I play alot of guitar and my mum gets fed up of the noise, her boyfriend works nights so he sleeps most of the day and their bedroom is right next to mine and the walls are paper thin, just 2 sheets of plasterboard with a 4 gap i think. Does anyone know how i can soundproof it without tearing it down?thanks
you can use a hard insulating board like polyurethane this can be stuck or screwed to the walls and is available with and with out a plaster board surface prob it is quite expensive a cheap way is to cover the wall with egg box's (cardboard not plastic) the shape and the material makes these sound absorbing and can work quite well
One thing you can do is add another layer of plasterboard (we call it drywall or gypboard in the US) on top of what's already there. Here's the trick that makes it work really well: don't attach it directly to the existing wall. You need standoff clips that will hold the drywall up, but don't provide a straight path directly to the old wall. That gives the sound energy less ability to move the old wall, less material to be transmitted through. A lot of the sound energy gets eaten up by the heavy drywall. But there's direct transmission if the wall is one big solid piece, so having the standoff clips gives the new drywall layer just a little bit of flex. Most of the sound energy is dissipated moving your wall surface, and the rest is absorbed and dissipated by the standoffs. Transmission through the wall drops precipitously.
There are other construction methods to lessen sound transmission between rooms...rebuild the wall with offset staggered studs so that the sounds from one room are not transmitted through the studs and drywall into the next room. One side of the wall is attached to one row of studs and the other side has another row of studs which are offset an inch or so....any vibrations of sound cannot pass through the studs. Placing eggcarton type foam on the walls can deaden the noise a little but the most effective way is to rebuild the walls between the adjoining rooms...or play when he's not around. Or play the guitar with headphones....or another room further away/garage?.
