So I'm very excited to be finally moving the recording setup to our finished attic, which has been fully insulated with rockwool and already appears to be giving a pretty flat response (not to mention keeping the space amazingly cool despite the heat).
But I'm still a drummer and I still have roommates, so how best to minimize sound through the floor? We'll have heavy stage curtain on the two main walls(ceilings?), and I was thinking of putting the drums on a thick layer of this with a rug on top. There might even be a heavy door I can cut down and install at the bottom of the steps.
What else should I consider? Money is very much an object and my brother already spent a ton on the insulation. Specifically, what would be the best/cheapest material for underneath the carpeting? Rn the floor is just thick particle wood panels with that loose cellulose underneath.
Without too much trouble, we could venthilate the attic directly to the basement (old fireplace) if it would allow me to seal the windows instead of install AC. Could this work? My neighbors would probably appreciate it, but it gets really hot in the summer...
I don't think rubber plates are optimum.
IMHO the best way is a plate of heavy material (e.g. outdor concrete tiles on a plate of stiff but transportable material), mounted on as few as possible very flexible sockets (springs).
I'd say research as much as you can and then implement whatever is practical and economical for you.
I think the "tricks" are mass, mechanical isolation, and air-sealing. You've probably seen pictures of pro studios built as a "room within a room".
Or sometimes you see a wall with an extra set of studs alternated & spaced so the inner-sheetrock mounted to one set of studs and the outer-sheetrock to the other. And, maybe a double layer of sheetrock on both sides, or playwood, etc. The same idea could work for the floor. That is, isolate/decouple the floor from the ceiling to whatever extent is possible/practical.
I agree with idea of mass, the more mass on the floor the less transition of the sound. Also mass on the floor, if it's smooth, will give you less floor noise into the mics.
Micing drums sitting on a wood floor that's sitting on joists is a real pita. I ended up with shock mounts on all my mics and it helped a great deal, I couldn't believe the difference.
Rubber mats won't do much of anything. A few sheets of mass-loaded vinyl might, though. As a cheapish DIY solution, you could try:
1. Rug
2. MLV
3. Sheet of plywood or something for sturdiness, the denser the better
4. Cinder blocks (at the corners, maybe a fifth in the middle if you need it for support)
As I understand it - and I could be way off - you want as much mass coupled to your kit as possible, and then you want to keep all of *that* as decoupled as possible from the floor. That seems to be the idea when dealing vibration from speakers, at any rate.
any diy method to achieve something like a 'floating floor' i think is the only way to achieve any results worth noticing directly below you.
hard to fix.
obviously kill your kick as much as possible as its frequencies and volume level will be the vast majority of any problem.
layers seem best bet mass/isolation alternating etc. - e.g combo of rockwool slabs, rubber mat, thick plywood ontop or plasterboard .
air tight keeps the higher frequencies escaping. the lows don't give a f**k.
i'd try have a system in place irrespective of treatment to keep decibels low for the longest time and high for the least amount of time bearing in mind if you are likely to disturb others or they disturb you recording.
I recommend "Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros" by Rod Gervais -- he has a whole section on floor/ceiling isolation.
More mass = better, but be careful about loads: the spans and spacing of attic joists may not have been laid out anticipating such a big load up there; with all your refinishing + gear + people, it might be pushing things to add a bunch of isolating mass on the floor. There are calculators online to calculate safe pounds per square foot loads given the details.
There exist specific springy/rubbery products to create a floating floor; in general any kind of spring decoupling is most efficient when the spring is properly calibrated to the mass on top of it, so just adding any old rubber mat or whatever might be a waste of time/money.
In general, drywall (aka sheetrock) is the cheapest way to add mass and gain isolation, but it's obviously not suitable for a floor, long-term. I've often wondered about making a drywall sandwich in cases like this: plywood sub-floor, maybe two or three layers of 3/4" drywall laid down, caulked along seams and laid with subsequent layer's seams at 90 degrees, with caulked plywood on top. Seems like it would hold up fine, but maybe the plywood would flex enough to eventually turn the drywall to powder. :-)
I assume you don't want to mess with the floor from underneath (i.e. ceiling from downstairs); you could add drywall in between joists if you didn't want to lose headroom in the attic -- plenty more on this in Rod's book.
Agreed that bass frequencies will pass through regardless of caulking, but I would still caulk the hell out of every gap (butyl or otherwise flexible caulk, with backing rod) as there can still be a lot of sound coming through gaps besides the low-end rumble. If you add a ton of mass on the floor, the flanking paths through the walls will quickly become the weak link.
