Home Studio Soundproofing

I’m a musician looking to set up my own recording studio at home. I’m looking cheap and small. I make hip hop songs and need to be able to make some beats, have good sound quality and be able to add effects. I’m looking to sound pretty professional for under $150 dollars. Please give websites and as much information as you can.

Its hard to find even a decent microphone for under 150(but not impossible) let alone a whole studio. You need moniter speaks expensive programs a decent soundcard about 2 gigs of ram. And if ur serious about sound quality you have to build a booth get foam and stuff to reduce interference get a good mic a mic stand shock mount boom arm pop filter, then u need a key bored probably a sampling kit… you just need a lot of stuff… in other words u can’t build a studio with 150 bucks… you cud prob get a pretty good to decent mic and a wack program for just 150 but that’s about it.

Patrick that’s not a studio by any means… that’s just a mic and he will have a shit sound quality don’t fill his head with nonsense

I’m a musician looking to set up my own recording studio at home. I’m looking cheap and small. I make hip hop songs and need to be able to make some beats, have good sound quality and be able to add effects. I’m looking to sound pretty professional for under $150 dollars. Please give websites and as much information as you can.

Its hard to find even a decent microphone for under 150(but not impossible) let alone a whole studio. You need moniter speaks expensive programs a decent soundcard about 2 gigs of ram. And if ur serious about sound quality you have to build a booth get foam and stuff to reduce interference get a good mic a mic stand shock mount boom arm pop filter, then u need a key bored probably a sampling kit… you just need a lot of stuff… in other words u can’t build a studio with 150 bucks… you cud prob get a pretty good to decent mic and a wack program for just 150 but that’s about it.

Patrick that’s not a studio by any means… that’s just a mic and he will have a shit sound quality don’t fill his head with nonsense

So i’m going to be renting a home, so I can’t do anything to the house itself, but I need to put a studio in the basement, it’s my career and how i’ll be paying rent, so it’s necessary that it’s there. I need to split the basement in half, two separate rooms. The Control Room, and the Live Room. I only need to sound proof the live room. But it’s not just as simple as dividing the room in half, I can’t do construction on the house itself, so it needs to be like a box in the basement, with it’s own walls and it’s own ceiling separate from the house. It needs to be soundproof, the one door to the Live Room needs to be a double door, for sound proofing purposes, and a double glass window in the center so the control room can see into the live room. There needs to be electrical outlets in there to plug amps and such into. And there needs to be an XLR wall plate so that I can plug, say 8 microphones into the input, and on the other side of the wall (The Control Room), have 8 outputs that I can run through my outboard gear. Thats all I need. I’m just curious as to how much this will cost, I don’t need anything exact, just give me some figures, and i’ll go off of that.

Measuring tape will go a long way to helping you figure out the amount of material you will need PLUS the cost of the material(where-ever you can get the best deal) for you may be able to score the lumber for free from a demolition site.
Then you are going to have to build a free-standing room in the basement. Use screws to assemble it, so you can modify or disassemble it later. So you need carpentry skills.

So the easiest part is sitting down with paper and pencil and a ruler and draw out everything to scale so you can figure out what you need just to build the structure. Erasing and redrawing is always easier and faster than cutting a mistake.

I have some noisy neighbors and would like to know if I can use draperies as a sound barrier? I know they will not block all the sound, but this is the deal: my bedroom is technically a solarium, so the only thing between me and the rest of my apartment is a glass door. The noise from the upstairs neighbors seems to travel from the rest of my apartment through the glass door. It is mainly stomping that I hear, so bass sounds. I have read that draperies can help, but wanted a second opinion.

Yes In your situation heavy thermal type drapes would defiantly help.
Also you can get fabric covered, material stuffed, folding screens to set just in front of the Drapes.
Hope you get relief.
Blessings.

Hi, my name is Bobby im 16 yrs old from NC. And im starting a home studio, im using my closet as a booth, but i need some type of fabric or whatever to put on my closet walls to make it soundproof… any advice?

Biker doc is correct. a separate wall is one of many ways to help deaden the sound. In a closet, this might not be an option though. Foam rubber will work to help deaden the sound a little but the deep bass sounds are nearly impossible to stop completely. There is a dense fiber board that I have installed in school cafeterias to help the noise there but as far as it sound proofing, with out doing what biker doc suggest almost impossible. good luck.

Now I know if differs from home to home but I’d like to know how likely this is…
I’m 18 years old, and two of my friends and I, 19 and 21 are looking to move in together. We’re looking to rent a home with at least 2 bedrooms and split the rent 3 ways. The home needs a basement, because i’m an audio engineer and I would really like to turn the basement into a recording studio. I would soundproof the live room (i’d have to kind of split the room in half, control room/live room, make it two rooms), so noise shouldn’t be a problem. I know we’re pretty young but we don’t throw parties or have asshole friends. The studio is my career and the clients is a major part of my income so its VERY necessary that I have it. Whats the likelihood of finding a landlord that would be okay with that? If this won’t work, what would you suggest that I do?
Well no shit, obviously. I’m asking the the likelihood of finding somebody who will allow it.

