For all those asking/wondering, there wasn’t any good way to let you hear the cabinet with the lids off versus with the lids on. The difference in volume is pretty extreme so by the time I had a room mic loud enough to actually hear what the cabinet sounds like with the lid on it would be completely over driven and distorting the preamp when the lid was off. And if I set the microphone to be able to handle the volume level with the lid off, you would hear literally nothing with the lid on. The noise reduction of the cabinet is right about 65 DB. Hope that helps someone, thanks y’all for watching!
It's a beast! How about a short vid with your room mic on, you talk at normal volume, and then let us hear how loud the cab sounds in the room mic with the same settings?
Lol, everyone wants the evidence of the cab working. I too expected it in the video. But decoupling an iso cab inside a massive cab already sounds like its going to do its job weather it's 60 something db, 50 something or even 40 something.
Colt.....First of all, WOW YOU ARE SOME BEAST IN TERMS OF AXE SOLOING ! Secondly, AWESOME DIY CAB DESIGN !! THOUGH I WILL TRY TO USE PVC PANEL FOR THE 2 INTERNAL LAYERS INSTEAD OF WOOD (LESS WEIGHT) ! Yes ill use real wood panel for the outside of the cab (also ill try PVC panel in the outside layer too using half of home exterior water gutter to glue corners with strongest pro grade contact cement with added extra screws just in case !) The internal hanging cab ill try PVC too for less weight !! Probably ill use bath towels in between those 2 PVC panels and outside the panel instead of pro foam ! Hotel type towels (thicker) are said to be the best in sound absorption like 3 layers on top of each other. Well, if you want less weight, then try my improvised method and sell your ISO CAB to another Studio 🤔... hehe !! Awesome Iconic guitars !! Well, thanks for this awesome video and looking forward for your guitar lessons ! Thanks !👌
Lex Bravary For all those asking/wondering, there wasn’t any good way to let you hear the cabinet with the lids off versus with the lids on. By the time I had a room mic loud enough to actually hear what the cabinet sounds like with the lid on it would be completely over driven and distorting the preamp when the lid was off. And if I set the microphone to be able to handle the volume level with the lid off, you would hear literally nothing with the lid on. The noise reduction of the cabinet is right about 65 DB. Hope that helps someone, thanks y’all for watching!
WOW ---- WOW ! Colt I am turning 66 next month and I live and breath what you are doing and have done, and have to say I am totally jealous. I am working on my second studio in my home and I just keep running out of room, energy and time. What you have accomplished is incredible and I can see the enthusiasm and excitement in your videos, something we called passion back in the day because $50 a night never changed and the mold we were cut from, well you just do not come across that often anymore, or at least I don't. Keep pushing the envelope and know you are raising the bar for those who follow. And my hat is off to your other half. It takes a lot of support to get where your at and I believe you know what I am saying. So don't forget to say thank you occasionally, because behind every guitar and every hour there is a wonderful person who supported that. Keep it up and great job.
I echo those thoughts. For a self educated man, there's not much you dont know. In fact, I reckon if you dont know, you either work it out or trust in someone who does know.
Damn, man! That's one kick-ass design. You must have spent your nights thinking it over. Thank you for sharing your fantastic ideas with the rest of us.
Your channel is invaluable in the sense that many channels tell you about gear and how to get sounds but very few if any actually explain how to build the studio correctly. Your iso cab is a stroke of genius in my opinion. I am a fan.
My ISO cab builds sounded so bad, I literally threw them in the garbage. These days I kill a lot less volume, and use an entire 4x4x8 area to keep 10 speakers quiet. Carpet, foam, and ceiling tile. Very Red Green (duct tape!) style build. Love your work, no cut corners.
