John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Im starting construction on a basement studio soon. Their is already an existing wall between the tracking room and what is to become the control room. It is a plain single frame 2/4 wall with two layers dywall and insulated. Would building another frame for control room with one layer drywall facing the existing wall be enough if the interior of control room was packed with dense insulation and covered with cloth? Only reason being my budget is limited and I wanted a very absorbtive interior studio with a mix of cloth covered fiberglass or rockwool and reflective surface. The window, door and bass trap panels being the reflective surfaces.

If your existing wall's two layers are one on each side of the frame, then you should NOT add another wall - it will actually worsen low frequency isolation, even though it would slightly improve mid-range isolation.

If you want a pretty dead control room, putting the insulation and cloth is fine - but if you want good isolation between CR and tracking room, especially for drums, you would need to remove the wallboard toward the CR, then put your new frame up with at least two layers of wallboard already on the frame, caulk thoroughly, and then add your acoustic insulation on the CR side and finish with cloth. The tracking room side of the original wall should get at least 2 total layers of drywall on one side of the studs, fill first with insulation, and nothing on the inner side of the studs.

The idea here is to build a mass-air-mass wall system between any two areas you want to isolate from each other - this means there should only be two places where there is wallboard - between these, there should be insulation. All seams need to be caulked tight with acoustic rated caulk, which is generally NOT available at places like Lowes or Home Depot. First place to check for this is every commercial drywall/insulation contractor in the yellow pages - if all else fails, it's available on the net for about 3 times the cost per tube as the normal stuff (but the tubes are 3x the size, also) - if you find it locally, it should run around $4 to $5 per 29 oz tube.

For more wall information, check out the "sticky" named "complete section" on this forum, and download the USG manual from the link by the same name... Steve

Good morning. I wonder if I could pull existing drywall off cr side of existing wall and recycle onto tr side wall. I'll have to see how messy it gets. So it could go from tracking room..leaf, air , leaf against studs facing into cr filled with fibre? TR [# [# CR hows that for a diagram:)

What you really want is this:

D = drywall
S = studs
A = air space

DD S A S DD (with insulation within the stud cavities)

As far as reusing the drywall - i suppose it's possible to do it - but it would be so very labor intensive to do it that it would not be worth the effort in my opinion.

Take care...........

Rod

thanks for your thoughts guys. I guess really my problem is budget and space. Would it still suffice though? I really dont want to build another frame for just the absorbtion in control room. The studs would not be facing eachother but I could still put some 12" fluffy in their and it would be generally the same result right? plus the jagged edges I will most likely get from pulling the existing drywall would be hidden. Another question, should this gap between walls be airtight, sealed at ends? or to be the best of my ability?

Kind of depends on how much isolation you want between rooms - if your goal is to be able to place mics by listening to your speakers in the CR, then you need more isolation than if you're just trying to keep any CR noises off the recording... Steve