HOW TO SOUNDPROOF - Studio - Music Room - Drum Room - Practice Space

hey what's up everybody and welcome to my how to build a studio series where I get to show you how I turn this into this a stand of the art audio and video production studio in my basement I can't wait to show you some of the tips and tricks and the things I learned along the way to hopefully help you make your home studio build the best that it can be thanks so much for watching let's get started all right guys I'm gonna do a little demo here and what the soundproofing is like here at Cooper studios so when I talk about the different techniques and show you what I've done you have a reference for how much of a difference that's making my lovely wife Anna is gonna walk around the studio here she's got an f1 recorder from zoom that is set to the same game structure and the same sensitivity the whole time so it's going to be really loud right here and actually goes into each room it's going to get quieter and it could get really really quiet on the recording for you guys and that's just showing the actual difference between here and there the volume on the mic is never adjusted and I'm just going to play some realms so let's see what happens [Music] [Music] hey what's up everybody and welcome to this video on soundproofing your home studio your drum room your practice space whatever and when I say soundproof I put it in quotes because technically there's a lot of misconceptions around soundproofing and the concept of a soundproof room or soundproofing a room means eliminating the transfer of sound from inside to outside of a room or from outside of a room to inside of a room and unless you have a ginormous budget of tens of thousands of dollars if not way more than that just for the soundproofing most likely you're not going to have a completely soundproof room now that's not to get you down this space right here had a large budget and a lot of incredible companies that helped to make it possible and I did a ton of work on this space and it's not completely soundproof but it's amazing and there's so many incredible things that I can do with it the idea of what we're going to talk about today this soundproofing which is really just a word to get you interested and excited is more about reducing the sound transfer in and out of the room and some things that you can do on limited budgets and limited of abilities because not everyone has like an unfinished basement that they're gonna build a whole new room in and not everybody has a practice space where they can add four walls or you know 20 inches thick of concrete block and things like that to actually soundproof the room and so today I've got a bunch of things to talk about that will help you with your small projects your large projects your home studios your practice rooms and we will kind of discuss a few things that you can do possibly even yourself without hiring anybody and without spending a ton of money no before we get to that let's talk about another mist exception just to get it out of the way this is not soundproofing if you throw this egg crate kind of stuff up on the wall you're not eliminating the transfer of sound in or out of your room all you're doing is kind of changing the way it sounds in your room so this is considered acoustical treatment and this is really cheap not very good stuff at that also if you see these all over my room these are acoustical treatment panels that are professional-grade they're from acoustic geometry and they're not soundproofing either they are acoustic treatment so they help the room itself sound better now now that you know that and you're not going to go out and buy a bunch of bed crates and throw them up on the wall let's talk about what you can buy and how you can sound prove your room alright so although there are many ways to reduce the sound transfer in and out of a room the first place that I would start is with the doors especially on a small practice room or a small studio where you don't have a huge budget to make a big change and the thing about doors is they have gaps they have gaps at the bottom they don't seal properly when you close them oftentimes in most homes your doors are not solid doors there they have a gap in between there's an air pocket in the middle it's not a very solid mass filled object and so when it comes to your walls typically it's drywall or it could be plywood or something but those are solid masses that have very few penetrations besides electrical boxes or lighting coming in and out of the room and so there are a few places for the sound to leak out but a door has all those gaps and so replacing a thin lightweight door with without a lot of mass with something that's solid core and then also sealing the door properly so that all those gaps are no longer there really can make a huge difference in the amount of sound transfer in and out of the room with not a huge investment and so one way to test your door is to take a bright light like a flashlight and shine it from inside the room to the outside of the room and check where it is that the light comes through so if you see your light coming through on the sides that means that it's not sealed properly if it's down at the bottom that means that you have gaps on the bottom of your door and it's not sealed properly there either and the acoustical surfaces or acoustic geometry door seal kit will actually allow you to seal those gaps on the door and reduce the amount of sound and light and air that can get through those gaps it basically eliminates the gaps on the door and it when you close it the bottom seal can actually seal itself as an auto seal feature which is really really awesome [Music] and if you noticed of course