Soundproofing a home studio

CJMST3K

I know the best product out there is Auralex for soundproofing, but it's also completely insanely high in price. There's another company Foam By Mail that has "soundproofing" which looks professional, but there's a number of complaints online that they lied about their absorption properties, and one company did a side by side comparison and sure enough FBM did not stand up... but anyway, what do you use?

I recently moved and have a freshly painted bedroom for my drum/music room and I'm looking for something kinda stylish but also functional to put up a handful of pieces to help control the volume.... and it needs to be cheap too.

So, what do you use?

HooterHonker

On the cheap side I've seen guys use egg cartons. Certainly not cosmetically appealing.

mccreadyisgod

Well, the first issue is to clarify what you mean. Typically, "soundproofing" means isolating your room from outside noise, and more recently has also meant keeping sound from inside bleeding out. The main focus is for recording (so you don't end up with outside noises on your album, like kids playing outside or an 18-wheeler passing by on the highway) or for courtesy to your housemates/neighbors (so your death metal band doesn't get ticketed for disturbing the peace). For the most part, this means heavy insulation in the walls, soundproof drywall, and often even double- and triple-thick walls (a lot of studios use double sets of concrete walls with a layer of sand/gravel in between). You also want to make sure to plug any "holes" in your room, like heating/ventilation duct work, windows, etc. Some amount of dampening may also help.

Dampening, or sound/acoustical treatment, is when you add diffusion and acoustical traps to reduce reverberation, echoes, standing waves, and problem frequencies within a room. Since most rooms are square/rectangular, with lots of parallel surfaces, this is a big problem for acoustical fidelity (recording) and clarity (band rehersals). You can certainly put a lot of money into engineered systems of diffusion, with integrated bass traps in the corners and lots of fancy wall panels. If you'd rather do things on the cheap, you can find plans for DIY bass traps, and you can create your own wall diffusion with carpet, carpet padding, foam "egg-crate" mattress pads, etc. Basically, the idea is to create spaces where sound is either absorbed (cloth/foam) or do break up the flat reflective surfaces with weird angles and varying depths. One of the best things is to eliminate those parallel surfaces by making walls with weird angles, ceilings that vault, etc. Glass is also a horrible reflector; try to cover any windows with heavy drapes, and if you need a window (control room, etc) mount the glass at a slight downward angle into the room (bottom edge pushed in relative to the top).

For the most part, dampening will help soundproof, but won't do the job all the way. A few expensive panels won't completely isolate a room from the outside, no matter how expensive they are. To properly soundproof, you need to basically rip the walls apart and start again from scratch. Most drywall/insulation sales pros can really help you out with what you need, soundproofing is getting much easier and more accessible over the years.

CJMST3K

^^about the post above...

Yeah, that's probably further than I'm looking to go. When I worked in a studio in Queens NY, I know they had not only separate walls that did not attach to the other walls, but they even had the concrete slab cut, so the performance portion of the studio was truly isolated from any potential noise pollution. What I'm looking to do is to be somewhat courteous to the neighbors, and to help make the room in general sound good for playing in, to the ear. I used to use six 2" thick cubical walls and lean them around the room at my old place, and covered the walls up with paper-thin fabric tapestries, but this room I'm making look less junky... I'm framing about 10 of my PJ posters (lucky me, I own a frame shop!) to make it look nice, and I was thinking about using a saws-all to cut the old cubical walls to cover the windows only, then drapes to hide the cubical walls. So the only space I'm thinking now of is below the framed pictures - from waist-tall and below, plus possibly the ceilings.

Strange thing is that when I took the cubical walls out of the room, the clarity went way up on the drums. Now I'm thinking if I put acoustical tiles up, it may suck out only the high and mid, and still leave the low, which would be muddy. After I get the windows covered and hang the pictures, I think I may try playing just the way it is to see if that's good enough. I'm not so worried about the volume in the rest of the house, just enough to be courteous to the neighbors and to sound good to me.

mccreadyisgod

So you're looking to do a little bit of both...

I'd definitely focus on plugging the windows, and cubicle dividers are a great cheap acoustical panel for that purpose. The windows are easily your weakest point for sound leaking out of the room.