I’m thinking most owners would be very leery of having something like this built into their property. But if you make no modifications to the building itself you should be OK. Don’t do anything to any walls or floors. Basically, built your sound studio (if there’s room, of course) as if it were just a big box sitting inside the basement. It’s own walls, ceiling, floor, and ventilation just sitting there no attached to the house in any way. Power it with adequate extension cords so you don’t have to modify the wiring. This would also help the soundproofing as there would be less conduction into the structure. Then you can just disassemble it and move it if you need to. In this situation I don’t think I’d even ask the landlord.

I’m thinking of buying construction blankets to use as a simple soundproofing tool since i have a home studio. My cousin uses it for his home studio and it works fine plus its cheap. I was wondering where i could purchase a couple, im thinking Home Depot or Menards? He got it from this guy he used to work with, a "handyman".

first of all you do not wanna sound proof. In fact….any sound that escapes is great. As for the sound that doesn’t escape, you need to tame it through deflection, diffusion and absorbtion, to minimize reverb times, standing waves, room modes, and frequency attenuation and accentuation from the listening position. Egg cartons do not work as they only absorb freq’s 1600 and above which actually colors the room worse by putting curves in the equalization of the room. That is some hussle and flow isht. I would say it only works in movies but it didn’t even really work in the movie.

Blankets may help with reverb times but really you should buy porpose built treatment. Right now they got deals on auralex at musicians friend and guitar center. You will acheive a much more pleasant sound.

In order to not destroy your room you should type your room dimensions into a generator at auralex website or GIK’s website. Reading ethan winer’s excerpt on acoustics would not be a bad idea. Nor would reading the wikipedia page on axial,tengenial, and oblique room modes, wave summation, standing wave ratios, comb filtering, and phase cancelation.

If you just do hip hop vocals you may get away with only treating freq’s above 300 hertz which would save you alot of money considering the bass freq’s are the hardest to tame and define acoustically.

I would like to start home recording for two reasons; 1: for a demo album and 2: for my youtube channel. I have logic studio 9, a ‘G-Track - USB Condenser Mic with Audio Interface’ (with a boom stand, pop filter and shock-mount), another decent quality mic (forget the name, but it’s not a condenser), a ‘XENYX 1202FX’ small format mixing board, a Yamaha keyboard, an acoustic guitar with a good pick-up and a Acoustasonic amp. I also have a large closet which I will soundproof. How can I utilize all of my equipment to have a good set up? I have very little knowledge on this subject, and picked up this stuff on a whim. Should I record all at once, or each track separately? Where should everything plug in? Do I need to leave out some equipment or should I pick up more? I would rather not buy more equipment but i will if necessary
Also, say I record video as I record the audio all on one track, then i work on the audio using logic studio. How should I put the audio and video together again?

Nice to know u. Ur questions is a little complex. Only I can tell u that is u can use this streaming media recorder which will be helpful to ur current conditions. U can record what u want track by track or home record at any time.

Hope u will be ok.

streaming media recorder website: http://www.streamingmediarecorder.com/

I am now sharing a rather thin wall with two young children, I would like to minimize the sound transfer between the two rooms to keep my private activities private, and their early morning noise away from me. This does not have to be home studio quality but enough to make a difference.

Without adding a large amount of mass you can’t really do anything effective. For that I’m sorry, but it is the truth.

Hanging a thick blanket an inch from the wall will reduce sound by about 5 decibels in the higher sound range. It is the difference between hearing every word clearly and only hearing most of the words clearly. But you will still hear a person roll on their bed the same as before.

Egg crates and acoustical foam are meant to alter sound inside the room, but don’t stop sound from moving out of the room. They aren’t a help.

Really the only effective way to do this is to add large amounts of mass. Most serious soundproofing doit yourself is done by adding drywall. For a wall 8′x12′ it costs about 50 to 80 dollars in materials to add 1 inch of drywall and finish the wall off. That provides about 15ish decibels average protection or about the same as wearing ear protection used at a construction site. Not a lot but is a noticeable sound reduction. And it really isn’t that expensive, just time consuming.

The professionals add vicious damping chemicals to their wall structure. This is a chemical paste that resist wall movement by turning movement energy into heat energy As a result sound dissipates much more quickly. Retail product names for this are "Decibel Drop", "Green Glue", and "Quiet Glue". Using them generally costs between 1 and 3 dollars a square foot.

Also before you start out you might want to consider your forced air vents. They may make any attempt at soundproofing a joke. There is no good answer to what to do about them.

I just bought a TDK Active Noise Cancelling headphone which has a 12db@300hz noise reduction rate, but what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that it will cancel 12db of sound in a sound environment of 300db or what?

It means that for sounds at a frequency of 300 Hz, the noise cancellation reduces the sound intensity by 12 dB (decibels).

Hz (Hertz) is a measure of frequency (pitch). The effectiveness of the noise cancellation can be different at different pitches, so they have to specify the frequency(ies) at which they measured it. 300 Hz is a fairly low pitch — it is at the lower limit of the range of pitches that a telephone will transmit. Noise cancellation works best at lower frequencies like this.

A noise reduction rating of 12 dB is in the range for a typical pair of noise cancellation headphones. By comparison, a good pair of ear plugs can have a reported noise reduction rating of 30 dB or more.