This is outstanding! I happen to be in the process of building my own ISOCab and found many of your requirements for this "box" to be similar to my own. I do not live in an apartment so I do not have a common wall between my studio and a grumpy neighbor....but I DO have a wife who tolerates my sonic abuse. She has been a "good sport" for several years as I built the studio in one end of OUR home after our daughter moved away. It occurred to me that perhaps I should not force her to endure the noise ( her description ) late into the night so the ISO BOX was conceived. I built my box to hold a pair of 2x12 cabs. I drive them with a Morin modified JCM800 Marshall head. I used 3/4 inch MDF sheets ( REAL DENSE ). The floor is doubled-up so it is 1 1/2 inch thick. I installed the BIG 6 inch ball bearing castors with brakes. I considered using the "suspension" technique for the speaker cabs but it was not practical for the cabinets I have. I de-coupled the box ( walls & top ) with two layers of 3/4 inch "R-TECH" foam insulation spaced 1/4 inch apart. Then I have 4" acoustic pyramid foam on the walls and top fixed to the foam insulation. The floor is 3" neoprene mat. ( It was a yoga mat in it's first life ). All the XLR & speaker jacks have been wired just as you have done. This box is a 48" cube. It lives most of it's life in a storage shed just outside my house and will only fit through a sliding glass door into my living room . With the speaker cabinets inside it weighs a little over 600 pounds. My wife is happy with the results , therefore I am happy. Please share with me WHERE you found those latches for the top of your box!!! Jeff Cramer Rat Nest Studios San Bernardino California
Great demo and understanding of acoustics/Sound Treatment and damping, just what I was looking for. Great Craftsmen ship as well. I also really appreciate the fact that sometimes, you just got to build this stuff yourself to appease your needs!
one could use Quiet Rock Dry wall ( Sheet of QuietRock is the equivalent of 8 sheets of the same thickness of stacked ) to further soundproof the ISO cab
Very cool man! I built one and sounded great as yours does, but had to take it apart because my wife didn’t want to look at it in our house(even if it was my studio room). I made a choice to shop around to find an iso cab that could fit in my closet. The best sounding, isolating and looking one I found was the SG-BOX by Grossmann! It is incredible as is the customer service. Plus it cost less to ship from overseas than building one and will save your back. It’s also ‘quiet enough’ that I can blast my EVH while our triplets sleep upstairs hehe! Great vid though!
I had never seen one as a box inside a box. I had the same idea about the same time you did. I did mine five or six hears ago. Mine is very similar but weight was my #1 concern, so mine is 100% carbon fiber. I used nidacore and honeycomb for vibration and frequency differentiation between box 1 and 2. Mine weighs way less than a 4x12 cab. Both of my boxes are lined with different densities of sound deadening foam. I built a double box and a single box both, but like the double box design better. I am glad I found this because I am tired of people telling me I wasted my time and created something useless. Actually, I am super surprised that more people aren't looking for these/making these. They are so useful in a studio situation. Great job and great documentation.
Like it! I'm thinking of building a couple of these but using lightweight concrete blocks to build the outer enclosure. The ones that are airated like pumice. My studio is about 12 x 5 meters, so a reasonable size. There's actually only one corner of the room that is solid walls (its a solid stone, former cowshed), the other corners have two doorways and a large window, so thinking i could build the two booths in that solid corner with gaps behind and they will double as a giant bass trap.
Was thinking the same thing myself. Even use it as another layer on each side of the drywall section between the outer ply's, with another layer of green glue each side of the MLV.
if you could soundproof even a small room you will be much happier, medium would be even better. But anything the size of an iso cab you will be unsatisfied with the sound. Tubby lows, no deep bass, weird mushy mids.
Yep, you designed and built it right Colt! I studied acoustics and studio building from writings of some of the best in the biz, including Rod Gervais, (author of "Build It Like A Pro"), "Boggy" Petrovic, Andre Vare, John L. Sayers, John H. Brandt, and many more. I did this for 1-1/2 years before my last personal studio build just to learn how to do it right. You've covered all the concepts Mass, Decoupling, Resonance Damping (mechanical and air-borne), Resonance Shifting, etc. using Green Glue, Rubber Isolation Hangers, Staggered Butt Joints, "Safe Door" Step Seals, etc. The only area that your design possibly doesn't cover completely (but it's obviously still great for guitar) is internal volume to get the air in the boxes to be of low resonance (yep, a sealed container has air resonance as well as panel resonance). This too could be mitigated by building a second "breather" iso box that had a "port within a port" out of steel water pipes as a connector-way between the two (separate) iso boxes. A lot of work to make this idea work, but it would yield approximately an octave lower resonance from the standpoint of the internal volume. Then you could design in an accommodation for bass speakers (maybe limiting it to a single 15")! Anyway, great video and excellent writing and playing - rock on!