You can also cut some of the cubicle dividers down and make smaller panels, like 2' wide x 3 to 4' tall, and hang them around the room to help cut down on some of the reflections off the walls. Like you noted, most of the cheaper forms of acoustic treatment cut down on the highs more than the lows, so use a little less of it, spread around the room. If you look at photos of older studio spaces, a lot of them have similar panels distributed around the room, not floor-to-ceiling coverage. You're looking for a room that sounds smooth, not dead. You might lay out these panels in a pattern between your posters, just a thought. One of my favorite acoustic treatments is to tack some carpet to a thin piece of plywood, and then hang it on the wall (you can use a cool cloth overlay to make it more decorative, like a tapestry or a funky patterned fabric from a crafts store). Just wrap the carpet, and the cloth if you're covering it, around the edges and staple with a proper staple gun. In theory... you could even frame them.

You may want to build a couple bass traps for the corners, where low-frequency energy tends to build up. If you do a google search for "DIY bass traps," you'll get a lot of great ideas that you can do yourself. It would certainly make the room sound much smoother, and a lot more even and predictable.

If you don't like the idea of hanging stuff on the walls around your posters, you can run carpet up the bottom half of the walls and frame it at the top with a chair rail. You could also hit Goodwill or Craigslist for some cheap, lightly-used overstuffed furniture. A big couch or sofa or a couple chairs can do wonders for absorbing some acoustic energy, but that presumes you have enough room for furniture AND gear.

CJMST3K

Good advice. I also overlooked the need for bass traps in the corner. That would probably help a lot. The floor I'm playing on is carpet, and I can feel that the floor is kinda hollow underneath so I'm sure a bit of the low end is the cavitation of the whole floor, but bass traps would be very helpful!

mccreadyisgod

The lower frequencies are always the hardest to absorb... a 20 Hz signal (lowest frequency people can hear) is something like 58 feet long, and an 80 Hz wave (think of the boom of a kick drum) is somewhere around 14 feet long. So it takes some super-thick shag carpet to try to disrupt those big, long waves of sound. By comparison, a 1 kHz wave, or 1000 Hz wave, has a wavelength of 13 inches. A lot easier for some thick fabric or some carpet to absorb. 10 kHz, or 10000 Hz, has a wavelength of just over an inch. That's right around the fundamental frequency of drum cymbals, which is why the drums will seem a lot more "live" when you get rid of those acoustic panels. There's a lot more of those higher frequencies that aren't being absorbed.

Guitarhero27

MAKE SURE WHATEVER YOU USE IT IS AT THE LEAST FIRE RATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CJMST3K

Hey mccreadyisgod,

Since I started this thread about 1.5 years ago, I'm no longer looking to soundproof, as the county regulations are very lenient with noise heard from outside, and I didn't want to invest currently in decoupled walls or green glue with new sheet rock.

I have a new priority though. I've since gotten a basic studio setup in my drum room (sans a recorder) with the Samson 8Kit drum mics, plus an Audix D6 kick, an Audix OM7 vocal mic, and headphones for more people than I'll ever have over, all running thru a modest Behringer X2442USB board and Behringer Multigate, just to jam and hear ourselves relatively clearly. Usually it's just me and a friend playing. Just for fun.



Just imagine this space, but now the drums all mic'd up and wires everywhere.







The mics have been a bit muddy. Not too bad at all, but just a little off... and the vocal mic, when on, picks up the ambient drums which are only 5 feet away from where the mic is, so even facing the opposite way, the mic is picking up a bit, and the gate opens with any drum noise.

So... without wanting to spend a ton of money, I've been researching dampening, and I finally decided to use Owens Corning 705 (denser than 703, and used by pro bass-trap companies) and I now have 12 3" thick 4x8 sheets en-route to me. (btw, there's someone with a killer deal on ebay right now for that material!)

I'm planning on putting 12 of them, wrapped in fabric, on the ceiling over the room, and a few over some other spots. I know putting in corners helps considerably, but I will not be treating the corners at the moment.