I actually have two doors here and the reason I have two doors is because this live room is a room within a room set up and so when you get really deep into trying to make this room is soundproof or as isolated and resistant to sound transfer as possible you would want to look into creating a room within a room because now I've got two walls and I also have double doors and so that is double the amount of solid corridor double the amount of door seal that I have keeping the sound from going in and out of the room so that's first step your doors next step that I think can be a moderately priced moderately easy project would be taking a look at the floor and isolating your floor so let's talk about that so another big problem that can be solved rather easily is the transfer of frequencies through the floor in your build and so for me I didn't have this big of an issue with that because this is the concrete slab the subfloor underneath the flooring I have here and so I'm also on the lowest level of my house so I don't have to worry about anything below me it can still transfer in between rooms but it's not a big issue on the concrete slab as it is if you have a drum set on a higher level in your house I used to have a drum set in my bedroom and so you could hear it right below me every single time I played really really well so what happens there is that your low frequencies especially like the kick drum floor tom are sitting right on the floor which is right on the subfloor which is right on the joist and it's right on the drywall most of the time of these bills there's no isolation especially in a typically built house between those layers and so sound transfers to those solid objects really easily right into the space below you and across from you in the room next to you and so what you want to do is you want to isolate your drums or your bass guitar ant or whatever it is from the floor the easiest way to do that is quite simply with just a rug right away so that can be a little bit of a barrier especially if you get one that has a rubber bottom but that's not going to make a huge impact a bigger impact will happen if you can build a raised floor or a small stage that has rubber gaskets underneath it to isolate it from the floor below it and so in a lot of builds you'll have the live room of the studio actually raised up four to six inches and then underneath those two by fours you'll actually find rubber Isolators that keep it from touching the floor right below it and so what that does is it limits the transfer of the low frequencies through the solid objects directly into the floor and thus reduces a big chunk of the transfer of the sound that you are trying to eliminate so the floor can be a big issue but it can also be solved rather easily without a huge expense as compared to something like your walls are transferring Center but we can talk about the walls next all right so what can oftentimes be the most beneficial but also the most expensive most difficult and biggest project to soundproof or reduce the sound in your rooms and transfer between them is your walls and your ceiling and so in many cases doing something big involves drywall work oftentimes it involves framing and really it can get expensive quick but if you really want to reduce the sound transfer between your rooms the walls and the ceiling are where you're going to have to put in that budget and put in that effort and so in my life room this is the only room within the whole build that I did this but I did a room within a room and so what that looks like and I'll show you some from the actual project we're now right inside the live room in my studio which is where the jumps are going to be a lot of the loudest instruments that I record live are going to be in this room and so you can see this is the wall between the live room and the control room and so what's gonna happen is there's gonna be drywall right here then I'm gonna have that air gap and then I'm gonna have drywall here and the safe and sound insulation in between these studs you've got two separate walls you've got three layers of the sound break XP five-eighths inch and I mean the sound does not travel through the wall right now the only spot that leaks sound between these two rooms is the doorway here which doesn't have doors in it so if I go down there and I knock on the wall you hear the sound around the corner but not through the wall so this is going to be a huge part of being able to mix in this control room right back here while I play drums in this room over here your typical wall which normally separate your two rooms but then another wall away from that first wall that is acoustically isolated it's decoupled and what that means is that those two walls don't touch so the sound transfer can't go from solid object to solid object from drywall to a stud to drywall to study etc etc it's decoupled it is isolated from each other and there is another layer of drywall that is where you're really going to start to find the large benefits if you're trying to actually basically completely reduce the sound transfer between two rooms you need that room within a room setup but one of the biggest things can actually be your decision in materials when you go to build a room even if you're just gonna do one layer of drywall if you use the type of drywall that I used in this project it can bring a huge benefit to you and so what it is is on the wall here I have purple sound break XP from national gypsum and what this product is is it's actually two layers of drywall acoustically separated by a polymer that helps to decouple those two layers of drywall that makes it harder for sound to pass through it's also five-eighths inch thick which is