How I Built My Acoustic Panels (Wall, Ceiling, and Cloud Panels) - An In Depth Build Video

So today I'm going to show you how I

build

my sound absorption

panels

that I will be using in my new recording studio. This won't be like any other

video

where you just grab some random insulation, wrap it in some fabric hanging on the

wall

, and call it a day. We're actually going to tailor these

panels

to the specific application, whether we're going to put the panels on the

wall

, put them on the

ceiling

or use them as

cloud

panels to hang over our mix position and then lastly we'll go over the type of insulation that's going to be used and then we also want to make sure that that fabric we're going to put over these panels we're not going to let those little insulating fibers get in there so we can breathe them in okay so there's a lot to go over in this

video

, let's get started right so I've decided on a length and width for my

acoustic

panels I'm making them five feet two inches by thirty one and a half inches and I'm just going to go ahead and just cut the wood with us okay now I have all the wood cut out, quickly go over the pieces here, this is one by four inch pine and these will be the sides of the

acoustic

panel, these pieces of wood right here in the middle, it's actually half inch plywood, but you can also use pine and This is for the ends of the acoustic panels and all of these little strips of wood are actually made from four foot by eight foot long sheets of wood called luan or also known as subfloor and I cut them to about an inch and a half wide and these are also cut to the same length as the ends of the acoustic panels.

Now I will explain later the reason for using them. These are great for the

cloud

panels, but now let's go ahead and start assembling the acoustic panel frames. We're going to use two pieces of pine and two pieces of plywood, so in some of the other acoustic panel

build

ing videos I see here on YouTube, a lot of them build the frames and pre-drill all the holes for all the screws. because they use drywall screws or something. I use these screws called PA ax pins. It's a construction screw. It has like a self-tapping head on the front.

You don't have to pre-drill anything. I just put. 8 screws on this first acoustic panel directly into the 3/4 inch pine with no pre-drilling and did not split a single area. These screws are amazing, especially when you use this thinner wood, so I am not sponsored by these guys and trust them. I would like to do it because I spent a lot of money on these screws, but I definitely just invest in some good screws, that saves a lot of time, so this will be the number one variation of the acoustic panel, because of the way I have this wooden frame.

Built sound can't actually come in from the sides or the top and bottom, it can only come in from the front or the back of the panel, so I want to be able to change that because I want these panels to be really effective at absorbing the sound. sound that's really coming from any direction, so the only way I can do this is to cut holes with maybe a jigsaw and the sides of the wood here or what I'm going to choose to do is just a little bit. The easiest thing is to use a hole saw, which is essentially just a big drill bit so you can selectively drill some holes, you know, at certain points in this acoustic panel.

Now, obviously, you don't want to have too big a hole. I'm not going to leave enough wood so you know the panel gets a little flimsy and you don't want to drill them too small because it actually won't be very effective. I'm using a 2 and 1/8 inch drill bit if I had a 2 and a half I would probably use. Now it's your choice you can assemble the panel like I did and then drill the holes or you can drill these holes in an unassembled panel and you know if that's easier for now I'm just doing it on the sides of my panel so I'm not going to do the longer ends at the top and bottom of this panel simply because of the way I'm placing them on the

ceiling

, it's not really going to be that effective, so this is one of those variations that I really don't I've seen it in no video and it really addresses the absorption that comes from the sides of the top and bottom of the panel, so if you want to make your panels as effective as possible to be able to absorb as much sound as possible.

I would go ahead and drill even bigger holes and more holes than I went ahead and this will increase the amount of sound the panel can absorb especially if your room is smaller or you don't have enough budget to be able to build a bunch of these. panels, you will actually be able to increase the effectiveness and absorbency of the panel by simply having more holes and larger holes in the side. Obviously if you drill the holes too big you will weaken the wood to the point of falling apart so be very careful, okay now that I have the frame

built

for my acoustic panel I now need to wrap it in fabric. so you can then put the insulation in there and call it a day and this is one of those things that no one seems to talk about in these acoustic construction videos is what kind of fabric to put in so it's actually a pretty critical part of building.

For a good acoustic panel, you want your fabric to be acoustically transparent, which just means that sound can travel through the fabric as if it weren't there, but you also want to make sure that your fabric can stop the tiny little fibers that are inside your mineral wool, your fiberglass or your cotton insulation, you don't want those fibers to make their way through the fabric, they become airborne and then you breathe them in, now, for example, like me, I work in my study every day. Sitting here 8 10 12 hours a day breathing in all this fiberglass and mineral wool is not good for you.