With treating this room with 12 3"x48"x24" traps/dampeners, do you think that should make the mics a bit more discrete and less muddy? ...I hope your answer is "yes" since I already have the material coming.

I'm also considering making them all 24x24 instead of 24x48, strictly for aesthetics... any pros/cons you can think of the that would affect the sound doing it one way vs another?

The room obviously has a lot of framed posters, which I know are reflection points, so I'm hoping that the extreme dampening in the other areas will more-or-less even itself out.

...also, everything is usually direct-in. No bass amp anymore, and while we mic the Marshall once in a while, it's mostly direct in for everything, so nothing can be heard acoustically except for drums (or an acoustic guitar).

Thoughts about how the method of dampening may improve the sound in the board?

RedMosquito22

mccreadyisgod wrote:

Well, the first issue is to clarify what you mean. Typically, "soundproofing" means isolating your room from outside noise, and more recently has also meant keeping sound from inside bleeding out. The main focus is for recording (so you don't end up with outside noises on your album, like kids playing outside or an 18-wheeler passing by on the highway) or for courtesy to your housemates/neighbors (so your death metal band doesn't get ticketed for disturbing the peace). For the most part, this means heavy insulation in the walls, soundproof drywall, and often even double- and triple-thick walls (a lot of studios use double sets of concrete walls with a layer of sand/gravel in between). You also want to make sure to plug any "holes" in your room, like heating/ventilation duct work, windows, etc. Some amount of dampening may also help.

Dampening, or sound/acoustical treatment, is when you add diffusion and acoustical traps to reduce reverberation, echoes, standing waves, and problem frequencies within a room. Since most rooms are square/rectangular, with lots of parallel surfaces, this is a big problem for acoustical fidelity (recording) and clarity (band rehersals). You can certainly put a lot of money into engineered systems of diffusion, with integrated bass traps in the corners and lots of fancy wall panels. If you'd rather do things on the cheap, you can find plans for DIY bass traps, and you can create your own wall diffusion with carpet, carpet padding, foam "egg-crate" mattress pads, etc. Basically, the idea is to create spaces where sound is either absorbed (cloth/foam) or do break up the flat reflective surfaces with weird angles and varying depths. One of the best things is to eliminate those parallel surfaces by making walls with weird angles, ceilings that vault, etc. Glass is also a horrible reflector; try to cover any windows with heavy drapes, and if you need a window (control room, etc) mount the glass at a slight downward angle into the room (bottom edge pushed in relative to the top).

For the most part, dampening will help soundproof, but won't do the job all the way. A few expensive panels won't completely isolate a room from the outside, no matter how expensive they are. To properly soundproof, you need to basically rip the walls apart and start again from scratch. Most drywall/insulation sales pros can really help you out with what you need, soundproofing is getting much easier and more accessible over the years.

Damn you beat me to the punch!!

SomethingCreative

Musicians and Gearheads post of the year. :thumbup:

mccreadyisgod wrote:

Well, the first issue is to clarify what you mean. Typically, "soundproofing" means isolating your room from outside noise, and more recently has also meant keeping sound from inside bleeding out. The main focus is for recording (so you don't end up with outside noises on your album, like kids playing outside or an 18-wheeler passing by on the highway) or for courtesy to your housemates/neighbors (so your death metal band doesn't get ticketed for disturbing the peace). For the most part, this means heavy insulation in the walls, soundproof drywall, and often even double- and triple-thick walls (a lot of studios use double sets of concrete walls with a layer of sand/gravel in between). You also want to make sure to plug any "holes" in your room, like heating/ventilation duct work, windows, etc. Some amount of dampening may also help.

Dampening, or sound/acoustical treatment, is when you add diffusion and acoustical traps to reduce reverberation, echoes, standing waves, and problem frequencies within a room. Since most rooms are square/rectangular, with lots of parallel surfaces, this is a big problem for acoustical fidelity (recording) and clarity (band rehersals). You can certainly put a lot of money into engineered systems of diffusion, with integrated bass traps in the corners and lots of fancy wall panels. If you'd rather do things on the cheap, you can find plans for DIY bass traps, and you can create your own wall diffusion with carpet, carpet padding, foam "egg-crate" mattress pads, etc. Basically, the idea is to create spaces where sound is either absorbed (cloth/foam) or do break up the flat reflective surfaces with weird angles and varying depths. One of the best things is to eliminate those parallel surfaces by making walls with weird angles, ceilings that vault, etc. Glass is also a horrible reflector; try to cover any windows with heavy drapes, and if you need a window (control room, etc) mount the glass at a slight downward angle into the room (bottom edge pushed in relative to the top).

