[QUOTE=Det_Nosnip]I've never bookmarked a thread before, this is a first. :)[/QUOTE]

How do u Bookmark a thread ? :)

Ctrl + D, cool studio by the way, are you going to make it a fully equipt recording studio with desk, comfy sofas, vocal booth etc or just for rehersals?

^^

Thanks :thumb:

in december (long time away, but anyways) me and my dad are developing our basement in our new house, and he wants to build me a studio. since i have the whole basement for my room, a bathroom, a pool table, and a studio/practice space, whats the ideal size for a studio? including space for computer, etc.

[QUOTE=Stubbsy]hey Ken, i am not getting it soundproofed (exactly) but plastered and insulated, wat would u do in this situation, get High Density insulation or normal insulation then like a layer of foam???wat would be the best idea for this??, i no i need to carpet the concrete floor and also remove the steel doors and all but wat other things shud i do to soundproof it as much as i can??[/QUOTE]
If you want to get by cheap then do the 8" wide wall with the alternating studs then weave the insulation through them. I used R-34 insulation for mine. It is really thick and heavy so it will do a good job. Do this then drywall, don't put up the soundproofing drywall. Put carpet down and then put up some 1" thick 4X8 sheets of foam insulation on the ceiling. Spray it with spray glue and put cloth on it, this will help with the ceiling really well.

This won't be sound proofed but it will be much quieter than not having it done. If your steel door is hollow drill some holes in it and fill it up with spray in insulation.

[QUOTE=sic__6__sic]in december (long time away, but anyways) me and my dad are developing our basement in our new house, and he wants to build me a studio. since i have the whole basement for my room, a bathroom, a pool table, and a studio/practice space, whats the ideal size for a studio? including space for computer, etc.[/QUOTE]
My room is 15X25 and is perfect. Don't build a perfectly square room, I like the rectangular rooms so the sound can travel down a long wall into a short wall. We are not getting any sound bouncing around at all. Quite possibly the most important parts are carpeting the floor and putting up cloth covered insulation on the ceiling.

[QUOTE=xeonman9000]Ctrl + D, cool studio by the way, are you going to make it a fully equipt recording studio with desk, comfy sofas, vocal booth etc or just for rehersals?[/QUOTE]
Right now it is a rehearsal place. I have an area built onto the back long wall of the room that you can't see from in the pictures that can house an eventual control room. All I need to do is put in the glass window and another series of doors which shouldnt be that big of a job. Im not going to develop this part of the studio until I have all the equipment. I have a couch in the studio now, a desk, wireless internet connection, and a series of shelves built into one of the walls to hold all our cassette tapes. We record EVERY practice, label them, write them in a log book and store them on a shelf. If we want to remember or work on a riff we worked up a month ago we can look at the log book, then pull the tape.

Additionally I back all the tapes up digitally and store them on a computer in the studio. Once I move my big set of Sonors in there I'll be able to access this information with the laptop I use to run the electronics in the Sonor kit and pull up the digital recordings of our past practices and play them through our PA system.

I have several bands already lined up to use the studio to audition potential members for thier bands. I have actually been thinking about building a series of practice studios in a piece of property I own away from my house, putting a drum set, a bass rig, small PA, and guitar stack; schedule it out and rent time to other bands so they will have a nice clean place to practice. I was thinking about charging 25 bucks for 2 hours. If I decide to do this it will be later this summer.

hey thanks ken, ur a real genious. i am going to get as much soundproofed as i can but i dont really mind if it isnt as soundproof as urs, but its still gonna be awesome. i am also putting in a tv, couch, surround sound, just lots of beanbags and stuff which will take away alot of the sound aswell (i hope). Insulation will do alot, because its only got 1 wall and then theres outside bascially, like its a 4 walled building but its only 1 layer of something (either cement sheeting or plaster board) and yeah thanks for your tips. i will show my dad sumtime tonight and he will get an idea off of it!

I have always found construction fun and it is relatively easy. I love geometry and math and building is all built around it. I still feel the most important things to key in on is the carpet and ceiling. If you can put the conduit in the walls, this really cleans the floor up. We were playing in there Sunday and all the XLR cables were run inside the walls and the floor was totally clean, no cables anywhere. This makes it SOOOO much nicer and it protects your cables as well. I believe all the conduit for the whole room (I did seperate conduits for power and audio cables) cost about 70 bucks. If you look at the pictures you can see a grey circular conduit sleeve sticking out of the bottom of the wall, these are the power conduits. The XLR conduits come out behind the cabs and behind my drums.

