Jam room from the ground up...

[BucketButt]

I know of one home studio that was built using concrete blocks for the exterior walls. It belonged to the late rockabilly legend Carl Perkins, and was his second (at least) studio construction project. Although I've never been inside the concrete-block studio, I understand it was very quiet; Carl practiced, rehearsed his band and recorded in it, and never disturbed his next-door neighbors.

 

[Petebass]

So no-one has mentioned this - all the focus seems to be on keeping the noise in, but what about keeping the noise out. I remember doing a recording at a studio that was in an industrial area so they didn't put too much effort into the soundproofing. What they didn't realise is that every time a truck came by, or a bunch or teenagers walked by, the noise ended up on the recording. We lost a lot of good takes.

 

[SpankBass]

So no-one has mentioned this - all the focus seems to be on keeping the noise in, but what about keeping the noise out. I remember doing a recording at a studio that was in an industrial area so they didn't put too much effort into the soundproofing. What they didn't realise is that every time a truck came by, or a bunch or teenagers walked by, the noise ended up on the recording. We lost a lot of good takes.

I'm not too concerned, right now I just want a jam room, but I will build it with the thought of eventually putting in some recording equipment. And if most sound is kept in, shouldn't most sound be kept out?

 

[Trouland]

Spankbass,

I am currently rebuilding my garage into a studio / rehearsal room. You will need quite a bit of room, the dimensions of my garage are 30'X26'. After replacing all of the studs with 2X8's I left a 2" air gap then 6" of fiberglass batt insulation with vapor barrier then 1/4" Luan board and finally 4" wedge sound absorbing foam. We are gluing the wedge foam on all walls and the cieling right now. The floor is a concrete slab, I put down a foam backing and a good durable carpet over that. I also have a 100 Amp service for power and all circuts coming off of the breaker box have power conditioners and built in surge protection. Be carefull when you do the power, it has to meet code requirments. So far I have about $5,000 into my project. It has taken about 3 months to almost complete, I work on it in the evenings after work, the drummer and keyboardist are helping also. After we get the wedges up we will be done. Last night we tried a little experiment. We cranked up the stereo in the garage and blasted the speakers at the connecting wall to the house and there was virtually no noise in the house. We then blasted the stereo in the house towards the garage and got no noise so we think it should work out pretty good. I will post pics when we get it finished. Sorry about the long post!

TR

 

[Zlartibartfast]

For my band we made some compromises, spent about $200, and got to the point where we can play into the night without anyone losing sleep. First thing - only our drummer plays live; the rest of us are DI into our mixer and we listen on headphones. Secind thing - we bought 90% of the contruction material at Habitat for humanity. We assembled portable panels (aka gobos) that are linked together with door hinges and set them up in our "game room". They run from floor to ceiling, and have double-pane windows. We lock the drummer inside and this has turned out to be a great incentive for him to be attentive during rehearsals - can't come out 'till we get it right ;-}. Sounds like your situation might not work with this scheme - maybe dig in about 3', then build cinder-block up the rest of the way. I tried styrofoam a long time ago but it started squeaking so now I'd go wih paper-based acoustic tile. We found 300 square feet of it for $40 at the Habitat. shop around....you can get lucky