For the most part, dampening will help soundproof, but won't do the job all the way. A few expensive panels won't completely isolate a room from the outside, no matter how expensive they are. To properly soundproof, you need to basically rip the walls apart and start again from scratch. Most drywall/insulation sales pros can really help you out with what you need, soundproofing is getting much easier and more accessible over the years.

mccreadyisgod

Well, as we steer this thread into new territory...

It's hard to say what is causing your setup to sound muddy in headphones. It could be your drum mics, those Samson mics are pretty low-end. It could be the way the mixer is set up. And it could be the headphones themselves. If you are close-mic'ing the drums and vocal, and going direct from your amp, then it's not very likely that the room is contributing to the muddiness. A room with bad acoustics might sound muddy in ambient mics, but shouldn't matter as much in close mic placement.

Not sure what you're using the gate for, but it won't affect the sound here.

One thing I can suggest is to get a headphone amp. If you're running more than one set of headphones, you'll need a headphone amp to properly run wattage to the headphones. My suggestion would be to plug your headphones into the mixer, and get a small, cheap headphone amp over by the drummer. It might just be that you aren't getting enough output to run the headphones you are using. Just for the hell of asking, what are your cans?

"Muddy" sound is usually characterized as low-midrange. That's frequencies between 200 Hz and 800 Hz, usually centered between 400-500 Hz. Drums especially get muddy in this area. I usually cut those frequencies from drum mics to reduce muddiness. Electric guitars, especially distorted electric guitars, tend to get muddy in this frequency area as well. I would start by cutting around 450 Hz on all the drum mics (kick, snare, toms) and I'd cut all the low frequencies, everything under 1 kHz, from the cymbal mics (hats and overheads). That will add some clarity to the drums. Then see if the guitar is muddy when played with the drums.

One of the hardest lessons about mixing is to make everything blend well; that often means making some instruments sound bad when played solo, but makes them sound great in the whole mix. For instance, a big, thick guitar tone sounds great by itself, but it sounds really muddy when added to a 2nd guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. The challenge is to make sure things aren't competing for the same frequencies. From lowest frequency to highest (bass to treble), you should have: Kick, 80-100 Hz; Bass, 100-500 Hz; Guitar/Keys, 500-1k Hz; Vocals, 1-5 kHz; Cymbals, >6 kHz. Drums will have their "click" around 3 to 4 kHz, acoustic guitar will split the electric guitar/vocal range, and you can play with everything else to get it just right. But generally, you want things to sit in their own slice of the frequency spectrum, so they aren't competing. And when certain things ARE competing (two guitars, or guitar and organ), it helps to pan them apart (one left, one right) so they are clear in their own respective speaker/headphone cup.

No doubt your acoustic treatments will make some improvements, especially in the drums and cymbals. It will make your room sound less "harsh," and more "warm." I would put two of the full panels above the drums directly, and two on the walls that form the corner behind the drums. Then distribute the rest around the room to even out the whole room; you can certainly cut them into 24" squares to distribute them, but I'd use full sheets above and behind the kit. Just gonna wrap them in tapestries or something else cool?

If you wanted to spend more money... you could get one of these: http://accessories.musiciansfriend.com/ ... sku=270353
Would help a bunch with the bleed from the drums into your vocal mic. Not sure it's worth it for your application, though. Same idea as: http://drums-percussion.musiciansfriend ... sku=446728
Bleed from drums into vocal mics are a world-wide problem, and there isn't an easy cure.

So start with some EQ on your mixer, and if you can swing it, add a headphone amp (I own and like my Behringer: http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/pr ... sku=240107 , but my friend's Rolls has worked out pretty well: http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/pr ... sku=483850 ).