Bring it to the top.. cause this thread is wack yo

That's cool, I got a room already isolated, with concrete and some styrofoam on. its really ugly, but very well isolated lol. The room is 20x30, and I plan to get a recorder this month. that will be a little start for my studio...

It's a really good idea to avoid parallel walls.
Anyway - Soundproofing is largely a mass thing. You want lots of mass, such as two 5/8ths thick pieces of drywall on each side of the walls, with high density foam inside. Although, mineral wool or rock wool is a better alternative to standard fiberglass insulation, you might want to also consider a floating floor.

And for the acoustics of the room you might want to make sure you have a balanced sound. You can't just throw a bunch of acoustical foam on the walls and expect the low end to be under control. You're going to want to try to get a good sound at all frequencies if you are at all serious about what you are doing. (Again, look at making bass traps from Rock Wool.)

I've plugged these forums before, and I'd willingly do it again - [url]http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php[/url]

I learned a lot from these forums; the guys on here are extremely knowledgeable and can help you out regardless of what part of the world you live in or what type of project you are working on. If you really want to soundproof your studio I'd look through what they have to say before you buy anything.

Really, not that what anybody does is wrong -- there just might be a smarter way to do things. If I were any of you kids saying you're going to have your dad help you soundproof your basement I'd read everything I could about soundproofing before I started. (You wouldn't want to buy material with no sound reduction capabilities and then have your dad lose his mind because he just wasted all that money.)

Jesus christ Ken, I thought you were a paramedic or something, If a civil servant can afford that kind of thing then my career path is pretty much chosen.

what kind of sticks are those theyre all blue

Is that a mapex v series you got there for your drums. Cus it looks like it and thats what i got right now and i was wondering if that is did u cut that hole yourself because my drum head didnt have one

You can make quite a bit of money as a medic if you don't care to work alot. Being a medic is a great job if you want to play music, you only work 10 days a month.

The blue drum sticks are actually Vater sticks wrapped with Stick Rapp (Pro-mark). I play for VERY long periods of time all at once and this stuff makes the sticks more comfortable.

I think the Mapex's are V-series. The hole was already cut in the reso head when I bought them, it looks like they cut it with box cutter as its not perfectly round.

As far as Voodoo's post. If your saying the techniques I used to build my room are not correct I disagree with you. I used a VERY specific drywall MADE for professional studios. The stuff was about 75 bucks for a 4X8 sheet. I consulted 2 different construction companies that have built professional studios and ran my ideas by them and they both said it would work out perfect. They agreed with the dimenstions of the room as well.

As far as stuff glued to walls to kill sound I have never had much experience with it, if your going to do that I think you are better to hang blankets off of wire placed at strategic places. The people I have talked to about the glue up stuff say that is does help but only in places that a professional studio would be able to notice. For my purposes I didn't feel I needed that. I may add in the foam corner pieces tho.

What I'm saying is that if most people just ran to Home Depot and bought general construction supplies they would be unhappy with the results. Soundproofing isn't cheap, although it is possible to achieve excellencent results by using modestly priced materials. You just have to do things correctly.

As far as what I said about foam or rock wool on the walls, it's just a sound control issue. As everybody knows, Concrete is not exactly great for making a studio out of. Some acoustical treatment would help to deaden or control the room's sound as needed. I'm no professional but I can hear the difference between a room that has balanced sound from just any ole' room. I know that it's hard to get good sounding drums without a good room to record in.

And Ken, could you post some of the specs of this drywall you used, who makes it, and if it is available nation-wide. I'm just interested to see what $2.40 sqft can do, as that seems extremely steep in cost.

They drywall I used is Solitude STC 54-77 QuietRock QR-540. I ordered it through Lowes. The research I did valued it, including labor at 5.89 per sqft. But, I did the labor myself. This stuff is designed so you don't need to stagger studs but I staggered them anyway and went with the dense insulation to kill all the sound.

I have a room just like yours that is soundproof, but im gunna paint it, mind if i use your colour shceme?

Wouldn't it be best to cover the walls and the ceiling with carpet as well? Rough edges will make sound bounce no matter what, but I'm sure its not 100% necessary. If you really wana go all out you can get this professional grade material, its kind of like black foam eggcrates. I think the stuff costs like 35 bucks for a 8'x10' section.

[QUOTE=Nicko_Shmicko]I have a room just like yours that is soundproof, but im gunna paint it, mind if i use your colour shceme?[/QUOTE]

Do you really think he cares if you use his color scheme? And was that question worth quoting the whole enormous post??

