My wife and I just made an offer on a house today. If we get it, the plan is to put my new studio in two of the upstairs bedrooms. I have two basic questions.

1) Will I be able to achieve acceptable sound isolation between the two upstairs bedrooms if I build rooms within rooms for the control room and recording room, or is the fact that they are built on a common floor going to ruin my chances of preventing sound transmission?

2) The wall inbetween the two rooms is plaster (not drywall). Would tearing out that wall and building two new drywalls between the rooms work better at stopping more sound than simply keeping the one plaster wall and adding one or two more drywalls on either side of the plaster wall? BTW, either way I do it, I will be adding a window between the rooms to see into the recording room from the control room.

Thanks!
P.S. Please be nice, this is my first post here.

The common floor won't help... but you can also float the floor. Essentially decouple from the real floor by creating a raised floor in your rooms. However, it will mostly be bass that will bleed throught he floor as decent insulation and treatment will take care of mids/high. With that in mind, I don't know if it will matter that much. Would you be doing vocals and drums at the same time? Probably not and the little bit of thump/rumble that may come through will be mitigated by a mic's shock mount and also hopefully with a nice high pass filter or EQ.

As for your walls.... room in a room works. I wouldn't mess with the plaster personaly. Who wants to screw with lath and all that garbage? Air space and insulation is the name of the game, not plaster versus drywall.

Actually, you'd want to remove the plaster from the inside of the old wall before erecting the new wall - otherwise you have a triple leaf that can acutally make transmission worse at some frequencies. You want 2 heavy masses. 1 on the inside of the studio room, 1 on the bedroom wall on the opposite side. In between you want a single air gap filled with insulation.

For the floor, if you really want isolation, you'll need to consider floating the floor and building the new inner walls on top of that floated floor.

Bryan

Hi Bart,

Welcome to the forum.

> is the fact that they are built on a common floor going to ruin my chances of preventing sound transmission? <

Yes, the principle of "weakest link in the chain" applies. But if you're going to all the trouble to build double walls and a hung ceiling, you can float the floor too. Or just accept that you won't play music really loud late at night.

> The wall inbetween the two rooms is ... <

I'm not much of an isolation expert so maybe someone else here can offer you specific advice. What I can tell you is you need to buy Rod Gervais' book. It's affordable, and has all of the information you need in an easy to read writing style:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598630342/002-5726990-8501645?n=283155

It's probably in regular "brick and mortar" book stores by now too.

--Ethan

Hey, thanks for the replies.

I'm not too worried about sound isolation from the rest of the house, just between the control room and recording room. I have a very understanding wife...

Ethan, I actually already bought that book (and am in the process of reading/digesting it) on your advice from my post in a Cakewalk forum!

Anyway, its looking like I may be building a garage in the backyard with an upstairs for studio purposes (we got the house really cheap!!). If it turns out that we can afford to do this, does anyone know how I can get in touch with an architect in the Kansas City area who could design this project for me?

Thanks!

Also, what do you think it would cost to build this? I'm thinking in the $15,000 to $25,000 range - is that a reasonable estimate?

Well, you'll need to be somewhat concerned with the isolation of the tracking room to/from the rest of the house. Not so much to not bother the wife as to make sure that sounds from the house don't make their way into the tracks.

Bryan