My soundproofing idea......opinions needed.

[benbrackett]

Hello everyone. I'm in the planning phase of converting my garage into a recording studio and control room, but there's one problem. Sound leaks very easily from my garage.

So what I've decided to do, is build a room within a room, leaving about an inch of dead air between the garage wall and the inner wall. The inner wall, or the inner room, is going to have bricks of styrofoam packed into them, then covered in sheetrock on both sides, with foam paneling placed on selected ares of the wall (for sound purposes, not soundproofing). On top of that, I'm going to curve the inner room a bit so that there's no right angles. Will this be effective?

Thanks
Ben

[AVare]

First of all if you would update your profile so at least we ahave a general idea where are on the planet. This helps in describing materials, relative costs fo some materials etc.

of dead air between the garage wall and the inner wall.

Great!

The inner wall, or the inner room, is going to have bricks of styrofoam packed into them,

Styrofoam is not effective at improving sound isolation. Use mineral wool, fiberglass etc.

covered in sheetrock on both sides

Bad to to do it to both sides of the inner wall. Best is to place all the sheetrock on the inside of the wall.

I'm going to curve the inner room a bit so that there's no right angles

It won't be significant for sound isolation. Drawings would help to give good advice.

Keep up the questions. we'll get it done right. Good studio building is 90% design and 10% construction, and I'm starting to think the 90% is too low!

Andre

[benbrackett]

I'm from the Southern Bay Area, around San Jose. So, it might get pretty costly. The thing about no right angles was actually for acoustic purposes, not soundproofing. I don't know why I mentioned it. I talked it over with a friend of mine who's gonna help build it, and we decided to use fiberglass, sheet rock on the interior of the wall, and then an inch of dead air. Styrofoam, like you said, won't work well. We had a feeling that might be the case.

Does anyone have any other (cheap) suggestions on how to make this room sound nice in general, soundproofing aside?

Thanks for the help,
Ben B.

[knightfly]

Ben, have you done any sort of "site survey" yet? Things like who makes what noises when, and how loud? This can affect what you need for isolation as well as what YOU do inside the space.

Please don't rush into this unless you just enjoy pain; there are a few HUNDRED more details that should be ironed out before you even order materials, and if you rush it you WILL make a mistake. It only takes ONE mistake to completely botch an acoustic project like this.

I don't remember the link to this, but here's just one example of how small things can make large differences - this experiment involved a pro studio that was built for heavy isolation, using two concrete walls separated by insulated air gaps - as built, a test was done; they fired a 9mm handgun into a barrel of sand (as I recall) on one side of the wall - it wasn't heard on the other side AT ALL. Then, they core-drilled through one of the concrete walls, and inserted a single wooden dowel about the size of a pencil until it was wedged between inner and outer wall - then, the hole was filled with concrete and let cure - after this, NORMAL CONVERSATION was heard clearly on the other side of the wall.

Needless to say, this "flaw" was undone after the test - it's just an example of how important EVERY detail can be for sound proofing.

If you have any way to post pix or sketches, it would help a lot for us to be able to visualize what you're planning - it might also bring to light some possible problem areas you may have missed - We can help you do it right, as long as you share ALL your ideas with us BEFORE you implement them. This stuff is NOT intuitive for most people, a lot of what seems like a good idea can really hurt performance... Steve

[benbrackett]

I'll have some pictures up soon. I'm building it in my garage, so we're just about done moving all of the junk out, save for a few more piles. But, yeah, this was all just conceptual. I'm actually still trying to find a layout on how I'm going fit everything (control room, tracking room, small vocal booth). I just wanted to get a basic idea of what was going to be done so I could explore further into whatever technique I was going to use.

I have surveyed the area, and the only thing that's really going to make noise is the washer and dryer in the connecting laundry room, but the control room will most likely be on that side of the garage, so there will be no walls connecting the tracking rooms and the laundry room together. We have an automatic garage door on the front side of the garage. But me and my friend have decided that that could be the side of the tracking room with the door where we could load in equipment. We'd just replace theautomatic garage door with an old swing-open one, and then we'd be able to just load stuff in from the driveway.

I've realized that with the money I have, I'm not going to be able to completely sound-proof the room. I just want to be able to record into the night without having the instruments causing a disturbance to the neighbors.