Love to rock it out in your garage, but getting tired of the neighbors (or your family!) calling the police every time the sound levels get cranked up? Soundproofing your garage may seem like an insurmountable task, but with the right tools and partners to help you get organized you can figure it out. Read on to learn all you need to know to keep the peace in your neighborhood while also maintaining the best sound quality possible outside of a professional recording studio.
1. How Does Sound Travel?
You may not realize it, but sound travels differently through different types of materials. For instance, have you ever noticed how it sounds funny when you try to speak under water? Or that you can only hear muffled noises through certain types of walls (like concrete) where you might hear really well through a glass door or window? These properties of sound make a difference when you are considering soundproofing a building such as a garage.
Sound waves move through solids, liquids and gases by vibrating the molecules in the matter‑and the different densities of the mediums mean that sound waves travel through them differently. Sound travels much more effectively through solids than through a gas, meaning air (a gas) can be an incredibly effective insulating tool. Sound travels much faster and farther in the water than in air‑allowing marine animals such as whales to communicate over vast distances in the ocean. Sound travels nearly fifteen times faster through materials such as wood as they do through gases such as oxygen, or air. The temperature of the air also makes a difference‑sound travels faster on hotter days when molecules are more active in the air than they are on colder days.
Why the science lesson? Well, this information is important as you start to consider what types of materials make the best soundproofing tools. Loosely‑packed materials such as insulation or even cotton batting make much more effective sound barriers than a glass wall or door, wood or even metal doors. This may seem counterintuitive, but open spaces are the best soundproofing materials. Having a solid understanding of what will keep sound from traveling can help you quickly spot places in your garage where sound can be escaping and help you shore up your defenses.
2. Why Soundproof?
Other than the obvious reason of keeping your neighbors happy and keeping the police away from serving you with noise ordinance citations, why would you want to soundproof your garage? There are several reasons, but what may be most important to you is that soundproofing your garage will give you a much higher quality of sound than leaving it with bare concrete walls with drywall, glass and maybe even tin on the roof. These highly‑compacted and dense materials will cause the sound to bounce and be overly bright, something that can really be jarring to musicians who are serious about their craft.
Soundproofing materials are meant to trap the sound, keeping the highs from becoming too bright and the lows from completely disappearing. Acoustic foam panels will not stop sound from getting out of a room, but they can improve the character of the sound. Similarly, egg crates and sheets of fiberglass as well as mattresses leaned up against the wall will not help greatly with decreasing the sound. You may have heard about hanging sheets from the ceiling to add a layer of sound‑dampening, but this tactic is unsuccessful as well.
The real reasons to soundproof are to stay within your town or community’s sound ordinances, keep the peace with your parents or landlord, and to allow for a distraction‑free rehearsal experience either by yourself or with your band members. Privacy for your musical experiments is also a great reason to soundproof, plus you will have fewer distractions to your creative flow.
3. Getting Started
Experts agree that the best way to soundproof a home studio or garage area is to create a room within a room, essentially an airtight sound‑absorbing room with plenty of insulation and air surrounding it. Sound isolation methods work best for walls; materials such as layers of drywall with plenty of room for an air gap between layers are ideal. To be truly effective, you will want to employ both soundproofing as well as sound absorption with the sound absorption adding layers to the sound to create a multi‑textured sound for your band. High grade studio foam can be installed, if your budget and time‑frame permits, in order to create a sound close to studio‑quality. This type of foam will also help cut down on echo and reverb, and help absorb any extra sound energy.
One of the most important things to keep in mind when soundproofing your garage is that you also need to focus on the floors and ceilings, not just on the walls. A dropped ceiling packed with sound proofing materials is ideal, providing an extra barrier for sound while keeping everything absorbent. You may be able to find a fiberglass core with a vinyl backing for your ceiling tiles, which would be best.
If your floors are concrete, one solid option would be to find acoustical quality carpet underlay, thick foam meant to not only support the feet but also to dampen sound. This creates a separating layer between the high‑bounce concrete and the new flooring that you will lay down, assuring the highest quality sound.
Add new comment