acoustic blankets/soundproofing

HMNY

Silver Member
I am stuck on a train with a phone browser, so apologies if there already a topic about this.

I am looking into draping sound absorbing blankets, or even moving blankets around my basement drum room to try and absorb some of the sound. Does anyone have any experience with this, are the 'real' accoustic blankets really that much better? Thanks
 
A lot will depend on the conditions of the untreated space. The size, is the room square or rectangle, what are the walls, ceiling and floor composed of, is there carpeting in the room, is there furniture in the room, do you have enough room to get your kit away from the walls. Do you want get the room to sound cleaner to you as you play the kit or are you interested in keeping the sound within your room and not bothering others inside or outside your house?

If you're in an echo chamber (large room), breaking up the space with moving blankets will usually shorten standing waves for a vast improvement. If you are in a room with a lot of reverberation (smaller room with hard surfaces) moving blankets on the walls and carpet remnants on the floor will make your drums sound better to you. If the area above your head is open beams, use a nice heavy (R-19) fiberglass insulation to fill between the joists.

None of these treatments will really affect the sound or amount of sound that escapes from your room.

You probably won't hear much improvement between moving blankets and acoustical blankets. Sometimes acoustical blankets will absorb a little more sound in different areas of the frequency spectrum, but you have to know their ratings and know exactly what your rooms needs. Also the thicker the blankets, the better they will usually absorb the sound.

Dennis
 
I helped a friend once soundproof part of his house that he built into a pretty nice 24-track analog recording studio, and it was eye-opening. We tore out the sheet rock and fully insulated inside the walls with acoustical foam. The same thing was done to the ceiling. His practice was to completely eliminate any soundwaves from exiting the room, which meant you had to fill-in all the nooks and crannies of said room. Once the new walls were up, a thin acoustical material was used to cover the walls completely, and then we installed birch strips (4" wide) vertically and about an inch apart the whole length of all the walls. A 45-degree angle bass trap was installed from the walls to the ceiling. It was a huge expensive project. But in the end, you could have an entire band in there blasting away and you wouldn't hear anything outside of the house. It was awesome.

I tell this story because I don't think there's any way to go cheap when you want to soundproof your room. Until I can do this to my own house, I'll continue to be friendly with my neighbors and have an occasional barbecue with them ;)
 
Dennis, Bo,

Thanks for your replies.

The space is our old laundry room in the basement, now minus the washer & dryer, and has finished walls and a few pipes running across the ceiling (which I was aiming to use to hang the drapes) and some old furniture. So probably not the best starting point. I was thinking of putting one or two 'proper' blankets on the ceiling as the sound goes straight through to the kitchen above, and then maybe some cheaper moving blankets on the walls to hopefully absorb some of the other sound as Dennis suggests. As much as I'd love to go large with a soundproofing project, my re-acquaintance with drumming has already cost more than I had expected (not that that EVER happens!).

Thanks again with the feedback, and if any other readers have experiences of the same, please chime in.

HM
 
What you are talking about will only help control the reflected sound in the room and really won't do much to keeping the sound from leaving the room. You need mass and air to help control sound from leaving the room and blankets just won't do it. Only way to minimize sound getting out is unfortunately going to involve construction.
 
Thanks, I understand that a complete re-working of the room/space would be required to eliminate sound leak, but, in your (and others) experience, would having blankets in the room, ate least help reduce the volume of sound available to leak out of the room?

After more research yesterday, would the installation of panels of sound absorbent material on the walls & ceiling, not complete coverage, make a better alternative?

Thanks again
 
Thanks, I understand that a complete re-working of the room/space would be required to eliminate sound leak, but, in your (and others) experience, would having blankets in the room, ate least help reduce the volume of sound available to leak out of the room?

After more research yesterday, would the installation of panels of sound absorbent material on the walls & ceiling, not complete coverage, make a better alternative?