This is an exceptionally intelligent design and to my ears the guitar tone was open and natural. It triggered an idea instantly. One could have an array of these in a room and create a situation where a band could play a take togther live and the bleed would be almost non existent. Obviously they'd need earphones, but they'd have the visual feed back and feeling. Vocalist would need to be in a booth. All of this aside, have you considered creating a complete design for this? An accurate piece by piece construction manual? I can see why, weight considered it would be difficult to sell commercially because the shipping alone would cost the same as the unit I guess. I would pay for a manual happily, because the level of detail is beyond my Capabilities, or at least it would be way harder without the manual. I have done everything from building furniture, pointing, wiring and I know how an idea expands as you go through the project, but for example the idea of staggering the joints. I don't think I would have thought of that, let alone the decoupling. You should definitely patent this idea if you haven't and you definitely deserved that Pepsi.
I like the hanging inner box concept to remove contact vibrations. When I build my iso boxes, I'll probably do a hanging floor I can just set my amps/cabs onto, as opposed to a second inner box.
Don't stop making videos your a very interesting dude and I love your videos! I know nothing about music but it makes me wanna start learning! Keep it UP!!!
I’m underway on my own copy of this cab. I work in a cabinet shop with tons of access to scrap plywood. Im trying to make mine lighter and smaller so I’ve gone with 3/4” plywood with 1/2” drywall green glued to the insides. I have 1” thick acoustic panels I salvaged from an old work project. All of this has allowed me to get down to a 36” long by 26” wide by 26” tall outer dimension. I’ve ordered my audio jacks as well as handles and latches. So far I’ve spent less than $60 since I got the plywood and acoustic panels free. If I can get 40 dB of reduction I’ll be extremely happy. If not I’ll have to up the insulation and add more layers of plywood to the outside
@@ColtCapperrune I finished my iso cab build today. I plugged in my Marshall origin 20. Volume on 10, gain on 10, boost switch on... 65 db on my decible reader. I was a little nervous because it was pretty light (198 lbs) but it did extremely well. I went in the other room to listen and all you can hear is faint bass. Nothing blaring but distinguishable. I may add another layer of 1/2” mdf and see if that can knock out some of that bass. Total I spent about $200 since the wood and acoustic panels were free. Thanks for the design and the video. I would have never come up with anything this effective on my own!
@@ColtCapperrune I went ahead and added the next layer. I was trying to play it while my wife was sleeping upstairs and she could still hear those bass frequencies I added 3/4” mdf, which I found out is denser than drywall, to the sides, bottom, and the top. I got it all put back together, plugged in and played a chord... i honestly couldn’t tell if the amp was actually working until I plugged in the microphone. It is 100% silent. I could keep it in my bedroom next to my sleeping wife and she wouldn’t hear it. I had green glue and noise proofing calk left over so I used that as well. I definitely think the second layer of wood is necessary.
Man, you are genius! I'm pretty happy with the one I've made my own but this is definitely on another level, awesome playing as well, you're fkn inspiring! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻🤟🏻
discovered you the other day, top tips and congratulations on your new studio. I have just spent alot of my money on starting my own PA and live recording set up, I am hoping to use the profits I make to start funding a decent home studio like you have now. Thanks for inspiring!
Most cabinets are about 30-35dB down. If this one is over 60 dB down, that is roughly 99.9% down from an SPL level, or about an 87.5% down from a perceived volume level, because decibels are base-10 logarithmic. AWESOME JOB!!!
I was thinking the same thing. It would take a hot minute but it could be extrapolated fairly closely using the speaker as the source. Be a lot easier if he posted the dimensions but I’m sure he’s very busy. Amazing iso cab regardless. Extremely well thought out and built.
I’m working on my own version. I am going to try building the outer box from the inside out so that I can test it as I build and see if multiple plywood/drywall layers are necessary. I think 3/4” Baltic birch and 2” of acoustic panels may be enough and would save my a lot of weight and cut down on size.
To give people an idea on how heavy this thing would be coming from a construction guy of many years (I'm out of that biz for a long time now) 1 4x8 3/4 sheet of plywood (or 23/32) is about 65-70 pounds. Considering all the layers, and looking like this is 8+ sheets, that's about 500 pounds. That would not be fun hauling that upstairs, no sir. What is even HEAVIER is MDF 4x8s, which are by my estimation 2x the weight, it's hard to handle solo. That's what I I'm going to use on my iso box. My studio is downstairs, and I'm happy for it.
Thanks for sharing your design, very cool. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you have gaps in the weatherstripping on your inner box at the corners. If you tighten up those corners I bet it will get even quieter! You went through as many measures as possible on the outer box, so it might be a nice, easy improvement!
