Just when I think I’ve turned into a total pussy, I turn to home improvement projects or something that involves building, sweating, swearing and playing with compressed air-powered tools.
Last weekend, Loud Joe and I built a drum room in my basement. This idea had been rattling around in my head since I’d had the house built in late-2002. Certainly, there’d been a delay, like two years of employment at EDS, being distracted by shiny objects, putting the house up for sale, and the like. And of course, I was still getting mileage out of my spare bedroom studio.
Once the gang from Plumerai gave me a chance to contribute some audio engineering to the band, it was decided that playing in my spare bedroom was no longer an option. Nor did I really want to setup all of the gear in my family room or den. Since we’re using real drums, room dynamics are an issue, so I made every attempt to think of a solution with that in mind.
I went through various design phases and had to ask myself the critical question: soundproofing or acoustics. I decided to err on the side of acoustics, which meant that I didn’t want to totally kill the tonality of the room (which would’ve certainly happened had I made the thing totally airtight in design). So, over dinner last Friday (where we drew out floorplans on scratch paper with crayons), Loud Joe and I decided to go with a sheetrock/wood/rubber design. This trumped the plexiglass/wood riser design I’d been leaning towards. There were a whole bunch of reasons for why we chose the former over the latter, but those are irrelevant since we’ve got something built now.
We planned out the dimensions of the room, made approximate count of items we’d acquire from Home Depot, and hit the road first thing on Saturday morning. We rented a truck to haul this stuff along with a circular saw, sheetrock screwdriver, and compressor-powered nail gun (used for framing a structure). It took us about 5 hours to acquire all of the materials from Home Depot, to load and unload the materials, then to return the truck.
We started construction at about 4pm.
Our design involved building a drum riser on 2×6 topped off by floorboard. The riser was decoupled from the basement floor with thick, rubber floormats. Sizing the materials (by cutting them) took about an hour and a half. Nailing everything down was a snap. We had the riser built in about 3 hours. It was quite solid and I could stomp my feet on it without feeling any reverbration on the floor. This was a good sign as it was the lynchpin of our drum room design.
By 7pm, we were starting to frame the walls of the drum room. Two of the walls were the easiest as they were just walls; they were to have neither windows nor a door. We built the easy walls first and started to work around the 36″-wide steel door and dual-plexiglass window.
By about 11pm, we called it a night, with 3/4 of the frames having been built.
We started about 9am on Sunday, picked up any additional items from Home Depot and started on the frame for the wall on which the door to the drum room would reside. Then we started to apply the walls. We’d picked up several large pieces of soundboard and 5/8″ sheet rock. Soundboard, if you’re unfamiliar, is a very grainy type of (thick) board that’s used to trap sounds. We opted for it since it’s just as effective as (and far cheaper than) a rubber or insulation solution. We assembled the back wall first, because this one would be impossible to deal with since it was 8″ away from the concrete foundation of my basement.
By 8pm, we’d eaten some pizza (that was an hour late) and we were finishing the soundboard. We’d considered calling it a project, but after we realized how easy it was to cut and install the sheetrock, we decided to muscle through. Unfortunately, craftsmanship started to fail around 10:30pm and evidence of this can be seen inside of the drum room. Someday I will repair this with caulk and other goodies. But not right now.
Monday, we were left with installing the plexiglass (dual) window, which we completed. Then I installed a nasty-ass shag rug on the back wall and small oriental rug on the floor to cut down on bounce from the back wall of the drum room. Finally, we tested it all out: with my 400W bass amp, a snare drum, and a cymbal. Basically, the human voice is almost competely deadened when you’re trying to listen someone speaking from inside of the room. Cymbals and higher frequencies are similarly squashed and mid-rangey things are greatly reduced. In the end, you can hear drums outside of the room like you’d hear a loud stereo, but largely without the nasty frequencies that would cause you to leave the room (or to call the cops if you’re one of my neighbors). I’d say that we cut something like 20-30db of noise, which was a coup and exactly what we were looking for.
The room is ready for the session with Plumerai this Saturday. I still have a number of things I want to do with the room, like adding bass traps and making a permanent roof, but it’s definitely quite functional at this time. I will add those things as time goes on.
As for the session this Saturday, we’re recording a song called “Sterile” for our record label, Get Nice Records who’s putting together a compilation album. In true entertainment business form, the single is due (to the label) next week. Martin and James are coming down tomorrow night with Loud Joe who will be co-engineering “Sterile”. Kerry is coming down later Saturday to track the vocals. I’ll probably arrange to do overdubs next week, but those can be done either here or at Martin and Kerry’s place.
Stay tuned!
July 11, 2005 at 9:44 pm
The 5/8″ sheet rock is sold in packs of two which makes it inconveniently heavy. I’d like to add that no fingers or toes were lost in the making of this drum room and no permenant injuries were incurred by either builder. Aside from the adventure of the lost pizza delivery dude, the details of which I will leave for Nate to reveal, everything went swimmingly.
Sounds like a successful building project to me.