Is it possible to isolate rooms in a normal house?

[DC-Choppah]

My studio house is doing well and I love it.

The control room has been professionally treated by a acoustician and it sounds wonderful.

I have a main large room, and then I use three separate rooms which each have their own sound. Some rooms are more lively than others. So we have nice options.

But when I record in multiple rooms at the same time, there is bleed. Not always a problem, but sometimes I have to just multitrack things one by one to get what I want.

I like to use upward compression on acoustic instruments and the bleed is unacceptable between say a trumpet in a side room and the grand piano in the main room. I have to track these separately today. We use RX to de-bleed and this works well but not always. If I had 20 dB more isolation, then RX would be able to do trumpet/piano isolation.

This house is regular construction, framing lumber and drywall sheet (sheetrock).

My question is: Can I engage a professional to modify the walls and doors of the three side rooms to make them isolated from the main room and each other? Is it possible? I would like to be able to record in all 4 rooms simultaneously with 20 dB less bleed.

I was also wondering if I will only have to treat the inner walls - not the walls that face outside? I only care about bleed back into the other rooms. I have no neighbors to worry about.

Before I engage someone, can you guys tell me if this is actually possible?

Thank you in advance for your lively replies. Always fun to be here.

[Wonks]

To do it well you'll need room-in-room construction. Which is certainly possible but it does make the useable room area a lot smaller, plus introduce issues like ventilation, which will be severely reduced from that in your existing rooms.

But have you looked at where the sound leakage is coming from in the existing spaces? Gaps around/under doors can let a lot of sound through. If you try temporarily filling any gaps and comparing before/after noise levels using the same sound source, you should be able to tell whether better-fitting doors with seals around might be the most cost-effective option.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I agree with Wonks — most of the leakage is probably through and around the doors. It might worth some experiments temporarily sealing gaps under and around the doors and suspending a heavy duvet over the door frame to see if that reduces sound leakage.

If it does, then heavy fire doors with proper seals on all four sides, and compression lock handles may well be sufficient.

[Drew Stephenson]

This house is regular construction, framing lumber and drywall sheet (sheetrock).

In the UK we tend to have a lot more brick-and-mortar internal walls. You might find adding some mass to your walls helps a bit as well. Green Glue and acoustic plasterboard on each side.
But look to the doors first.

[James Perrett]

This house is regular construction, framing lumber and drywall sheet (sheetrock).

What is the floor construction like? If it is a solid concrete base then you are in with a hope but if not then you may not be able to do much better.

Which version of RX are you using? If it is anything other than 11 then I'm not surprised that it won't separate the audio very well. The algorithm that they used up to version 10 is around 8 years out of date now and even version 11 is around 3 years out of date. Source separation is improving almost monthly at the moment.

[DC-Choppah]

This house is regular construction, framing lumber and drywall sheet (sheetrock).

Which version of RX are you using?

RX 11 Standard / Music Production Suite 8

This is the latest one out now on the Izotope site

[DC-Choppah]

This house is regular construction, framing lumber and drywall sheet (sheetrock).

What is the floor construction like?

This is a one story 4000 square foot house with a finished basement over half the house and concrete floor under the other half.

There is the big main live room, and three side rooms (bedrooms). Two of the bedrooms (small and medium) are on concrete. A big bedroom is over the finished basement.

Underneath the main live room is the finished basement where the control room and office and apartment is. The floor of the live room is framing lumber and plywood. Under the basement is concrete. The live room music bleeds into the control room so we use headphones in the control room during recording.

The big bedroom is above a finished apartment and has a floor of framing lumber and plywood. I can isolate the basement apartment from the control room space (under the live room) since there are two doors between the office and apartment.

The small and medium bedrooms are far away and sit on concrete. But they share a wall. I would like to try to isolate these two bedrooms from each other .

[DC-Choppah]

But have you looked at where the sound leakage is coming from in the existing spaces? Gaps around/under doors can let a lot of sound through. If you try temporarily filling any gaps and comparing before/after noise levels using the same sound source, you should be able to tell whether better-fitting doors with seals around might be the most cost-effective option.

No

OK I will try the door gaps.