Man I really enjoy your videos. Great job on your cab however I only managed to watch it till the end after I had to repeat your riff for like 30 times for my 3yo son :D cheers!
Now you just need the trick Sylvia Massy uses for feedback for solos when she has her 4x12 in an isolated room... Patch in a small tube combo in the control room. You can do feedback with studio monitors, but a lot of people complain it's not the same, kinda like with an FRFR cabinet. Haven't tried it myself, but I'm no soloist. Normally, I'd do some gibberish and outsource it to someone better. In the meantime, it's usually in the same room, but I'm looking for a quiet solution other than digital. Keith Merrow has good results with just a Randall iso cab, but he still keeps it in another room, and usually uses the same speaker, and I guess the combination works for him. He just skipped the v30 and uses some WGS speaker that gives him what he needs... But that might not be ideal if one wants to use a different speaker I suppose. That specific combination might just work for him... Could sound like garbage with a different speaker.. Would be cool to make something where you could change the dimensions of the speaker box by adding / pulling boards... But that could make the whole setup bigger... I've thought about doing this with Mesa cabs though... To convert an OS to Traditional. One would just have to put small brackets inside, on the top and bottom to change the height from 32" to 30" (doing the math because those are the outer dimensions of the OS and Trad cabs). I suppose that if someone has room, they can just have two cabs, but it saves some cheese and room for people that are in a bit more of a cramped situation, if they want to experiment.
I love your stuff so much been watching since 2019 and finally my house is starting to look studio worthy lol got some gears n stuff now , you're a huge inspiration and hero to me. Love to be able to get your autograph with Andrew masters to hang in my jam / studio space, it's not quite there but done put in some work so far lol
Nice choice in microphones! The M201 sounds so much better than the average SM57. Also, great project and video - I'm looking forward to more of your videos.
Hi Colt,- thanks for your kind reply. In case you were wondering what progressive operatic symphonic vikingr folk metal actually sounds like ( as I have a feeling it´s probably not THE most in vogue style of music in Nashville, Tennessee :) ) I have taken the liberty to put together a suggestion list to some bands and some characteristic songs,- if for no other reason than to bring y´all up to speed on what the international rock scene sounds like today. Should give you and all of the other hard working music people following your channel a slight competitive edge, hopefully. Hope you´re gonna enjoy it ( even though it´s a bit different from what you people are normally used to). Here goes: Nightwish- Storytime and Song Of Myself - Live At Wacken 2013 ( Floor Jansen ) ( Symphonic Metal) Jinjer - Pisces- Live Session and Teacher, Teacher ( Tatiana Shmaylyuk) ( Progressive Metalcore) Epica - Sancta Terra - Live Retrospect Show Ft. Floor Jansen (Simone Simons) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Nightwish - Phantom Of The Opera - End Of An Era dvd 2008 ( Tarja Turunen ) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Epica - Consign To Oblivion and Cry For The Moon (studio version)( Simone Simons)( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Arch Enemy - Nemesis - Live At Wacken ( Alissa White-Gluz) ( Melodic Death Metal ) Eluveitie - Thousandfold and Rebirth (Chrigel Glanzmann / Anna Murphy) ( Folk Metal ) Faun - Federkleid and Walpurgisnacht ( Fiona Rüggeberg / Katja Moslehner) ( Think Euro Bluegrass and Good Ole Boys from the Middle Ages :) ) Blackmore´s Night - Name Of A Rose ( Candice Night / Ritchie Blackmore) (Faun and Blackmore´s Night - The precursor genre of music for modern day Operatic Symphonic Metal, Power Metal, Folk Metal and Viking Metal - modern day European Folk) Amon Amarth - Guardians Of Asgaard - Live At Summer Breeze and Twilight Of The Thunder God- Live Official Video ( Johan Hegg) ( Papa Bear King Vikingr and his raiders having a ball - Swedish/ Finnish Viking Metal ) Tyr- Hold the Heathen Hammer High and Sunset Shore - Official Videos ( Faroese Viking Metal ) Eivor Pálsdottir - Trøllabundin - (live or studio) ( Eivør Pálsdottir) ( Faroese ancient pagan Roots-Folk) Blackbriar - I´d Rather Burn ( official video) ( Zora Cock) ( Dutch Power Metal ) Delain - Masters Of Destiny and Burning Bridges - Official Videos ( Charlotte Wessels ) ( Dutch Symphonic Metal) Frozen Crown - Neverending ( Italian Power Metal ) Wardruna ft. Aurora - Helvegen - live ( Einar Kvitrafn Selvik / Aurora) ( Original Viking Age lyrics,- modern Scandinavian Vikingr-Folk ) Heilung I Lifa - Krigsgaldr ( Maria Franz) ( shamanistic Late Bronze Age tribal music ) Give them all a listen,- you will not regret it. Enjoy.
