IDK if there's interest in this, but it's something I know a bit about and I've never done an AMA before.

Background: I'm a guy who designs and builds buildings. A couple years ago I did a radio broadcast studio that frequently had live music performances in a shared building. There was no budget for professional acoustic engineering or high end products, so I had to learn a whole bunch of stuff instead to do it (relatively) cheaply. The end result was a rock band going full tilt on one side of the glass and casual conversation levels on the other.


The basics for non-acoustic nerds

Sound Deadening is what you do to cut down reverb and make a room less live. It's important for recording and broadcasting, but fairly useless for not pissing off the neighbors at 3 A.M. It can be done with minimal cost and effort to any room, by pretty much anybody.

Soundproofing is how you keep the neighbors happy and keep the street crew's jackhammer out of your mix. If you're not handy with tools and basic construction you have no hope of achieving good (or any) soundproofing at a low cost, but if you are, I can maybe help you do it.

So if ya got any questions, ask away. If not, enjoy my cool story bro

Tucooooooooo

How much extra does it cost to soundproof a wall? My neighbors hate me.

I could use some advice, and I bet you probably have a good idea what to offer imo.

We play in a trailer, and we basically crank our **** up all the way and rock the **** out of it. We have problems with feedback, both with the guitar amps (non musical, microphonic type feedback), and especially with the PA system, which is horribly underpowered right now. It's an old 150 watt Fender passport with just two pretty small speakers. It's way underpowered.

Anything we could do to combat the unpleasant feedback, while still being able to have the pleasant, musical feedback with the guitars? Would a more powerful PA feedback less? Here's our room:




(this picture was taken apx. where the creme amp is in the other)






(this pic was taken from just in front of and to the side of the drums)

It would cost a ton to completely isolate their side from yours, but there are things that can help. The easiest would be to glue (not screw or nail) another layer of sheetrock to that wall, making sure all joints are well sealed. Heavy walls and air tight walls are good for reducing sound transmission.

If you can't do this yourself, you should be able to find a drywaller or handyman to knock it out for about $500. It might take some searching to find somebody willing to do a job that small, though.

You can try some sound dampening, which may help. That space has a lot of parallel, flat, hard surfaces, which makes rooms very live. You're going to want to combat that, generally in any way your budget allows. Looks like you have a blanket behind the drum kit which is a start. You want more stuff like that, but thicker, more irregular, and in a lot more places. Especially the ceiling and that plywood wall.

If you have free rein to do what you want to that trailer (like nobody lives there when you aren't jamming) spend a day going crazy attaching whatever you can find to every flat surface in there. Scrap wood, old mattresses, car tires, whatever. Make them not flat, not parallel, and softer.

It's open to customization, the back wall was just knocked out about a month ago to make more room. My friend lives in a trailer in front of that trailer, and he owns the property, and both trailers, so it's completely open.

Maybe something like hang drapes around in zig zaggy patterns and ****?

Something thicker and heavier. More like blankets or egg crate foam. You can also build simple wood frames, fill them with insulation and wrap them with fabric. Then hang them at odd angles from the ceiling and walls. They're real easy and cheap to build, and they work well.

This guy has a tutorial for a fancy version, but you can ghetto these things out and they still do a good job.

I make bass traps in this post. I just painted that room this last week and plan on finishing up with panels and room acoustic and calibration tests soon. Oh, don't use egg foam imo.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=137

Nice!

I think that level of carpentry is out of LirvA's range tho.

But wait!


MTD (Mike The drummer ) is thinking about building a room on his property for playing music. He plays his kit in the house, and his wife was like "build you a drum room or something, get those damn drums outta here!!!" and so he might be building a room on his property. We could build a recording studio. What kind of recommendations do you have?

Is an octagonal room, or a round type room with like a domed ceiling, better than a square room than like that trailer room? I'm on a mission on the internet for plans for a studio room, big enough to fit a full band.

Do you just place those bass traps randomly around the room? Covered with egg crate type stuff or???

Bass traps usually go in corners. Egg foam on them might be a bit of a waste because it doesn't do much for low frequencies (which is prana's objection, I think). If you wanna get real nitty about the room you'll end up with lots of different types of dampers in precise locations for the exact type of room response you're looking for. That requires lots of metering and tinkering and is probably serious overkill for rehearsal space. Thus my vague suggestion to just stick whatever you happen to have around on the walls and ceiling.

