Soundproofing your drum room

pfastfoot

Junior Member
I'm curious how those of you who practice on acoustic kits without any dampeners or Remo Silent strokes, etc. are able practice without bothering your neighbors.

I currently live in a townhouse so I have to practice on an electronic kit, but I'm looking to move into a single family home in the next year or so and ideally I'd like to be able to practice on an acoustic kit without any noise reduction stuff.

Has anyone gone down the road of soundproofing their drum room? If so, how difficult (and expensive) was it?
 
I've never soundproofed a room or had any complaints from my neighbors, but I've always introduced myself and told them I'm a drummer, etc. I've always also held to a reasonable time of day as well and generally don't play much passed 7:00 pm.

I doubt I would practice much beyond that even with soundproofing anyway, because my own household wants some quiet time. If I could soundproof to the point of not being heard much inside or out, then I'd just go nuts anytime. I just haven't seen or found any soundproofing material that's that good. The only thing I've seen work real well was a friend of mine drilled large holes in the top sections of his drywall and pumped in sand to the top and covered with another layer of drywall. He also used two insulated doors to isolate the sound from inside the house as well. Don't recall what he did for the ceiling, but no sound escaped that room. Cost a fortune to do too.
 
I thought about doing this a while back and found a lot of information on this forum as well as the web. Be warned, there's more to it than throwing up some blankets on the walls. It's not cheep. A lot of science. It will make your eyes bleed.

I think you are doing the best you can do by moving from an attached home to single family, creating some separation.
 
I did. I spent $200 for 2" thick acoustic foam and made four 4'x4' panels and attached them to three walls in a spare bedroom. Added track lighting to gain floor space, then moved in a full PA and my drums. It's not soundproof and wasn't meant to be, but according to the wife, the painful factor has been stopped inside the house and sound emanating through the walls to the outside is much less than it used to be. So I'm happy with the investment and time spent. Plus the purple and black looks cool.
 

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Matt:

Re the relatively quick fix and low price of $200, what acoustic foam brand/spec?

I might give that a shot inside the spare bedroom, only because just a little soundproofing is what's needed for my current practice set up.
 
I did. I spent $200 for 2" thick acoustic foam and made four 4'x4' panels and attached them to three walls in a spare bedroom. Added track lighting to gain floor space, then moved in a full PA and my drums. It's not soundproof and wasn't meant to be, but according to the wife, the painful factor has been stopped inside the house and sound emanating through the walls to the outside is much less than it used to be. So I'm happy with the investment and time spent. Plus the purple and black looks cool.

Yep I think it looks great and very professional. I would buy that stuff myself if I owned a house so that I could practise on my acoustic kit, but since I own an apartment and my ceilings are quite thin, my neighbours above would still complain, lol.
 
Do a search on the subject and you will find many threads on this subject. go to Search, type Soundproofing and they will pop up
 
For effective sound isolation you need 3 things: mass, air-tight construction, and mechanical isolation (room-in-a-room). You should go over to Gearslutz.com and cruise through the Studio Building forum. Lots of pros over there that you can ask questions to. Rod Gervais is a well known studio builder who is a regular poster over there. His book, Build It Like The Pros, is very informative as well. You can find it online.
 
I soundproofed a part of my basement.

I tried to do it well, but it's not totally soundproof. It's surprisingly quiet compared to what it would sound like if I didn't treat the walls and ceilings, pipes and windows.

I live in a two family in a very dense neighborhood, and I sometimes play really f-ing loud, but nobody has complained — yet.

A quick search will give the best advice.
There's a lot of threads on it but going into it here would just be more redundancy.
 
Matt:

Re the relatively quick fix and low price of $200, what acoustic foam brand/spec?

I might give that a shot inside the spare bedroom, only because just a little soundproofing is what's needed for my current practice set up.

I found the stuff on eBay. It was 96 12x12 tiles that are 2" thick. You can get thicker, and they even make 1" thick too. I forget who I bought from but there are several vendors selling the stuff. They sent along a can of spray adhesive, but my wife had Scotch 77 which is the best.
 
To make a soundproof room would be very, very expensive and probably not possible in a domestic dwelling. Acoustic foam does little to reduce sound leakage, its main benefit is reducing room overtones and resonance, a bit like hanging heavy curtains on the walls.

There are companies who produce DIY room within a room kits, but expect to pay thousands. As Ghostnote said above, sound insulation needs "Mass, air tightness and mechanical isolation" to be effective.
 
Most people get this wrong..

To "SOUNDPROOF" a room, as in lower the decibels else where in the house or outside, you need to build a suspended room with in a room that has an air barrier. No matter what your told, unless you have 20k or more kicking around to do it and a lot of time and effort it's not worth it.

Take that cash, buy your acoustics and keep your EKIT. Play the acoustic kit during the day in your single family home as it's not loud enough outside to make people mad. Switch to the EKIT after 10 PM when neighbors are sleeping.