Great cab.ive seen a couple of commercially available cabs that are terrific. One was featured on henning pauly's eighth channel. The othe was German made, in a flight case and the speaker baffles slid in and out so you can swap speakers easily and opens like a flight case. Really good and there's a band that tours with them. Also I heard about a big band that has huge isocabs under the stage that 8x4 or something crazy, with a 4x12 inside.they must weigh a ton.
Awesome job. Not to nitpick but what about vibration noise from the metal to metal suspension hooks on the inside? Would at least wrap them in teflon tape or something to be on the safe side. In either case, I love the cab! Nice work man
chang li Really appreciate that! The channel is continuing to grow, just trying to put out the best content I can, and content I enjoy making. Thanks so much for following along!
Zach Martini Thanks man! Probably 50% of my production work is country based, and probably 90% of my session guitar work is country as well, but I produce a lot of rock, and my background is all rock. Felt good to shake off the dust and play something heavy LOL, thanks for watching!
Not exactly the same, but a number of years ago, we built something similar for a very loud server that was going into a small office with no server closet. It worked wonders to keep things quiet. The big challenge with that was creating a dramatic drop in noise while building in a fan system to air cool the server that ran pretty hot. Anyway, nice work!
Nice job, Colt,- would the same idea work for bass recording or do you just go active DI with a parallel signal path for preamp and OD ? Would still want the option of hooking up an actual bass speaker and a couple of mics,- in my case Sennheiser e905 for top and Sennheiser e602 for low end. The speaker is a 35 yrs. old Peavey 15" and I just love the sound of it. I´m normally a modern day Progressive Operatic Symphonic / Vikingr-Folk metal guitar player but it seems to me that nowadays if you ain´t chickin´pickin´you ain´t shite,- so I gues I´ll be going for a Tele and dusting off my old Peavey Classic 50-410 combo very soon and learn some of that kind of playing technique. ( Yes, I like the old school Peavey gear,- can throw it down a flight of stairs,- just keeps on working! ) Thank you for your channel,- it´s very interesting stuff even to me half a continent and all the way across the Atlantic in Scandinavia away, - so many greetings,- will be checking back in with you! :)
Ulf Danielsen I normally record bass direct, whenever I have both a microphone, and a DI, I always end up preferring the DI anyway. I’m certain you could make something like this for bass guitar, but it would have to be much bigger, and probably wouldn’t be nearly as quiet since the lower the frequency, the harder it is to contain. Thanks for watching!
Super helpful. Thank you very much. I’m ok with a lot of digital stuff on my UA Apollo system BUT not guitar modeling stuff. I live in a condo in Chicago, so this is what I need to do. I CAN SAY I would have done it badly had I not seen this. Sounds a lot of money but compared to a Kemper... or building the ISO cab twice because the first one didn’t get the job done, it’s not bad. Thanks again!!
For all those asking/wondering, there wasn’t any good way to let you hear the cabinet with the lids off versus with the lids on. The difference in volume is pretty extreme so by the time I had a room mic loud enough to actually hear what the cabinet sounds like with the lid on it would be completely over driven and distorting the preamp when the lid was off. And if I set the microphone to be able to handle the volume level with the lid off, you would hear literally nothing with the lid on. The noise reduction of the cabinet is right about 65 DB. Hope that helps someone, thanks y’all for watching!
It's a beast! How about a short vid with your room mic on, you talk at normal volume, and then let us hear how loud the cab sounds in the room mic with the same settings?
Lol, everyone wants the evidence of the cab working. I too expected it in the video. But decoupling an iso cab inside a massive cab already sounds like its going to do its job weather it's 60 something db, 50 something or even 40 something.
Well this says everything doesn't it really haha. Wow. Better start buying plywood
Colt.....First of all, WOW YOU ARE SOME BEAST IN TERMS OF AXE SOLOING !
