When I moved into my current house a little over a year ago, I turned one of the spare bedrooms into an office / studio for working on sound, machinima, etc. Most of the time, interior walls in a single-family home do not get insulated, they're just two sheets of drywall separated by studs made of either steel or wood depending on what climate you live in. Regardless, those standard walls do little to dampen noise from adjoining rooms. Below, I'm going to detail what I did to turn this potentially noise-overrun room into my little machinima fortress of solitude.

First, I took down the drywall in this room, and filled the wall cavities with unfaced R-11 fiberglass insulation batts. Blowing insulation into the walls was an option, but one that would have been problematic. Any wiring in the walls would have disrupted the insulation from falling into place, creating air pockets that would be deadly for sound reduction. So I chose to tear out the existing drywall and be able to see what I was doing.

Fiberglass batts are not generally expensive (in the U.S., anyway), and they are fairly easy to self-install. Then, when putting the drywall back up, you've basically got two options (for optimum sound control). You can either install a single layer of drywall using something called resilient channel, which is basically like a shock absorber between the wall studs and the gypsum board. This is an extremely effective way to deaden sound because it decouples the drywall from the studs, preventing vibration from traveling that path. Or, a relatively new product is something called Green Glue, and basically you install two layers of drywall with this green glue in between, and achieve the same effect (if not slightly better). I went with the Green Glue, and I hired a contractor to do this part; drywall is messy business, and is something I had less experience in and wanted it done right. But a determined person could do that part themselves too.

So that takes care of the walls. Next, the floor and ceiling needed attention. The ceiling was easy; I just made sure the attic had ample blown insulation (R-38) in a nice even blanket across the whole attic. A pro studio would probably have done some resilient channel on the ceiling as well, but I thought it was overkill for my home studio. The floor wasn't too bad either, and only needed attention because this room is on a second story. I opted to put down a special acoustic underlayment which goes under the carpet. This was the most expensive material I had to buy for this project, it cost about $200 for a roll big enough to cover the room. We rolled that out directly onto the bare floor (after tearing up the carpet), then added standard carpet pad, and then new carpet.

The final step was to replace the door of the room with a solid wood door, attaching a rubber seal to the bottom.

It's not a sound proof room, but the changes we made greatly reduce the amount of sound that can get into the room. It created a new problem that I did not foresee: there's no cold air A/C return in this room. What that means is that when the room is sealed, the air coming into the room via the A/C vent has nowhere to easily go. As a result, not much air comes in. (A/C air is going to flow through the ducts into areas where pressure is lowest; this room is now higher pressure). So some time this fall, we're going to get a cold air return added to this room, it should make it a bit more hospitable for those long sessions.

And the next phase of the project is conversion of the room's closet into a sound booth. That project, which is probably a much more reasonable one for Joe / Jane User to take on, I plan to document thoroughly with video. Hopefully I'll get that done in the next few months. Stay tuned.