What 99% of people do is sound "Treatment" Roxul insulation pannels, hanging blankets, Bass traps, and Baffles. This makes the reflections of sound in the room much lower and the sound is WAY better. I made a ton of Roxul panels out of wood, insulation and speaker fabric. It was night and day for recording and jamming. What it didn't do was lower the volume upstairs in my house.

It is slightly audible in my front yard when I am jamming but not bad.

Some advice when you move in is to talk to both neighbors, explain you drum, tell them you'll never play after 10pm or so and that if it bothers them to let you know and you'll work something out or find a time they are not home.

Check out homerecording.com and there are some huge experts there. I just checked a few forums and they say $25k to $30k for an existing room.

http://www.soundproofcow.com/ is a good site with a ton of information on what you would need to do to get started.
 
20K is a little excessive. My project has stalled due to not having tge money right now to finish it, but when all is said and done, I will have been able to build a 13'×16' room in my garage that should reduce sound transmition by about 65dB or so for around 4 grand.
 
20K is a little excessive. My project has stalled due to not having tge money right now to finish it, but when all is said and done, I will have been able to build a 13'×16' room in my garage that should reduce sound transmition by about 65dB or so for around 4 grand.


I don't think 20k for a single room isn't unreasonable... IF your doing it to spec to REALLY soundproof it. to drop a few db is another thing.... This is more for studios I would imagine though.

I just see too many guys grab a bunch of Auralux foam and hang some sheets and wonder why it's still loud.

Also, if your handy, 30k becomes 15 and 20k becomes 10 if you can do everything yourself, find your own supplies and parts etc. I think those upper ends are to have it professionally done. I'm just going off what I see on all of the respectable recording and gear sites and from a TON of people with crazy build photo logs.

I just see tons of people think they can have a air tight 100% silent room to jam in for a few grand. It's not going to happen.
 
Yah, no, my goal wasnt to have a 100% soundproof room (in theory, there is no such thing anyway) I just wanted to make my drums about as loud as nornal conversation outside the room. At that volume, my drums would be heard inside the garage, but not outside or on the other side of a wall or door. And yes, 4 geand means Im doing everything myself.

I don't think 20k for a single room isn't unreasonable... IF your doing it to spec to REALLY soundproof it. to drop a few db is another thing.... This is more for studios I would imagine though.

I just see too many guys grab a bunch of Auralux foam and hang some sheets and wonder why it's still loud.

Also, if your handy, 30k becomes 15 and 20k becomes 10 if you can do everything yourself, find your own supplies and parts etc. I think those upper ends are to have it professionally done. I'm just going off what I see on all of the respectable recording and gear sites and from a TON of people with crazy build photo logs.

I just see tons of people think they can have a air tight 100% silent room to jam in for a few grand. It's not going to happen.
 
I found the stuff on eBay. It was 96 12x12 tiles that are 2" thick. You can get thicker, and they even make 1" thick too. I forget who I bought from but there are several vendors selling the stuff. They sent along a can of spray adhesive, but my wife had Scotch 77 which is the best.

Thanks for those tips. I see a few eBay vendors selling that spec tile.

For adhering the tiles to the wall, is the Scotch 77 tape double sided, how did you utilize that, and will there be wall damage on removal? I definitely won't use spray for adhesive.

Any tips on securing the tiles with the tape?
 
Something to be mindful of is if you hire someone to do your soundproofing, make sure they've done it before and preferably, are in the business of soundproofing.

The average carpenter will ruin the install. If you have a z-clip or hat channel and iso clip build, it's likely the typical carpenter will short out the design by using the wrong screw.

I built a house where the owner asked about Green Glue for sound abatement between the apartments and wanted to know if anyone used it before. I explained all about the stuff and that I used it and it works.
He bought 12 buckets of the stuff at almost $200 US each.
When the drywall installers came in, they were "taught" how to use the stuff, but when we all came back, the walls were up and there were 11 buckets left!

They claimed "stupidity". They said they couldn't find it, so they just installed all the extra drywall without it.

Their fingers probably got a little sticky and they abandoned it.

The homeowner was very nice, he gave me three buckets of the leftover stuff.
 
Because I now own a house and a yard, I paid workers to dig an 11mx5m, 2.5m deep hole in my back yard, in the corner where two of the retaining walls meet. They will next create a concrete shell, put a concrete roof on it, and I will build a sheetrock room-in-a-room. Then I'm going to go crazy on my kit whenever I feel like it :)

Getting to this point took forever, and if I didn't have the space, I'd probably do something like this guy. He soundproofed his tiny garage by himself and filmed pretty much every step:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFG-W9nvSrQ

But yeah, the 'secret' of soundproofing is mass and separation. I think if you're one of those fabulously rich professional musicians you can do it in a condo, but for most of us that's going to mean a basement or a separate building.
 
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