So the big bedroom leaks into the live room and this is the primary problem I have. The two smaller bedrooms are much farther away and don't bleed into the main room. They bleed to each other only.

The big bedroom actually has the option for two doors between the bedroom and live room. There is one door now, but it is a light privacy door with lots of air gaps. There is a place for a second door about 10' down the hall.

OK let me try putting a temporary air block at both these doors and see how much the trumpet goes down in the main live (piano) room.

I assume two doors is better than one! But acoustics is weird.

[DC-Choppah]

I agree with Wonks — most of the leakage is probably through and around the doors. It might worth some experiments temporarily sealing gaps under and around the doors and suspending a heavy duvet over the door frame to see if that reduces sound leakage.

If it does, then heavy fire doors with proper seals on all four sides, and compression lock handles may well be sufficient.

OK I will try this air gap test. The doors look promising. Thank you. I am finding acoustic/fire doors that look like my handy man could install since they go in the existing interior door frame.

[James Perrett]

Strictly speaking, fire doors should use special fire door frames although they may well fit in standard frames. I've used the matching door frames in my recent builds.

[DC-Choppah]

We did the before/after test of sealing the door for air leaks. We measured only 2-3 dB of reduction.

Seems like the sound is just coming through the walls and also the aur ducts.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Air ducts most certainly — I'd forgotten about the US penchant for ducted air heating systems.

But yes, mechanically linked walls, floors and ceilings will certainly pass a lot of sound too.

This is why professiobal grade sound isolation between rooms really needs to be designed into a building before construction starts...

[Wonks]

You certainly need silencers in the duct each side of a wall, which increases the air resistance so you need a more powerful fan to get the same amount of ventilation. Depending on how the ducts are laid out, you might also need sound insulation for some of the ductwork.

[RichardT]

We did the before/after test of sealing the door for air leaks. We measured only 2-3 dB of reduction.

Seems like the sound is just coming through the walls and also the aur ducts.

I wonder if your best option is simply to wait until de-bleed software improves! All these so-called AI-based tools are evolving relatively quickly. In a couple of years you may be able to get round the problem without spending a lot of money.

Maybe trying a different tool such as Spectralayers might already give you better results. You can get a free trial of it.

Just a thought - are you taking maximum advantage of microphone directivity? To be honest, I'm not sure how much difference that might make if you have lots of sound transmission routes.

To get your target 20dB reduction would be very expensive, and might well require a room within a room.

[Sam Spoons]

Have you got a floor plan just so we can visualise the place better?

I'm thinking that if you could build a room-in-room in either the big bedroom or main live room that would help isolate rooms on opposite sides from each other as well as the room in question but without knowing the layout of the property it's just guesswork.

[Matt Houghton]

Just a thought - are you taking maximum advantage of microphone directivity?

This was my first thought too — placement, proximity to the wanted source, and directivity.

My second was whether the OP has tried using some decent shields/gobos to limit the bleed reaching the mic, rather than worry about it reaching the room as a whole. I mean, working that way, I can get pretty decent separation between fairly loud instruments (eg a rock band) even in a single live room. Surely you could do that here?

My third was whether you really need such strong isolation when recording performers playing together. As in, if you're planning to manipulate the recordings to the extent that you need that degree of isolation, then why play together instead of overdubbing in the first place?

As for soundproofing the rooms treat air gaps and thin doors first. After that it gets very expensive, very bulky and very dependent on construction. For instance, I have a semi-floating structure inside a double garage, with two layers of plasterboard and low-mod silicon in between, and about two feet (more in places) of RW3 Rockwool behind them. I get almost total isolation from the attached house (there's a cavity wall then about three feet of Rockwool, then the floating frame and two layers of plasterboard) to the point I can play acoustic drums and not hear it in the adjacent lounge. But I can still just hear the rumble of the occasional trucks that pass about five metres in front (to be fair that front has a metal garage door rather than a brick wall).

All of which is a great argument for booking studio time. Or maybe building for one good isolated booth, either to protect the more sensitive sources like vox, or to isolate the louder leakier ones like trumpet. But a good booth also takes up a huge amount of space...