Secondly, AWESOME DIY CAB DESIGN !! THOUGH I WILL TRY TO USE PVC PANEL FOR THE 2 INTERNAL LAYERS INSTEAD OF WOOD (LESS WEIGHT) !
Yes ill use real wood panel for the outside of the cab (also ill try PVC panel in the outside layer too using half of home exterior water gutter to glue corners with strongest pro grade contact cement with added extra screws just in case !)
The internal hanging cab ill try PVC too for less weight !!
Probably ill use bath towels in between those 2 PVC panels and outside the panel instead of pro foam ! Hotel type towels (thicker) are said to be the best in sound absorption like 3 layers on top of each other.
Well, if you want less weight, then try my improvised method and sell your ISO CAB to another Studio 🤔... hehe !!
Awesome Iconic guitars !!
Well, thanks for this awesome video and looking forward for your guitar lessons
!
Thanks !👌
Why not use a UA Ox and the unlimited IR's available?
Would love to hear a room mic of you playing and taking the two lids off vs having them both on.
Lex Bravary For all those asking/wondering, there wasn’t any good way to let you hear the cabinet with the lids off versus with the lids on. By the time I had a room mic loud enough to actually hear what the cabinet sounds like with the lid on it would be completely over driven and distorting the preamp when the lid was off. And if I set the microphone to be able to handle the volume level with the lid off, you would hear literally nothing with the lid on. The noise reduction of the cabinet is right about 65 DB. Hope that helps someone, thanks y’all for watching!
@@ColtCapperrune Good point, didn't think of that. Thanks again for the video.
WOW ---- WOW ! Colt I am turning 66 next month and I live and breath what you are doing and have done, and have to say I am totally jealous. I am working on my second studio in my home and I just keep running out of room, energy and time. What you have accomplished is incredible and I can see the enthusiasm and excitement in your videos, something we called passion back in the day because $50 a night never changed and the mold we were cut from, well you just do not come across that often anymore, or at least I don't. Keep pushing the envelope and know you are raising the bar for those who follow. And my hat is off to your other half. It takes a lot of support to get where your at and I believe you know what I am saying. So don't forget to say thank you occasionally, because behind every guitar and every hour there is a wonderful person who supported that. Keep it up and great job.
I echo those thoughts. For a self educated man, there's not much you dont know. In fact, I reckon if you dont know, you either work it out or trust in someone who does know.
would love to hear a comparison of iso cab to a proper in room mic'd cab and some Impulse responses to see how they all differ in and out of a mix.
Damn, man! That's one kick-ass design. You must have spent your nights thinking it over. Thank you for sharing your fantastic ideas with the rest of us.
Your guitar tone sounds so good. I would have never guessed it’s from an iso cab. That’s for the detailed information on the build. Must be heavy!!!!!
Your channel is invaluable in the sense that many channels tell you about gear and how to get sounds but very few if any actually explain how to build the studio correctly. Your iso cab is a stroke of genius in my opinion. I am a fan.
I’m very impressed with your iso cab. And by your attitude. Thank you for sharing this.
I like the way you floated the inner box. Nice job and thanks for posting.
Yours is the most complex and creatively designed iso cab I've seen. Excellent Job. Thank you for sharing your design. Great video, too.
Brilliant. Probably heavy.
Love it.
What a brilliant idea re floating the inner iso cab in the larger box!!!!! Superb :)
Damn man you know your stuff. Thanks for the concise information.
You need to patent this design. Seriously! Nice job.
The isobox has already been invented - all the ideas are in soundproofing manuals.
It would be really cool to illustrate swapping out a few different speakers and the tonal difference they make.
Man. So great. Well done. I've always wanted to make my own. One day!
Raytheon Orion Appreciate it! Thanks for watching!
@@ColtCapperrune keep `em coming!
My ISO cab builds sounded so bad, I literally threw them in the garbage. These days I kill a lot less volume, and use an entire 4x4x8 area to keep 10 speakers quiet. Carpet, foam, and ceiling tile. Very Red Green (duct tape!) style build.
Love your work, no cut corners.
Awesome Colt. Great job , love the iso cab.
This is outstanding! I happen to be in the process of building my own ISOCab and found many of your requirements for this "box" to be similar to my own. I do not live in an apartment so I do not have a common wall between my studio and a grumpy neighbor....but I DO have a wife who tolerates my sonic abuse. She has been a "good sport" for several years as I built the studio in one end of OUR home after our daughter moved away.