Edit: also potentially a consideration is a viscous damping layer, e.g. Green Glue, between layers on the floor. Not sure about the efficacy. Works pretty great in my wall.
There are stands for monitor boxes that use this paradigm (a cheap version is half Tennis balls), but of course you need a much more powerful version of that. if you search for "room in room" offers (of course optimum for the problem discussed but extremely expensive and unhandy), the stands of those are what you want.
The idea with springs (like box stands) is that the resonance frequency of the construction is below the sound to be killed. I'm not sure if that is easily possible with foam.
yea I have done a bunch of research, but I'm still pretty overwhelmed. The idea is to spend around a $100, not $100k. I'm thinking there's not much that can be done without spending a lot.
All my roommates work enough that I can simple record when they're not home. Was just hoping I could maybe cut the thunder in half if it was cheap to do. With the drums on the second floor it's somehow louder downstairs than in the room with the drums.
Like the floor is a acting as a big bass amplifier.
I guess the time to consider these things was before the subfloor went in...well o well.
If you're particularly concerned about kick going down through the floor - then this is mainly / somewhat (?) an impact noise thing? I suspect you'll get the most bang for your buck with something like 18mm chipboard over a layer of that rubber crumb sheet.
Like a tiny drum riser. It's also fairly easy to test. With and without.
P.S. You can get a commercial product - chipboard / foam chip sheet bonded together to overlay an existing floor - about 16kg per m² ( so rather more than MLV) costs around £20 per m² Effect on airborne noise is limited of course, but should significantly reduce impact. Try that. Again, you might get away with just sitting the kit on some.
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They are quickly and easily placed, don't take away a lot of room height (3 cm), can quickly be walked on after install and provide a firm and sound de-coupling base. The resulting floor surface has gaps at all borders, never touching the drywall room-in-a-room wall construction to prevent vibrations passing from the booths floor into the drywall. I've put laminate on top incl. another layer of footstep sound insulation. The acoustic and de-coupling results are very good.
A very good source of information on the topic is John Sayers' website with its studio design and construction forum: http://www.johnlsayers.com/
you're welcome, fox. Not sure if the exact same product is available where you are. I can find it in almost every hardware store nearby.
One thing that has driven me a bit mad: As I had followed the rule to angle all walls (meaning no rectangular corners, not even the ceiling is rectangular with regard to the walls in my drum room) that screed floor panels got smaller and smaller towards the and of their placement and the few last pieces were extremely small due to the unavoidable offcut getting larger and larger. The very large offcut of the small pieces, however, could not simply be reused at the other end of the room (in fact nowhere!), leading to the last few pieces being fairly expensive, looking at their size to cost ratio: A piece of only a few square decimeters costing the amount of an entire panel leaving the large offcut as unusable trash
I'd still highly recommend to build slightly angled walls to avoid parallel reflecting surfaces causing annoying standing waves! Room acoustics are far better that way.
Another interesting approach I learned from John Sayers when building a room in a room is to build the drywall skeleton inside-out, meaning that you plank the drywall at the "outside" (towards the original wall of the room but without touching it anywhere). This is a bit tricky but the benefit is that you have the same amount of sonic transmission dampening but with less space lost inside the future booth. Instead, you end up having the skeleton on the inside, offering the space and the linking points to easily apply/stash and fix dampening materials like rock wool in the space otherwise unreachable and "lost" outside the cabin. It's important to note that this approach requires some thorough reasoning to avoid a ton of potential pitfalls. I realized this approach "half way" in one of my rooms and it was quite a challenge. By "half way" I mean that only one wall of the four was built inside-out but the other three in the usual manner, resulting in a horrible effort when it came to connecting the "opposite constructions". My idea of doing it with only one wall was probably the worst one you could have
Well it's an attic with hardly any parallel walls and already lined with rockwool. The drums can hardly be heard in the attic from the floor below, so if I can properly decouple the riser from the floor, I should have some success.
We're about to do the drywall, so I might have some scraps for a mass layer... I'll have a look at the link. How good are your results? At least half as loud? And how heavy are they?
This might seem silly and naive but the layered floor could/need only be under the actual area taken up by the drums and drummer, not the whole attic floor?
Compromise might be the only solution - bit like putting your mic in a foam lined cardboard box rather than building an isolated room.
This might seem silly and naive but the layered floor could/need only be under the actual area taken up by the drums and drummer, not the whole attic floor?
That's the idea. I'm not worried about the mics, just the people living below.
I think mass would normally being the answer, except you're going to have the drums coupled to the floor. I think you'd want to have a platform+air gap with a minimal contact with the floor (ala speaker stand spikes) and THEN have as much mass as possible. I think just mass alone would require on the order of 2" or more of concrete.