Thanks again

Refer to konaboy's above quote. Neither blankets nor acoustic foam will prevent sound from traveling out of the room ... at all. Not even a tiny little bit. The difference IN the room will be significant - less echo, more natural sound - but the people on the other side of the wall won't hear one whit of difference. Only adding mass - more layers of sheetrock, concrete, etc. - and isolation - air channels separating inner walls from outer walls - will really start to make a difference.
 
More good feedback, thanks.

I am now very conflicted! I understand that I will not get any significant sound reduction, just better damping of internal room sound, but if this internal sound is damped, will this not mean the volume leaking out would be less?

I am wondering if these sound blankets are "snake oil" and perhaps I should bite the bullet and try and fabricate some form of soundproof layer to attach to the ceiling in the room, i see that that there is a product called safe and Sound from Roxul that seems to have good sound proofing attributes, which may be more like the sound proofing a number of commenters here have mentioned.

Thanks once again
 
More good feedback, thanks.

I am now very conflicted! I understand that I will not get any significant sound reduction, just better damping of internal room sound, but if this internal sound is damped, will this not mean the volume leaking out would be less?

I am wondering if these sound blankets are "snake oil" and perhaps I should bite the bullet and try and fabricate some form of soundproof layer to attach to the ceiling in the room, i see that that there is a product called safe and Sound from Roxul that seems to have good sound proofing attributes, which may be more like the sound proofing a number of commenters here have mentioned.

Thanks once again

Oh, the dampening inside your room will have a very slight degree on the affect of the sound leaving the room, but it's only a very small percentage and I wouldn't count on being able to hear that difference though out the house or outside of the house's perimeter. If the room was not originally designed to be a quiet room, there's probably a healthy expense to make it into one. I'm not sure what my studio and control rooms cost me, since it was built over twenty years ago, but I know it was close to $25,000. It consists of a room within a room, within a room. and these rooms were built by me and my girlfriend when the lower level of our house was just open studding. The rooms are basically floating within the frame work of our house.

Dennis
 
Thanks to everyone who kindly replied to my questions. The whole process has been enlightening, I was aware that sound proofing and sound absorption were not one and the same, but it was certainly interesting to read your experiences and observations.

Thank you
 
Depends on your budget - extra thick insulation and double drywall are very helpful, as is adding dead air space between the inside and outside walls. But old mattresses or moving blankets are definitely a cheap way to go.

Cheap... and completely ineffective. We already covered this. All that blankets and mattresses do, besides removing a little of the "slap" from the inside-the-room sound, is make your rehearsal room look like an unmade bed. They DO NOT prevent sound from escaping. At all. Period. Honest.
 
Depends on your budget - extra thick insulation and double drywall are very helpful, as is adding dead air space between the inside and outside walls. But old mattresses or moving blankets are definitely a cheap way to go.

Mattresses and moving blankets are not effective. Please stop pedalling this nonsense.
 
Didn't realise I was still getting replies to this thread, sorry.

In the end, after gaining some useful information about sound from this forum, I bought some Audiomute Sound absorption blankets, they could be likened to thicker, heavier moving blankets, but they are of better, thicker, more consistent quality, and what they have done is to "deaden" the room, and as such have helped to reduce the volume bouncing around inside the room before it leaks out. It is not by any means a total solution, but it does help make the drums less noticeable around the rest of the house, and was the best bang for the buck in terms of what was available for this exercise.
 
I'd definitely say that blankets made especially for soundproofing are better. If you want to do it properly, you should definitely invest in one- my personal favorite brand is soundblanketcurtain. I've had a curtain from them for two years now, still works like a charm :)
 
Blankets will make a very minimal difference, but it will sound better to you where you are playing. Much less echo, noise, cleaner sounding.

When I put up sound baffles and treatment in my room it was night and day with the amps and jamming. Recording is much nicer too.

soundproofcow.com has a ton of information and so do the audio forms on doing this.

Our old spot had a ton of carpets hanging. we took them out and it sounded awful in there.

sound treatment, and sound proofing are two totally different things.
 
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