[DC-Choppah]

I wonder if your best option is simply to wait until de-bleed software improves! All these so-called AI-based tools are evolving relatively quickly. In a couple of years you may be able to get round the problem without spending a lot of money.

Maybe trying a different tool such as Spectralayers might already give you better results. You can get a free trial of it.

I love this answer.

Ok. I will like to try Spectralayers and see if it can de-bleed the audio from the rooms. I am looking for any SoS reviews of this software for this purpose.
i hope I can make this work. So cool. And much better than de-constructing the building!

[DC-Choppah]

Ok it seems pretty clear that this bleed is just part of the building. I appreciate you guys helping me here. The answer is NO to my original question, at least in my case.

I really want the software to work! And I will let you know here if we pull it off.

I no longer worry about the heating systems in the house, since RX can remove it completely. So I love using software to clean up the tracks first before we start editing. I hope I can get the Spectralayers to de-bleed the audio from the rooms.

[DC-Choppah]

My third was whether you really need such strong isolation when recording performers playing together. As in, if you're planning to manipulate the recordings to the extent that you need that degree of isolation, then why play together instead of overdubbing in the first place?

We play jazz music and have lots of wonderful soloists. But I like to comp the recordings and put it all back together with the best morsels from every take. To do this I need to be able to say move the trumpet solo from one take to another, so I need them all isolated. Meanwhile, these musicians do not like to record to a cue mix or a click. They like to play live. So my goal is to preserve the feeling of playing together live while also being able to comp the tracks.

If all of the recorded tracks were isolated this would work fine. I hope the software can de-bleed the tracks even with the nominal amount of bleed I get with my house construction.

Yes the fall back position, and what I do now is multitrack and record everyone separately that bleeds.

Or else we record together in one room, and don't try to comp.

[James Perrett]

We play jazz music and have lots of wonderful soloists. But I like to comp the recordings and put it all back together with the best morsels from every take. To do this I need to be able to say move the trumpet solo from one take to another, so I need them all isolated. Meanwhile, these musicians do not like to record to a cue mix or a click. They like to play live. So my goal is to preserve the feeling of playing together live while also being able to comp the tracks.

I think you are going to lose the whole essence of jazz by doing this. Jazz is about people improvising together and the tiniest of timing changes will make a big difference to the feel of the piece. You might produce something workmanlike with no mistakes, but you won't produce something better than the original take unless you are extremely lucky.

You'd do better to embrace the sense of adventure that is essential to jazz and allow imperfections for the greater good. There's nothing more boring in jazz than technical perfection.

I'm not saying that you need to accept a bad take and I wouldn't be averse to editing more than one take together but I certainly wouldn't attempt what you are proposing.

[Matt Houghton]

Yeah, that would be my take on it. Not playing to a click means either they're utterly amazingly consistent musicians, or you're going to end up having to time-stretch things to fit well... and risk losing the groove and nuances in the process. Sounds like a lot of hard work in post, and a lot of risk to me. Might be better off working in a more traditional overdub/punch in kinda way if you want to put different solos over different takes. But I'm not gonna judge, as you clearly have an idea of how you want to work, and I've not heard the music!

[RichardT]

Another approach is to do multiple takes and edit different sections together. If the tempo aren’t too different between takes this will preserve the feel. But again it’s not easy.

If there’s no click I agree with that comping solos is going to be extremely difficult if you want the timing to sound right - but maybe you’ve cracked it somehow!

[DC-Choppah]

I give only the drummer the click or percussion groove. Then everyone else follows the drummer.

[Meeraj]

I give only the drummer the click or percussion groove. Then everyone else follows the drummer.coc mod apk th 18

Regarding the 'drummer-only click' workflow, I’ve seen this work for the vibe, but doesn't it make your goal of comping solos nearly impossible?

Even if the drummer stays on the click, the micro-timing of the band reacting to them will vary per take. If you try to drop a Trumpet solo from Take 1 into the rhythm section of Take 2, won't the slight timing differences create 'flams' or phase issues, even if you successfully remove the audio bleed?

[DC-Choppah]

I suppose this is the whole point.
Everyone isolated i can comp.