If the drummer is building a room from scratch, he'd want to avoid any kind of regular geometry. Parallel surfaces and 90 degree angles are your enemy. Think of your sound as billiard balls and the room as the table. You want shapes and surfaces that slow the balls down quickly, so no rectangles, octagons, domes, or any other shape that can be described with one word.

If you're going to go for a full recording studio you need to isolate the control room from the live space, which is something I'd need more specific questions on before I could offer useful suggestions.

Lemme try 1,000 words instead. Here's the studio floorplan of the radio station blueprints. Both are fully functional studios, while studio 2 can also act as a control room for studio 1.

Can you listen to some of my songs and share your thoughts on the engineering? Any thoughts at all... The top three songs I did all in 2013. I've been learning purely by trial and error but now I'm reading a lot of stuff from therecordingrevolution.com (good site).

www.soundclick.com/mikebisforbyj

i've been recording the drums in an unfinished basement, i do vocals in a walk in closet, and the guitars and bass I amp up in a bedroom.

thanks!

I'm not the best person to ask about engineering your mix. Other people here are much better qualified for that. I'm more like the guy who can maybe help you with specific techniques for making your basement less boomy or get you better acoustic isolation in the closet. I'm also on my laptop so all your mixes sound kinda tinny to me

Seriously, to my untrained ear they sound pretty good, but I'm not a musician or recording engineer. I'm a construction guy.

lIrvA, those are stuffed with insulation that specifically performs the best for reducing bass frequencies. They can be wrapped with a material that looks appealing to whatever room you are using. Typically they are placed in the corners of rooms. Different shaped bass traps are often placed along the floor corners too. Egg shells don't do much at all really and building panels would be a bit more spendy but work multiple times better as well as look professional.

I'm really busy this week and my house is a mess because I'm painting so I can't post much for a few days but basically:

Any room creates small echoes because the sound reflects off the walls and the reflected sounds take a fraction of a second longer to hit your ear than the original sound that goes right from the sound source to your ear. Square rooms magnify this occurrence more so than other rooms and corners in square rooms are especially problematic. Even the corners from the floor to wall can cause issues. Issues can range from certain frequencies being cancelled out completely to certain frequencies standing out in the mix to a point where your final mixes will be off.





I haven't had time to make panels for my side walls and ceiling and while the bass traps help stop the boominess in that room I can still clap or talk in certain areas and hear the echoes off the walls. It is pretty annoying.

If you can make guitar pedals you can make those traps.

nice thread Zikzak

If price is no object - Sonex is the nuts..
http://www.markertek.com/Acoustic-Ma...tic-Foam.xhtml

The Markerfoam Acoustic Foam might be a decent budget substitute.

Auralex brand is something to check out too. They sell room kits I believe. I like building stuff though so just take on the DIY projects.

I kind of wish I was in a place i owned right now and could pick Zikzak's brain while building a real soundproof studio and/or theater room but will probably be renting at least another year.

Well, when you get your place, bump the thread and shoot me a PM

Yeah I'll most likely be posting here still. Who am I kidding?

Some of this may be obviously but it's where i've come to with our rehearsal space: Build some gobos (stupidly easy) / baffles, also have packing blankets (sound isolation blankets) around the place. Put some baffles or at least blankets behind the drums (this is a pretty classic way of reducing reflections on that wall). make sure your mic isn't pointing at the PA in anyway. consider a compressor on the vocal mic so that it is louder continuously so that the mic can be quieter, as it doesn't need to be louder for screaming, usually you need more gain so that you can still hear it when the vocalist sings in a quiet natural way- compression will make this louder without making the mic louder in general (which causes feedback). use less reverb on the vocal mics. Consider a 33 band eq like this to slice out feedback if it still occurs, this is what most live sound people are doing ( http://www.ebay.com/itm/DBX-2231-Equ...item1e7c6f56d2 ). When setting levels to jam, start with the drums then get everyone to match their level to those rather than having the drummer hit harder so that he can match the guitars that are set to 11.

Those are most the things i've found rehearsing in my space. Also with 3 people we've found its actually nicer to have the PAs set up as floor monitors for each person in the band (1 PA going to the bassist and a little to drums, other feeding to vocalist / guitarist).