Best way to convert a shed to a studio?

red_ice

basicly my band and i jam in a shed. 20 foot by 10 foot, pritty nice size for a 3 piece band! We have to stop playing at 10:30 coz as you know acustic drums are loud!

It just so happens the drummers parents (owners of the shed) have big ass bricks left over (50)from building walls in the back garden. We worked it out that we could make a wall seperating the shed into 1/3 and 2/3's. In the 1/3 section we will break into /3's again, 2/3 for drums, and 1/2 for a singing booth. The drum room is entered through the singing booth, and the singing booth is entered through a door beside the entrance of the shed.

We plan to put a window between the drum room and the main room, to which we usually hang out, listen to our tracks, and where we will be playing guitars and so on.

What is the best way to kill the volume on the drums with that set up? The roof on the shed is a standard roof, and we know all the sound (pritty much) gets out from it. There is a 3 foot gap from the top of the wall we will be building to the shed roof. Whats the best way to cut the noise down on the new roof thats going over the drum room? How should we go about it?

Another thing, i was looking at random pics on the internet of studio windows and they seem to be double glased windows that if you look at them from the side they go like this \ / . Other than light refraction, how will this help sound proofing?

Would you say a concrete wall would be better than a stud with rockwool? We also have carpet lining (the black wavey stuff) to line the new walls of the drum room aswell. Anything we can do we will do, but with most cases the budget is pap!

Cheers

cornbb

Studio windows are \ / shaped because sound resonates a lot more inside a | | shaped cavity

I dunno what else I can tell you... you could try filling any gaps, eg under doors, with some sort of soundproofing material. Best of luck with it anyway

Chardee MacDennis

egg cartons?

QuadLeo

Egg Cartons? Are you serious? They do absolutely nothing. They do stop sound bouncing around a bit. But no more than carpet and curtains. Egg Cartons won't help sound proofing.

A good way to do it would be to build a box inside a box. Basically build a brand new solid wall room inside the garage. With a cavity between both walls, and a layer of rockwool and plaster board on the inside. Run all the electrics under the floor. If anything breaks the cavity it won't work. It's expensive. But if you already have the blocks it might not be too bad. You'd have to have a rockwool and plasterboard ceiling too.

djeoinc

want to do that my self but its expensive and i want the ****ing money 2 do it now good damnet ill rob a bank to do so

Chardee MacDennis

QuadLeo wrote:

Egg Cartons? Are you serious? They do absolutely nothing. They do stop sound bouncing around a bit. But no more than carpet and curtains. Egg Cartons won't help sound proofing.

But that's how they did it in Pugwall, and if there is one thing I know; it's TV never lies!!

Anyway i realise they dont do much for soundproofing, but they do help with the rooms acoustics if it is a square room.

smashey

Call_me_al wrote:

But that's how they did it in Pugwall, and if there is one thing I know; it's TV never lies!!

Anyway i realise they dont do much for soundproofing, but they do help with the rooms acoustics if it is a square room.

Egg cartons, curtains etc only reduce the reverberation time of the sound. Quadleo's idea seems like a good one to me.

red_ice

QuadLeo wrote:

A good way to do it would be to build a box inside a box.

That is what we are doing! We have the room seperated up into 3 parts, main area for guitar, bass and hangin out in general. A vocal room and a drum room. The drum room walls are being made out of concrete rather than a studwall with rockwool. The drums will be put on top of 4 craits that will be nailed together on top of about 2 inches of lino floor and another 2 inches on top. The main problem i can see is the fact that all the sound will escape out of the roof. Whats the best roofing option for sound proofing?

david

Is it a flat roof or traditional? You could put a suspended non load bearing false roof inside of it with loads of rockwool on top, but if you want to do a good job on this you'll need to recess proper joist hangers into the the external walls. Ideally you want a basic concrete cavity external wall and concrete partitions, then build stud partitions with rockwool inside the concrete walls and partitions, two layers like with an air gap between them.

My advice is to leave the room as it is partition wise, it's a small room as it is.
Your best bet is to build an inner layer inside the external walls as explained above and fit a decent double glazed/solid PVC external door then put in a false room. The plan you describe is just messy, keep the room as big as you can as a nice rehearsal space, seperate tracking rooms wont make that much of a difference. You're much better off investing in soom decent acoustic room treatment like bass trapping HF diffusers etc.