Building My Studio: Part 5 (The Ceiling)

I went back and forth on this part of the process... Some builders told me to do the walls first, and others told me to do the ceilings. Finally, I decided to do the ceilings first. Word of warning... this is one part of the job that could benefit from just hiring a pro to do it, or at least have some friends over to help. I hung my ceiling completely by myself, without a drywall jack, because I was too stubborn and proud to ask for help and too cheap to hire someone. Well, I got it done but it took a long time and was exhausting. 5/8" firecode drywall is HEAVY! Now, try lifting it over your head while standing on a ladder, holding it in place with one hand and putting in screws with another....

I opted not to use a suspension system to isolate the ceiling from impact noise from above. While this would have been nice, once again, I felt that it came at too great a cost both in ceiling hieght and financially, without enough reward for it to make sense. So, I opted for a traditional method of hanging the drywall directly to the joists.

Before I hung drywall, I installed a second light in my room. Ahhh... much easier to see now.

As you can see, I have a very thick R19 insulation stuffed in the ceiling. This particular type of R19 is specially meant to not just provide insulation but for sound control as well, and it works great. Much better than "the pink stuff".

I do have a 4" drain pipe that runs through one side of the ceiling, and I spent some extra time putting extra insulation and mineral fiber around the pipe to mute the sound a little more.

Then I hung the drywall - again, using screws instead of nails. This was a long an laborious process working by myself.

Bass frequencies build up in corners - along the wall/ceiling joints, and especially in corners like this where two walls and a ceiling all come together.

Before closing up the ceiling all the way, all of the corners were given a little extra insulation with mineral fiber, in hopes of getting the best bass response possible from my room.

The ceiling in my iso-booth recieved a little more attention. I started by giving pipes running through or by the cieling a little extra insulation and mineral fiber to surround them.

In this photo, you can see that I placed a complete layer of compressed mineral fiber in the ceiling. This is in addition to the good quality R19. The intent of this was of course to help keep the iso-booth quiet, but also to once again - combat the build of up bass frequencies, which are typically worse the smaller the room becomes.

In this room, I also used the foam taping to help reduce the transmission of vibrations from the ceiling to the drywall. Even though the impact of this is most likely very minimal, every little bit helps, and this was just using up leftovers so that they wouldn't go to waste.

Once the drywall was installed, there wasn't much more to do on the ceiling at this point. There was no need to do a traditional finish on the ceiling, as I had already planned to use acoustic treatments on the entire ceiling surface. So, I merely spread caulk over screw holes, edges, and seams and moved on to the next step.

In my next installment, I'll show you the walls...