Sound Proofing

This doesn't have much to do with guitaring, but my bro back home just insulated a garage with the hopes of using it as a practice/jam room throughout the winter. Anybody know of a cheap and pratical way of sound proofing it so the neighbors don't lose it again?

- 3/4 or 1 inch wood siding, insulation, and vapor barrier is all that's up there right now. We were thinking those flat egg cartons or covering the whole deal with plexy glass but that'd probably suck accoustically.

I would think that uncovered insulation would be pretty good for soundproofing. Some other people have suggested egg cartons in the past; I'm not too sure whether that would work, though in theory it sounds like it should.

Heavy blankets would probably help, too. Oh, and enough heat is important, too, esp. for the sake of the instruments.

I saw several pictures of professionals jamming in a room covered with egg carton shaped like foam. Makes you wonder the egg carton business might work. I also wanted to soundproof my garage a while ago, and I came to the conclusion with "Batts" (hope that's not a aussie word) but these look like big bricks of foam which absorbs sound. You install these in between walls and be hidden so your garage doesn't look crap. You can get these from hardware stores. Well thats my plan when we build our new double garage.

The last resort would be to call in the pros to do it for you but this will cost a fair bit.

that egg-cartoon shaped like foam, as you call it, is EXTREMELY (and i mean EXTREMELY) expensive. and it doesnt realy serve as an isolation to the outside. is makes the room "dead" so that you got no sound reflections from plane walls which sucks.

In that case go for the batts :)

A friend of mine got his room done with egg cartons over a couple of inches layer of sponge , some old blankets and carpets on the floor ... The sound is just perfect for jamming/recording and it costs almost nothing !

Decent, thanks. I'll write him telling him egg cartons, foam and blankets. What we figured, but thought I'd check here in case there was something else.

You have to keep in mind that there is a big difference between soundproofing a room, and treating a room acoustically.
By putting up egg crates/foam up on the wall, you're basically just affecting the acoustics INSIDE of that room. Some frequencies(mostly in the high registers) will indeed be blocked from traveling outside, but low frequencies will travel right through it without even being affected by the padding. Now, keep in mind that your neighbours will mainly be hearing(=complaining about) low end noise, since high frequencies got absorbed much much easier. So using egg crates/foam is pretty much useless(on top of being a major fire hazard).

Your best bet in soundproofing a room is to try and achieve a "room within a room", with a layer of air between the walls to isolate the sound. Now, I assume that actually building a floating room in your garage is out of your budget( or simply not possible), so here's what I suggest that you give a try:

Put up heavy duty(preferably fireproof) curtains about a foot away from every wall. Just doing the outside walls will probaby suffice as far as complaints from the neighbours goes. The good thing about this is that with a proper rail system to hang them, you'll be able to take them off pretty easily as opposed to egg crates.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents, do some searches on google for "soundproofing." I'm sure there's lots of info out there that's much more reliable than what any of us can give you...

[Edited by SPL on 11-13-2003 at 12:35 PM]

spl is correct. as far as keeping the neighbors happy you're not going to get what you're after by using egg cartons, foam, etc. You'd need floating floors, hanging ceiling, a lot of insulation, an air-tight room within a room (dead air is the key), etc....you're talking about at least 10K to make it right. The best you can do is try to soak up the low freqs by focusing on limp mass but without well-designed bass traps (in combination with good designs in the rest of the room) you're still going to experience very minimal success. There are books on designing studios and rehearsal spaces -- I bought a couple when I designed my studio space. Since I couldn't afford to do it "right" I just schedule all my drum and bass times around when my neighbors are not at home.

In other words, try the curtain idea (sounded good to me) and other than that we're out of luck. The insulation should pick up the highs, the curtains might pick up the lows. They've dealt with us for 12 years but it was from the basement. The shed is right beside their house, ha.

Theres decent stuff like those big black rolls of sound proof stuff that are like a couple hundred a roll.It would hardly cost $10,000 to reduce audio leaking substantially considering the area isnt large.Yes egg cartons do nothing to block sound.Ive heard that they can actually enhance certain frequencies.

If your looking to stop bouncing soundwaves and other space/sound issues...then you might be looking toward 1500-2000 tamales for that kind of sha-bang.
Wow I'm full of lousy vocabulary tonight!

Later! \m/

Oh yeah if you happen to wet the bed alot or know of some people who do,ordanairy mattresses are pretty effective...just make sure there not 'inhabited'...
you dont HAVE to use soiled ones,but it will keep complaining neighbors and parents away.

Later! \m/

You can stop some sound "leakage" with cartons and carpets and anything else but you're not going to stop a lot and you're really not going to stop any of the low end freqs that rumble the neighbors. To stop those you need a lot of limp mass and tuned traps in combination with a floating floor (if you're on a slab).

Just keep in mind that for the money you guys are looking at there is no such thing as "sound proof"

Honestly, I wouldn't even bother worrying over it or spending any money unless you have specific issues with the sound on the inside and you could benefit from difussion or isolating a precise set of freqs that need to be tamed -- but even here you're going to need some analysis tools that you probably don't have.

I researched studio design for two years and read book after book, article after article on all this...unless you have thousands of dollars to spend on serious redesign of the rehearsal space then you're better off not bothering because you're just throwing money away on nothing if you're trying to get sound isolation. Nothing you're going to do will get an air-tight room and a dead-air shell around that room and as long as there's even a small "hole" in an otherwise air-tight room then all the effort is for nothing.

And a $10,000 budget to create a "sound proof" studiorehearsal space is about what you'd need to spend (variable depending on how much of the work you do yourself) and still you wouldn't have a "sound proof" room.