I would like to ask if there is any ideas, suggestions, sollutions or photos of already made booths or the process of making them. I am planning to build my own small, SIMPLE but highly effective Uilleann Sound Booth, and I would like to get as close as possible to reduce volume up to min. 80 %. The reason of making Sound Booth is, that I was forced to move far away from house where I lived all my life, to a small apartment in a big town, becouse of job. My new apartment is located in the middle of big building, so I have neigbours all around. The place materials don’t have good sound isolation properties and neighbours are firm.
So now “Pipes Despair” is becoming even bigger - after already being isolated and having reed adjustment problems and not enough practice time, now I am also TOO LOUD
I was searching on Internet and I found a lot of already made effective Sound Booths, but the price is crazy, so I can’t afford it - I already spent all money on chanters, drones ect. I also found options and prices for different Sound isollation foams and other materials, but it is question what will realy work and + they are expensive again. The most promising what I found is USA company called AUDIOMUTE. Their materials are hi effective and less expensive absorption alternative to Pyramid studio foams ect. Does anyone have any experiences with them? I was thinking to make all wooden construction alone – in the shape of diamond (in the the corner of the room) and using room in the room/double wall sytem. But still I want that I can put computer into the booth to be able to have skype lessons + I want to incorporate one small window + simple but effective air system. BIG TASK.
Any stories how you solved this OR any plans/measurements/photos of building process???
Any other special ideas?
Buying flat chanter or practising outdoor, in music school, church, vehicle, rental place, basement ect. are not an option for me right now, until I found a good one.
Well, that’s only about the price of a half-set – not so bad, and wha-hey, it’s dismantle-able for when you move. !
But in the absence of $3500 USD … the smallest room in the apartment (ideally a closet if you can stand it) is a good place to start. Cover the walls and ceiling with several layers of foam padding, topped with the thickest egg-crate foam you can find (a heavy-duty staple gun is often sufficient for hanging it up). On curtain rods over this hang cheap but thick rugs or curtains, and put several layers of thick rugs on the floor as well. You can also put sheets of foam insulation on the floor with plywood over the top and then rugs atop that for extra coverage. Layers are your friends. Don’t forget to put at least one layer of insulation and fabric inside the door, too – and leave enough room for an electric cord so you can run a light and a small fan b/c it’ll probably get toasty in there with the door closed
Another thing I’ve seen done is a set of 2 or 4 plywood and foam “baffle panels” – wooden frames with plywood and foam and fabric attached on both sides that are movable. You can “wall off” a corner of your apartment with these, put heavy rugs on the floor, and place a foam camping mattress over the top, too. Not as effective as the closet, but definitely better than nothing, and the movability is a nice feature.
Finally the cheapest option … befriend a local pub owner and see if it’s OK to go play your pipes in the corner for an hour at an uncrowded time. For the cost of a beer or two a day you get mileage both on the pipes and playing in front of people, too.
You can buy “egg box overlay” for mattresses. It doesn’t cost too much (under $50). Get some 4x2 and some thin plywood or particle board in the hardware - it doesn’t need to be good quality if it’s going to be sheltered from the elements.
The secret to sound abatement is not soft wall padding, but very dense wall board material. A double layer, with or without a gap inbetween, of heavy duty sheetrock/gypsum wallboard is more than adequate for your purposes. Rig any sort of wood frame you care to come up with and clap two layers of sheetrock over it and you’re done with the basic problem of noise getting through the walls. Linining the hard interior walls is an exercise in preventing unpleasant internal reflections that has little to do with actually stopping sound from passing through the wall itself.
Hammer another layer of wallboard or two onto the closet, the whole room if you care to. Don’t forget the ceiling and floor. Wallboard is relatively cheap for what you’re describing. Don’t fixate on the cosmetics of how great your little room looks with fancy wall damping materials on it. A blanket will work about as well.
I recently undertook a construction project in converting my garage door into a double stud/firecode drywall/insulation thingy. Before I went to the local building materials supplier, I was reading everything over at GearSlutz:
The reality is regardless of dimensions, if you build yourself a four-walled room within a room (including a door of course) you’re going to reduce your STC rating by quite a lot.
I built my double wall to help deaden the amount of noise coming from a drummers acoustic kit, but it also help in reducing sound from our PA system when my bands rehearse here on occasion.
Remember, you can’t sound proof an apartment 100% without spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. However, you should be able to reduce the transmission of sound coming from your UPs by 60-80% if you use the right materials.
If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty, feel free to PM me with your questions.
How do you get air into one of these things and still keep the sound from bleeding out of your air vent? I’ve been wanting something like this for my highland pipes too!
You can build a box called a “soffit” which is a thing that fits over the external air vents (like in my case in the garage) where you can still have airflow coming in and out through the new vent cover, but it helps with the suppression (not elimination) of sound transmission. Google “soffit” and acoustics and you should see many articles come up with diagrams and explanations.
This is the only one I’d suggest. It’s mass you want to add, not foam. Make the walls, ceiling and floors as dense as you can. Pay attention to materials which travel through the barrier, like nails or screws. Building supply stores will often carry an aluminum (or similar thin metal) L or V shaped track, which you fasten horizontally across the first layer of board (drywall), and then attach a second layer of drywall to the track instead of the board or the studs below, with an airspace of about 1 cm or so between them. This isolates the layers, preventing some of the sound from transmitting through. Add another 1.5 cm layer of a fibre-board material that’s a bit more felt-like than typical construction fibre-board (I don’t know what to call it), or another layer of drywall and you’ll cut out more sound. The more mass the vibrations have to move through, the more sound will be absorbed.
Finally, pay attention to the frequencies. Low sounds are the hardest to kill, but find out what it is that’s bugging the neighbours most. You may not have to go to the full extent if what annoys them is the top of your pipes’ register.
Regarding the drywall, s1m0n is correct. If you do decide to build a wall with double drywall, make sure you use one sheet of 5/8" and one sheet of 1/4" together. Because they both have different masses they will absorb more sound. If you do leave a little bit of a gap between the two, that will help as well, but remember the sound still travels through the screws and through the 2X4 studs, so you can never absorb 100% noise/sound on a home project. You’d need to use Green Glue and some other products to achieve an extremely low STC rating and that will cost a ridiculous amount of money for what I think you’re attempting to achieve.
If this room is really for uilleann pipes practice, the good news is that your “bass” tones from either drones or regulators are going to get their transmission reduced a bit, but where you’ll really notice a difference is on your mid to high frequencies (i.e. the chanter). When I built this double wall in my garage it was able to reduce the sound transmission on an acoustic drum kit by 80%, especially on the higher frequencies caused by the cymbals and snare.
While it is in my basic nature to argue with two people already agreeing with me, just to perpetuate a great argument, I’d just like once again to emphasize that since this is really knocking the sparkle off a set of uilleann pipes, and not damping down a full drum kit, isolating a bass guitar driving an 18" subwoofer fed by a thousand watt amp, or stopping the screws from vibrating due to the stack of Marshalls piled against the back wall, the really fine points of some of these designs are essentially pointless. Gap, no gap, one layer, two layers, any amount of mass you add to a closet or any box you make out of preferably two layers of sheetrock is good enough. You can vent it with dryer hose and a fan kit in and out the nearest window. Sure, some leakage will occur, but you really aren’t dealing with a lot of sound to begin with either. If the point is staying cheap, lumber and wallboard is the working combination to remember. Exotic designs, or studio-type wall treatment is what will make it run into the hundreds and thousands in a hurry.
+ I want to incorporate one small window + simple but effective air system. BIG TASK. 
