How to Make a Music Practice Room

[adminSPF]

This thread is intended to become a discusion of different peoples experience of treating a room/space so that it can become an effective music space. In my mind there are two parts to a good practice room:-

1. Acoustic Isolation (good old soundproofing) so that you can practice/record/enjoy your music at the volume level that you choose, without driving your family/neighbour crazy.
and
2. Acoustic treatment so that things sound good when practice/record/enjoy your music.

Acoustic isolation is a pretty well understood task and the theory and techniques are simple for even the lay person to understand. Mass, airtightness and physical isolation are really the cornerstones of this task and to be honest with you the more heavy, airtight and isolated a room is the more soundproof the room will be. The difficult part of soundproofing is achievign these characteristics without spending a fortune and making the room completely impractical.

Acoustic treatment is much more of a black art or at least is involves mixing many ingedients in a skilled and thoughtful way to create something that isn't perfect but does hav ethe features that you value most. The main things that we will try to affect are, frequency response of the room, reverberration time of the space and reverberation 'qualities' of the space(more on this later).

Now it is over to you to ask questions and share your experiences both good bad and ugly.