates the room from the upstairs of our neigbours property.

The types of intstruments I will be recording will mainly be guitar, vocals, strings - no drums unless we can really isolate the room!!!!

I do use an electronic drum kit frequently and really need the vibrations from the frame and kick/hat trigger to be isolated from the downstairs also.

The budget is really how ever inexpensive we can make it - but it would be good to get it right.

I will post some dimentions and a rough drawing asap.

Many Thanks for your help!

Simon

Thanks for your help so far. I have been taking some time to search all the threads for the best information, and have decided to just build a floating floor to start, and then deal with the walls and ceiling afterwards.

I just wanted to check that I've got the right idea with regard to materials, etc. and I also have a couple of unanswered questions which I would really appreciate your help with. Bear with me - I'm new to this!

The floor is currently comprised of the ceiling of our neighbours room below, then joists, a layer of chipboard and finally wooden boards stuck on top. So, the idea is to put Rockwool RW3 in-between the joists, and U-Boats on top. Should we put the chipboard and wooden boards straight back onto that, or would an extra layer of MDF and/or rubber and/or more rockwool improve the soundproofing significantly more?
I understand that in building walls more airspace is good, but there isn't much space between the downstairs ceiling and our floor, so should we pack the gaps between the joists completely full of 100mm rockwool, or would it be beneficial to leave airspace as well?

How much of a gap should we leave between these materials and the walls? We've found an expanding foam polyurethane which apparently insulates and soundproofs - does that sound like a good material to fill those gaps with?

Finally (phew!) if I put the U-Boats onto the joists, how do I fix the flooring materials down to stop them moving around too much? Obviously I can't fix them to the joists, so how will this work best?

I need to get this completed very soon, so I would appreciate your help very much. Is there anything else I should consider? Thanks.

Simon, I still need to know how thick/wide your joists are - also, do you intend to remove your flooring for this project?

Please do NOT randomly put a floated floor into your room til we discuss this a LOT deeper - using point loads such as the U-boats will place a high stress on existing flooring, and I need to know EXACTLY what's under there (and so do you) before even THINKING about doing this. You will be completely re-distributing the weight on your floor, and this MUST be done right or it will be disastrous.

Can you post some drawings of what's there and how it's laid out, etc? Any and all detail is GOOD... Steve