thicker than your typical half inch drywall by a little bit and then on the ceiling I have three quarter inch thick sound break XP which is the same kind of drywall with that polymer in between it's just even thicker and so what this can do is this acts as a barrier that polymer in between the two layers for your sound going through and a lot of builds people will do drywall with a layer of polymer and then another layer of drywall but this is this means a ton of work because you have to hang a lot of extra drywall and it also means a lot of added expense because you're paying for that extra labor or you're doing that extra labor yourself but you're also buying two layers of drywall you're buying the acoustical polymer that goes in between the layers of drywall and it's a big mess and a lot of work and so this sound breakneck speed drywall that I used in my build I used it because it's a lot easier they just hang one layer if they're doing a single room or in this situation it's a room within a room so you've got a layer here on this wall and then you have that that gap that isolation and then you have another layer on this wall it's one layer to finish it is one layer to hang and it reduces the labor cost of the project while still gaining the benefits of having a polymer in between those two layers of drywall outside of that the choice of insulation within the walls is important as well you can use your typical pink insulation fiberglass but it's hard to work with and it doesn't acoustically isolate like the product that I used which is the rock wall safe and sound product it's a stone wall product and it goes in between the studs and it actually helps with fire as well it's it's very resistant to fire and it's also much more resistant to sound than your typical insulation and so you spend a little bit more on the insulation side and you get that added benefit of the sound transfer being blocked even more by not only your drywall but also the insulation in the wall and so many homes actually don't have insulation in their interior partition walls so for a smaller build something where you want to work on a single room in your house and you don't want to spend a ton of money you could take the drywall off insert the safe and sound insulation into the stud cavities and then put on a layer of the purple sound break XP and you're going to immediately increase the sound resistance between the two rooms by a lot and so those are kind of a few small ways without having to go to adding another layer another wall doing a room within a room that can be a big benefit for not as much work but the biggest thing you can do is if you just take a room that you already have and add a second wall inside of that room and a second ceiling where it's acoustically isolated from the one above it and then use the sound break XP and use the statement sound insulation within those walls and that's where you're really going to start gaining huge benefits for the amount of sound transferred in and out plus if you do within the room within a room you can have that doubled or double isolation that we talked about earlier another option to help with your door situation that we talked about earlier as your doors being your biggest leak point is to do what a lot of studios have and you can actually do this in your home too if you really wanted to although it might be a little weird but that is to have a sound lock and so this right here is my sound lock it is the the hallway the connector between my live room my control room and on the other side of this door is my green room and so I typically have artists I have people here at the studio hanging out in this room they can talk they can joke they can actually there's their own speakers in there so they can hear whatever mix they want from the board but you don't want the sound of them talking and laughing and joking to get into the other room and if say that's a bedroom which it actually is a bedroom as well I don't want to be in here mixing and the person not be able to sleep and so what this sound lock does is it adds another door and another amount of space in between one room and the next and here it works in three ways because it isolates the live room in the control room it isolates the control room in the green room and in this here is my HVAC for the house and right here are my guitar amps and so I don't want my HVAC sound going into the live room I don't want my guitar amps sound going into the live room control room etc etc etc so this air here in this open space allows for that sound to have a harder time travelling between as well as this corner and then all those extra doors adds up for more soundproofing or sound isolation and so it also allows people to go from the green room to the control room without going into the live room and so there's a lot of benefits to having a sound lock like this and it certainly has worked out really well for my build and could be something that you do just to eliminate the sound coming out of a room into the next room through the door by building a small sound block that you can use for storage or you could use it as I don't know it's just a way to come out of your space maybe talk on the phone while someone's drumming but not go into the next room it can definitely be helpful in a lot of builds in a lot of scenarios alright so if you're a guitarist or a bassist or anyone who uses an an for a speaker for your sound source for what you play I actually have really good news for you because you don't have to do a lot of the huge projects that we talked about before as far as room within a room or building stages or adding drywall and insulation you can actually do that that room within a room concept by