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Once you’ve built your soundproof room–your “room within a room” (RWAR), or whatever solution you’ve decided for your needs, you might notice that the sound that’s staying in the room isn’t so great: you might have standing waves, reflections, etc. This is where sound or acoustic treatment comes in…enter the egg carton, foam-walled look! Yes, finally a use for those egg cartons (or their commercially manufactured studio-grade, much more expensive cousins). I can’t tell you the amount of people who thought that hanging egg cartons on the their walls would “sound proof” their drum rooms–put some egg cartons on the walls of your condo, and play at 4:00 a.m. and see how long it takes for the police to arrive. However, until building the RTD studio, I wasn’t too sure myself because this egg-carton sound “proofing” story is everywhere. It wasn’t until I consulted with soundproofing experts, and more experts, and then acoustics experts, that I realized that sound proofing and acoustic treatments were two separate but equally important stages to building a studio.
This space will be reserved for documenting the past and ongoing project to make the RocktheDrums studio, which is sound proofed (Yippie!), sound much better.
RTD studios is currently undergoing a facelift of sorts to install the final piece to the acoustic treatment puzzle, diffusers. However, before I even got to know the term, “diffusion,” or care what a “polycylindrical diffusor” is, let alone be in the market for some, I had one more immediate issue, standing waves, and big ones, too! The next post will detail my issue with standing waves, and the two phases of bass traps I went through: the homemade solution and the retail solution…
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Ok so I am starting to think the egg carton thing will just not cut it. I have a set of Mapex sitting in my living room and jamm often and well into the wee hours.
My neighbours are loosing their minds. I have put sound blankets up, 2″ styrofoam in the windows and a lass egg cartons on top of the styrofoam.
My budget is simple….I don’t have one lol well very little of one to say the least. I am not worried about it being a recording studio it’s just a leasure jamm space.
Any advice to assist in keeping my neighbours calm and undisturbed is what I’m after. I have spent more money on buying them bottles of wine to keep peace then I have in sound proofing :))
Looking for some answers……..
it’s a 10 x 15 space with two windows and two doors ….
Please help keep the Paint can band alive !!!!!!
Hey Virginia!
I’m sorry to hear that your neighbours don’t enjoy the sound of your Mapex kit as much as you do 😉 I bet they sound great!
Your gut feeling is unfortunately correct, and it’s a tough lesson to learn, but egg-cartons only change the sound dynamics of a room; they don’t “sound proof’! Blocking out the windows with foam and blankets is also a pretty instinctual response–I did this too once–but you’re really just blocking out more light waves than sound waves. My first piece of advice is this: get out of the living room if you can. Do you have a basement? A huge part of sound proofing involves mass, and the more massive something is, the more sound it absorbs. Basements are typically below ground on at least 3 sides (if you have a walkout) or 4 if not, and this gives your sound proofing a huge advantage because rather than surrounded by 4 walls made up of a dozen or so 2x4s and half dozen sheets of drywall, as in your living room, your basement is surrounded by tonnes and tonnes of concrete and thousands of tonnes of earth between you and your neighbour; this is a great first step, if possible. It’s nearly impossible to add enough mass to your living room to make it a nice place to play but keep it looking like a living room!
If moving rooms isn’t an option, so you’re stuck in the living room, and if your budget is minimal, then your options are limited to making the drums themselves quieter. You can use drum mute pads, which essentially turn each drum into a practice pad; this doesn’t sound great and won’t be satisfying to play on, but it’ll keep you practicing into the wee hours without much hassle. Check out this page for some tips ranging from getting mute pads to using bundle sticks, which I prefer to mute pads because the feel is better, and you still get a little sound from the kit–using the sticks option won’t affect the kick drum, though, so you’ll still need to mute it with a pad 🙁 The kick drum is by far the worst culprit because the lower the frequency, the harder it is to sound proof because the physical waves are so big; this is why people sound all muffled when you hear them talk in the next room with the door close–most well built walls and double-paned windows block out most of the higher end frequencies anyway without doing much in the way of specialized and expensive sound proofing. It’s always the low end you need to worry about as a drummer.
Also, get yourself a decibel metre (a sound metre)–you can get them for as low as $30 or the iPhone has a whole bunch of apps that work really well, too! Here’s an SPL metre App for free from the iTunes–I’ve never used it, so I can’t guarantee how accurate it is, but it’s free, so you might as well try it out 🙂 This is important because you need to know how loud in terms of decibels you and your kit are because your neighbourhood/community will have noise laws, and those laws are usually based on decibels, so you need to have the numbers on your side. By the way, it’s not always cut and dry because “disturbing the peace” is a pretty broad category and really subjective, but generally if people are complaining, and if the police are coming out, the police like to see that you have an understanding of the sound you’re making, and a metre helps with this. It’l also help you form a baseline, so when you do make sound proofing improvements, you actually measure how effective they are. To give you an idea of how it works, you have to measure (with your metre) the ambient sound level of the neighbourhood–go out on a Sunday at 2:00 a.m., stand in the middle of the street, and take a reading. Basically the time when your neighbourhood is most quiet is the ambient noise level, so “sound proof” is anything that gets you to that level, so you don’t need to be at zero; you just need to be on or near the ambient reading. Mine was 37, Sunday morning at 3:00 a.m. My kits played (at the time) at 126 dBs, so for me to say I was sound proofed (and I can) I need to trim 80-ish dBs off. That was expensive and a lot of work, and that’s not where you’re at right now. You just need to keep your neighbours from going crazy.
Last, and this is as unsatisfying to type as it will be to read, but it’s practically free, and saves a lot of heartaches: talk to your neighbours and see if you can get them to agree to certain drum times…why sound proof if you don’t have to? Most people generally tolerate more noise up until 9:00 p.m., and then everyone’s patience seems pretty stretched (at least this has always been my experience), and by 11:00 p.m. and after, you’re in a just asking to call the cops zone 🙁 Talk to your neighbours, and you might find that they all go bowling–or whatever non-drummers do with their time ;P–between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. twice a week, so basically you have carte blanche to go crazy on that Mapex kit. Remember, if a drummer plays in the forest, and no one’s around to complain, sound proofing doesn’t matter 😉 Basically, see if you and your neighbours can come up with a schedule.
That’s it for easy and cheap solutions for sound proofing–move locations, muffle the drums, change sticks, and/or make a schedule with your neighbours. I hope this helps. If you need anything else, or want me to expand on anything here, send me an email, and I’d be happy to get into some more specific details about your situation and what you can do to improve it.
Rock ‘n’ Mahalo!