I mean, these fibers go into your lungs and blah blah blah, so I'm not going to tell you what kind of fabric to put in there, but you really want to do your research, so if you don't want to spend money on a domain like Gilfer, which is a very popular company that many studios will use for their fabrics, you can be a little more economical and use something like This is a weed control fabric, like the same type of landscaping fabric you would put in your garden to literally stop growth of weeds. This roll is four feet wide, 200 feet long, and cost me about forty-five dollars.

What's good about it? This is breathable and you can check this by just breathing through it if you can feel the air moving through the fabric and onto your hand and you know this will allow air movement, but the cool thing is it's kind of like that. like a fabric screen with little holes in there so this will do a really good job of trying to keep those little fibers from making their way through the fabric and then after this continues I'll also take out my finishing fabric to that you essentially have like two layers of fabric to stop those fibers, okay, now we need to talk about the type of insulation that you're going to put in your kusik panels.

I got this information directly from a studio designer who said you should really use mineral wool. insulation when your acoustic panel is between 3 and 9 inches thick okay the

depth

of the panel and then anything over 9 inches you want to use fiberglass insulation so in this case we're using three inch lumber and medium thickness, so we want To use mineral wool now, mineral wool is also known as you know, some people will call it rock core or rock wool. It's like a darker green or a lighter green that looks like very dense insulation, so without going into too much detail, some insulation contains formaldehyde from aldehyde. has been linked to apparently causing cancer.

I don't know all this information. Well when I tried to look it up it was like someone said this was super nice and then other people said it's actually no big deal because it exists in so many other things we have in our homes, but just do your research, okay, you might find it. You discover that you are allergic to formaldehyde. Put it in a small room that is completely sealed, it could have some kind of reaction in your body to me, because I have very bad asthma. I chose to have a family wall, that was just my preference so just look at the formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde-free insulation exists and that's what I bought for the studio before construction, so now that I've chosen my insulation, we can move forward. and start placing it inside the panel now these pieces are 15 inches wide and 4 feet long so since I made my panel the width of exactly two of these pieces of insulation I would have to cut any of them and they would actually fit in there. alright, which leaves the third piece on top that I can go ahead and trim out with an insulating knife, which is really nice to use and I can link it in the description if you guys want to check it out and then just press place and obviously wearing gloves and now I'm using the landscaping fabric again to wrap the back of the panel just to help and try to keep those fibers from coming out of the panel and going up into the air and then here I'm just using a pair of scissors to just trim the landscaping fabric to the proper size and then tilt it up so I can go ahead and vacuum the floor just to lift up all those bits of insulation, so now I'm laying out my finished fabric once again, making sure it's acoustically transparent and I'm turning it upside down to Let your face be on the ground.

I'm putting the panel on top of it, so the way I make my final fabric is that I make both long sides first and then I go ahead and staple. the shorter sides I just make sure to pull them tight to staple them in place. I'm using that red pneumatic stapler that connects to an air compressor and it really saves your hand, especially if you're doing a lot of paneling like me. What I'm doing now, if you want to see this pneumatic stapler, I'll put a link in the description and then the corners here. I like a triangular fold and then I'll fold the flap and then just go ahead and put it on. a few staples to make it stay there, so here's the final look of the panel, but now we can go ahead and even modify this panel a little more by adding those wood strips to the back.

Okay, this will be variation number two. I'm now using this variation on my ceiling panels as well as the cloud panels I'm laying over my mix position, so what I did was buy some luan, which is also known as underlayment and is essentially just a bit of thin wood. three sixteenths is its thickness and what I did was I took a full four by eight sheet and I tore it into these one and a half inch long strips, now these one and a half inch long strips, what I'm going to do is I'm going to to mount them on the back of my acoustic panel because I am hanging my panel at an angle on the ceiling.

What will happen is that these strips will help disperse the sound in a random, somewhat random way, so what will happen is sound. it's going to go through the panel and it's going to be partially absorbed and then half of it is going to be dispersed by these strips of wood and then the rest of the sound is going to go through the panel, hit the actual ceiling of the studio and then come back down and this way we're creating like a absorbent diffuser all in one so let me show you what I'm talking about okay here I'm taking the inch and a half wide pieces of luan and I'm actually I'm using some of the pieces as spacers and I'm going ahead and I'm using my pneumatic stapler again with some long 9/16 staples, this time much longer staples and I just go ahead and make sure they are square. the back of the panel and they're not hanging and then you just go ahead and staple them all to the back.

You can see here, it's a nice close up of how I stapled them to the wooden frame, okay? Real quick, I just want to show you how I hang all the panels from the ceiling, so I'm using my laser right there and measuring the center of all of this. I don't know what the cavity is called and I got the laser. everything is set up and it's drawing a center line across the entire room and what I'm doing is using these wood fern strips and the reps that they would provide me allow me to essentially place the acoustic panels anywhere I want because I know that They are We're not going to fall over a stud, so these furring strips are screwed to the studs that go through the two layers of drywall with green glue to the ceiling joist, so this way, if I need to screw here , I can screw. this burn strip and not have to worry about hitting the stud, so this is the hardware I'm using to mount these acoustic ceiling panels.

