A Less than Ideal Situation

vince.cimo · Post by **vince.cimo** » Sun Feb 19, 2017 3:49 am

My parents recently purchased a house which I am renting in San Luis Obispo and I would very much like to be able to practice drums and if possible make some halfway decent dead drum recordings in the garage. Unfortunately the owners have specified that we cannot modify the garage door functionality....the garage still has to function as a garage; their request was also echoed by city building codes. Boo. Hence, a less than ideal situation. My plan is currently to build a room within a room that's completely acoustically dead. I'm attaching a floor plan of the garage sizes. An online room mode calculator recommended a size of 10.5' x 8.5' x 7.5' which seems less than ideal considering the length and height are more or less the same, so I'd love your feedback. As far as construction goes, I was planning on doing double 5/8" drywall with green glue on both sides of a 2x4 wall, insulating with rockwool, then covering the interior with rockwool and fabric. I have about a 2-4k budget and will be doing the construction myself. I am guessing for HVAC i'd probably want to do a baffled duct with some kind of exhaust fan pulling towards the garage door.

So, my goals:

1. Acoustically isolate the drum kit from the rest of the house, allowing a drummer to play in the garage and not be heard by the roomates. Sorry for the lack of dB specs here, I can try to get those soon...
2. Preserve the garage functionality.
3. Get a halfway decent dead drum sound out of the iso room.

and questions:

1. Considering the size of the garage (21' x 23' x 8') and considering I can't touch the opener hardware (pulls back 8' from the garage door, 9.5' in the center for the opener motor), what's the ideal size of my iso room?

2. Can you point me in the right direction for a simple and inexpensive HVAC solution?

3. Does my wall assembly sound more or less ideal? (double drywall with green glue on either side of a stud wall insulated with rockwool).

Thanks guys, I know this is a terrible situation, but I'm also not planning on doing any commercial work here, just wanna play drums without pissing people off.