Imagine hammering on a piece of sheetrock in a room versus hammering the sheet rock already part of the wall. Make a platform supported at 4 corners by bolts so it has minimal surface area contact with the floor. Wrap loosely with burlap, put insulation under it and call it a "bonus bass trap".
Suspending a platform from the roof rafters and putting your drums on that might actually be a workable and reasonable solution. :-) The suspension could attach to appropriate springs right at the platform.
I think mass would normally being the answer, except you're going to have the drums coupled to the floor. I think you'd want to have a platform+air gap with a minimal contact with the floor (ala speaker stand spikes)
Maybe i'm missing something, but I can't see how spikes would decouple anything. Same total force over less surface area = same coupling, probably more since the spike digs in as opposed to e.g. sitting on carpet?
That said, I can see how some of the flexion of the platform-on-spikes would absorb some sound that otherwise would have transmitted through, so maybe the spikes do gain something there... seems like it'd be better to put it on something springy at the four corners, rather than use spikes, though.
Given that the OP said the drums don't come up in to the attic when played below, implying that most of the sound is transmitted through the floor as opposed to the air, I think some kind of platform solution is the way to go for bang/buck ratio, as opposed to mass loading the entire attic floor (though it wouldn't hurt, as long as the floor can safely sustain the weight.)
Quote:
Least amount of coupling + most mass possible.
Agreed on that. Though if the platform is totally decoupled (i.e. suspended), the mass isn't needed.
Maybe i'm missing something, but I can't see how spikes would decouple anything. Same total force over less surface area = same coupling, probably more since the spike digs in as opposed to e.g. sitting on carpet?
+1. My understanding is that spikes actually increase coupling because you're making the connection much more solid (i.e. cleats on shoes).
Suspending a platform from the roof rafters and putting your drums on that might actually be a workable and reasonable solution. :-) The suspension could attach to appropriate springs right at the platform.
Concerns expressed above about excessive loads on an attic floor would also apply to anything you might hang from roof timbers. More so, in fact, since this would involve point loads applied to just a couple of rafters. You'd deffo want to run that past a structural engineer.
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Concerns expressed above about excessive loads on an attic floor would also apply to anything you might hang from roof timbers. More so, in fact, since this would involve point loads applied to just a couple of rafters. You'd deffo want to run that past a structural engineer.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm just talking about a one-person platform with drums on it... say a 200lb person with 100lb of drums and 100lbs of platform, that's 400lbs, which could be distributed over four rafters with strategic positioning of the hanging points, which seems pretty tame, but yeah, not a bad idea to check with an expert. And one could add cross pieces to the rafters and hang from those to distribute the load further.
And one could add cross pieces to the rafters and hang from those to distribute the load further.
"Purlins" we call those. In a trad timber roof they may already be there. This is the kind of stunt that's unlikely to impress your landlord / insurer. Stick to some kind of "isolated" "riser".
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+1. My understanding is that spikes actually increase coupling because you're making the connection much more solid (i.e. cleats on shoes).
If the platform is perfectly stiff. The platform is vibrating away from the floor, therefore it's losing energy. If it's pressed with a large surface area against the floor it won't be able to vibrate as much - because it's now vibrating the floor.
So for a mass layer of drywall, I guess it needs to be solid and not a pile of scrap?
Typically when making sound walls the drywall is put up and lots of effort is spent meticulously caulking or filling all the seams. If they're doing two layers, the second layer gets put up at 90 degrees (or just offset) to the first to minimize seam overlap.
So, AFAIK it would be much better to have it be solid, but even scraps assembled together would likely do something. They just wouldn't behave as a "leaf" and with all the seams I'm sure it wouldn't perform as well.
Then again, if we're talking about a floor, presumably there is something on top of the scraps locking them all together, and previous posts here suggest that air leakage isn't the concern so much as conduction through the floor, so maybe the seams are moot as well, in which case maybe the drywall scraps can serve usefully as bulk mass fill... I'm still curious as to whether this would last without gradually turning to powder, though. :-)
1) Carpet on a sheet of 5/8" ply, separated with an air gap+polyfil/loose insulation of 1" or more from
2) another sheet with through-bolts suspended on rubber bumpers on washers (ala skateboard bushings+washers so the weight is on the bushing), THEN
3)another sheet of 5/8" MDF suspended the same way with another air gap+loose insulation
4) bolts on bushings+washer on the floor.
1st platform is going to vibrate on the underside, crosses the air gap (loses energy), tries to vibrate the bushings (loses energy), second layer vibrates less, etc. etc.. Probably less than $100.
Minimize Sound Travel Through Floor?
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