It was actually a metal repair plate, so it was just a long piece of metal. It has a fairly thick caliber. they're strong ties from The Simpsons, so they're really strong, they're meant for structural things, acoustic pianos aren't that heavy, but this section from here to here is about nineinches and this one is about three so now I'm going to go ahead and install the first acoustic panel and this one is a little bit more difficult just because it's so close to the front wall, but I'm using a speaker tripod which actually helps me holding this panel up as I go ahead and Putting all these screws in okay so there is a panel if you can say but that end of the panel is actually a lot lower than this piece and this remaining support is actually how the panel goes on. next panel, it will be something like this at the end and this way all the panels are staggered so we will have a low end and then a high end and then the next one starts low and goes up and then continues So as you can see here, now I have two panels installed and again using the same metal brackets to mount them, in this view you can see the angle of each acoustic panel and I believe the actual angle was four or five degrees and This is the back view so you can see how a bracket on It actually takes and holds two acoustic panels on each end, so now the last panel that we haven't mentioned is the acoustic wall panels, so what I did in my studio was build the wall panels directly into the wall, so now you have your own frame, if you don't want to do that what you can do is buy these heavy duty picture frame hangers and what they are is like a picture frame hanger and Screw them into the back of your acoustic panel and then hang them on the wall like you would with a photo frame.

Now they work really well because these acoustic panels weigh about 10 to 20 pounds whether or not you put those wood slats in there and these. Sturdy hangers can definitely handle that weight. If you want to see them, I'll put a link in the description. Now there are other variations you could do with these wall panels. You know how I put up all those wooden slats. the back so you can't see them with the wall panels just like I did here on the studio wall panels. I actually put the wood slats on the outside and now I found out on a lot of audio forums that they would actually put the wood slats on. on the outside you can obviously choose a different type of wood.

A lot of people recommend MDF, but I couldn't really find a necessarily good reason why you would want to use MDF instead of other woods now with the wall kusik. panels, I would still place them at an angle which will once again help break up those parallel surfaces and reduce the flutter echo you might have between the two side walls or the rear front wall, so I am placing these acoustic panels in my control room , so this is where I do all the production, mixing and mastering, but I'm actually making the exact same panels, just different sizes for my vocal booth, so I'm using this exact same design in my vocal booth so you can use these panels. in a variety of different areas, maybe a live room, a vocal booth, a control room.

Now exactly where to place them in the different types of rooms will be something you'll have to figure out or go ahead and contact me. in a different way and we can and we can determine where and how many of these panels have been placed in your room and then something I forgot to mention was going into the cloud panels, now the cloud panels I

built

just like the other ceiling panels with the wood slats on the back, except over one blend position area, where you really want to try to reduce any of those reflections on the ceiling, so you might want to make the cloud panel much more thick, it was recommended by one of the studio designers I've been talking to.

Placing three layers of three and a half inch rock core rock wool mineral wool on your cloud acoustic panel, now just one more time, those are the ones you would hang over the mix position off the ceiling. I made my panels still three and a half inches. thick I put the wooden slats on the back except because I have this big beam above me. I actually put the rest of the insulation on the beam so as not to lose any more free space, so here in the studio I put three panels on one side of this big beam, three panels on the other side, like I had mentioned, but then I put two panels almost 4 feet by 4 feet right above the mixing area, so basically I have an eight foot long cloud panel right above my mixing position and then a little further back in the room, I put another cloud panel four feet by four feet to have three big clouds in the center of the room and two of them are right above the mix position, then three on one side and three on the other side, so if you want to see how I built the panels acoustics on my wall or even these on the back wall or if you want to know how to build a recording studio this was actually a full garage at one time and is now a very large control room with a vocal booth and a storage area .

I converted all of this myself and documented everything. There are 12 videos right now, there will probably be fifteen or sixteen by the end. It's a very, very detailed series on how I built this entire series so you can go ahead and find those videos here on YouTube. I'll leave a link in the description and I'll find it at the end of this video, so just one more thing if you guys do it. If you want to stay up to date with True Sound Studios, go ahead and follow True Sound Studios on Instagram, so if you file Sound Studios on Instagram, go ahead and send me a direct message and I can send you six photos of the entire acoustic panel built this way.

It might be a lot easier to reference these images instead of having to go back to the video if you're going to go ahead and build these acoustic panels yourself, so thank you all for watching this video. I hope I have given you some motivation. Go ahead and build your own acoustic panels that will actually be not only effective but also safe to place in your mixing space