building an isolation box for your amplifier and so in this situation I've done built-in so these are part of the property now it would take a lot of work to rip them down and take them out but you can do a mobile one on casters and what these do is they allow you to put your hamp inside and reduce the volume on the outside and also reduce the volume coming out into a different room and so if you wanted to record a guitar amp in the same room as the drummer but you didn't want your drums on your guitar mic you didn't want your guitar and your drum mics if you build a really nice box then you can almost completely reduce the sound if coming in and out of the box for the amp and so in this situation I made them pretty big but you see this door is super thick it's multiple layers of you got MDF and then I actually did some plywood on the outside so I could have that pretty wood finish there and then you've got a 2x4 frame and underneath this echo Eliminator insulation or absorber product you have multiple layers of that sound break XP so there's two layers of drywall in here then you've got the two layers of wood you also have a seal around the outside and I'm also going to add some rubber gasket for that seal as well similar to the doors but on the inside you've got multiple layers of drywall on each side and then on the sides of the boxes themselves and I'll show all this in some extra clips but you actually have an air baffling system and so an important thing is you need to make sure that there's air circulation in and out cool air has to come in hot air has to leave because if you don't do that your amp is gonna overheat or catch fire or who knows what I'm not a not a guitar amp connoisseur but I do know that it requires cooling air and so in this situation I have the air being pumped in and then baffled so the sound can't easily escape through the air vents or air ducts for these boxes so cool air comes at the bottom and then the hot air leaves higher up in the box and his baffled out and comes out on the side so these were definitely expensive boxes but because I built in myself instead of paying five to ten thousand dollars for a company to come in and build one for me I probably built both of these boxes for somewhere between a thousand to two thousand dollars maybe even less than that and the bottom one is a little bit smaller but you can fit two amps at once and they're connected via conduit to the live room into the control room over here and I think they actually turned out looking pretty nice so I also use them for storage when I'm not using guitar amps in them and they turned out really cool but they can be a huge factor in reducing the sound transfer for a guitar amp or a bass amp or whatever it is that you use as a speaker source all right so I had a little helpful tip bit for the guitarist that doesn't require a whole room transformation so I wanted to have a helpful tip it for my drummers out there you can actually take an acoustic kit and you can transform an acoustic kit into an electric kit like I have done here where you've got normal drum sizes you can set it up like you normally set up your kit and it's just like electronic pads that replace the normal drum heads and so these are the true track drum heads from purl and they're connected to the Pearl mimic pro module so I can play this in a little volume setting and I can also still play it like a drum set I can record it like a drum set and these are the Zildjian 16 symbols which are acoustic electric hybrids as well you can have little condenser pickups here that sends down to a DSP module and you can transform the sound that you play in record but they're also much reduced volume so you can practice and play and they feel like normal cymbals and the other alternative is using this or low volume cymbals with silent stroke heads which I also have demoed here where that reduces the volume greatly inside of the room and into outside of the room just like using an electronic kit does but it still feels like a normal acoustic kit and it's much less expensive than transforming an acoustic kit to an electronic kit you just don't have all the same options as you do when you have a nice electronic setup like this [Music] so just another little tidbit to throw in there and another way to practice and reduce sound if you don't have the budget to throw up a bunch of drywall or put it in multiple layers of isolation but at the end of the day if you can do it you should do it because having a nice soundproof room to play your drums in or your guitar or whatever can be a huge factor to allowing yourself to practice to record to do the things you love whenever you want to do them because I can sit down here and play all my family's asleep upstairs at 3:00 in the morning and my neighbors don't hear it and my family can sleep it is absolutely amazing to be able to do that whenever it is that I want to so I hope that this video has helped you I hope that you click the links in the description and go check out some of the other videos that go more in detail about certain things like how to install the isolation on the doors the seals how to use some of the other products that I spoke about throughout this video and I hope you enjoyed it please leave comments and questions below and I'll try to get to as many as I can thank you so much for watching and happy drumming happy music happy studio wing [Music]

Channel: COOP3RDRUMM3R

Views: 277,061

Keywords: how to soundproof, how to soundproof a studio, how to soundprood a room, studio soundproofing, how to soundproof a drum room, soundproofing, soundproof, soundproof studio, room soundproofing

Id: gYgTbesF1FU

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2019