To give this post some meaning:

ken, what's the equipment you are looking into to use in the studio? (mixing desk, mics, software,...)

I have a Behringer sl-2442fx (16 channel + 4 stereor's, 24 total). I'm gonna get a 16 in/out audio interface from our bassist for the pc. After that, I'm just gonna need some mics and I will be set...

I'm quite new to this, but how would you send that many individual tracks from the mixer which only has a stereo main output to the audio interface? I checked out some audio interfaces and it seems that they has many mono jacks inputs at the rear so presumably you would require a seperate output for each one on the desk?

[QUOTE=xeonman9000]I'm quite new to this, but how would you send that many individual tracks from the mixer which only has a stereo main output to the audio interface? I checked out some audio interfaces and it seems that they has many mono jacks inputs at the rear so presumably you would require a seperate output for each one on the desk?[/QUOTE]

Lol :)

Yeah, each input has an output also...
You have a lot of options with that. You can even choose wich channels are to be cut of from the main out etc.

So in my case, I will hook up all the instruments and the vocals to the mixer and lead them all to the interface to go into the pc. Since the mixer is also the pa for the vocal installation, I need to cut the instruments off from the main output, since I don't want to have guitars and drums coming out of the monitors, only vocals. So in short: everything (every channel) goes into the pc, but only 2-3 channels for the vocals also go through the main out.

On most mixers you also have sub groups. Another possibility is also to lead the 2-3 vocal channel to a separate group and have that group go through the monitors. You have lots of choices basicly... :thumb:

[QUOTE=DxRocker]Lol :)

Yeah, each input has an output also...
[/QUOTE]
Ahhh, is that the "INSERT I/O" below the line-in? I didn't realise that was what it was for, how do you dictate whether it's an input or an output?
I have a UB1204-pro and I just pan two channels hard left and hard right then send them to the stereo input on my soundcard, I was thinking, I might also be able to use the 3/4 submix to send another two channels to the digital in, or can you not use jack to spdif cables :confused: ?

[QUOTE=xeonman9000]Ahhh, is that the "INSERT I/O" below the line-in? [/QUOTE]

yep :)

it is an output when you plug the cable only half way in.
wouldn't know about that spdif stuff though. My table is completely analog

[QUOTE=DxRocker]Do you really think he cares if you use his color scheme? And was that question worth quoting the whole enormous post??

To give this post some meaning:

ken, what's the equipment you are looking into to use in the studio? (mixing desk, mics, software,...)

I have a Behringer sl-2442fx (16 channel + 4 stereor's, 24 total). I'm gonna get a 16 in/out audio interface from our bassist for the pc. After that, I'm just gonna need some mics and I will be set...[/QUOTE]

sorry dude. I'll go edit the post now, i was tired, not sure why i did it in the first place.

Hi Ken,

Sorry for dragging up an old thread but I’ve got a few questions for you. I want to soundproof my garage… I’ve read your very thorough explanation of how to do this but I’m still a bit confused about a few things.
I really don’t know anything about DIY so I apologise in advance!

I thought I could split the garage in half and build a room within the garage at the far end. This would mean using the 3 walls of the garage and then constructing a dividing wall to split the garage in two. The dividing wall would have a door.

So, the plan is to put up a frame a certain distance into the room from the proper, brick wall. When you say you use insulation (R-34), what is this? Is it proper soundproofing stuff or just standard insulator? I’ve seen something called Acoustic Mineral Wool which seems pretty pricey… would this be the same stuff you’re talking about?

What is drywall? Is this American (I’m UK). I’ve seen Plasterboard being suggested many times so is this the English version of drywall?

What do you mean by ‘mud it up’? What’s the mud?

Any more tips (I really have no clue!! But don’t worry… it wouldn’t be me doing the work but I need to understand it so I can think about price and how much is involved.

I obviously want to cut out as much noise as possible for the neighbours sake but I’m not sure if I’d need to TOTALLY soundproof the garage (I’m not sure how effective it is). I want to do this as cheaply as possible but I am aware that it will cost a fair but (I currently rent a very small farmhouse for my drums and it costs £200 per month… if I can play my drums in my garage, the money will hopefully be recouped as I wont be paying out that rent any longer)

Many thanks!! :)

Could you build an outer wall of brick and leave about a one foot gap and then build and inner wall of brick. And inbetween the two walls put insublation? Then pad the inner wall with carpet etc...? Just wondering if that would work at all

I am converting my garage into a room. I will be sleeping in thir and it will be for jamming out and maybe recording. Ill check out the dimensions but would i use the same process?

I wonder when he will reply...