It occurred to me that perhaps I should not force her to endure the noise ( her description ) late into the night so the ISO BOX was conceived.
I built my box to hold a pair of 2x12 cabs. I drive them with a Morin modified JCM800 Marshall head. I used 3/4 inch MDF sheets ( REAL DENSE ). The floor is doubled-up so it is 1 1/2 inch thick. I installed the BIG 6 inch ball bearing castors with brakes.
I considered using the "suspension" technique for the speaker cabs but it was not practical for the cabinets I have. I de-coupled the box ( walls & top ) with two layers of 3/4 inch "R-TECH" foam insulation spaced 1/4 inch apart. Then I have 4" acoustic pyramid foam on the walls and top fixed to the foam insulation. The floor is 3" neoprene mat. ( It was a yoga mat in it's first life ). All the XLR & speaker jacks have been wired just as you have done.
This box is a 48" cube. It lives most of it's life in a storage shed just outside my house and will only fit through a sliding glass door into my living room . With the speaker cabinets inside it weighs a little over 600 pounds.
My wife is happy with the results , therefore I am happy.
Please share with me WHERE you found those latches for the top of your box!!!
Jeff Cramer
Rat Nest Studios
San Bernardino California
Great demo and understanding of acoustics/Sound Treatment and damping, just what I was looking for.
Great Craftsmen ship as well. I also really appreciate the fact that sometimes, you just got to build this stuff yourself to appease your needs!
love all your vids and knew you had "the stuff" but that solo at the intro caught me off guard!!! nice playing dude!
Another great video, I really enjoy seeing how you customize everything based on your needs and build it yourself. Super cool.
one could use Quiet Rock Dry wall ( Sheet of QuietRock is the equivalent of 8 sheets of the same thickness of stacked ) to further soundproof the ISO cab
Bro ,so jelly.....in a great way , love to tune in and great jam by the way .
Very cool man! I built one and sounded great as yours does, but had to take it apart because my wife didn’t want to look at it in our house(even if it was my studio room). I made a choice to shop around to find an iso cab that could fit in my closet. The best sounding, isolating and looking one I found was the SG-BOX by Grossmann! It is incredible as is the customer service. Plus it cost less to ship from overseas than building one and will save your back. It’s also ‘quiet enough’ that I can blast my EVH while our triplets sleep upstairs hehe! Great vid though!
That intro, is just so wicked, sir.
I had never seen one as a box inside a box. I had the same idea about the same time you did. I did mine five or six hears ago. Mine is very similar but weight was my #1 concern, so mine is 100% carbon fiber. I used nidacore and honeycomb for vibration and frequency differentiation between box 1 and 2. Mine weighs way less than a 4x12 cab. Both of my boxes are lined with different densities of sound deadening foam. I built a double box and a single box both, but like the double box design better.
I am glad I found this because I am tired of people telling me I wasted my time and created something useless. Actually, I am super surprised that more people aren't looking for these/making these. They are so useful in a studio situation.
Great job and great documentation.
Would you be willing to share your material list and dimensions?
@@AmericanOlympian Material list would be impossible, but I can do a quick video on it and give dimensions, etc.
Looks great, man. Nice cab.
Like it!
I'm thinking of building a couple of these but using lightweight concrete blocks to build the outer enclosure. The ones that are airated like pumice.
My studio is about 12 x 5 meters, so a reasonable size. There's actually only one corner of the room that is solid walls (its a solid stone, former cowshed), the other corners have two doorways and a large window, so thinking i could build the two booths in that solid corner with gaps behind and they will double as a giant bass trap.
BEST INFORMATIVE - EDUCATIONAL video !! Thank you for sharing your experience and education !
FANTASTIC video! Great design and presentation. I have a friend interested in building an ISO box and I will be sending him this video for sure.
Colt that iso cab is awesome!
Super informative and easy to understand
Just discover your channel! Sick project!
Greats videos. Thanks for sharing!
Man your channel is becoming one of my favourite channels in youtube! Great videos!! Thanks!!
Consider trying mass loaded vinyl for this sort of project. It will take care of a lot of mechanical vibration and sound transmission.
Was thinking the same thing myself. Even use it as another layer on each side of the drywall section between the outer ply's, with another layer of green glue each side of the MLV.
if you could soundproof even a small room you will be much happier, medium would be even better. But anything the size of an iso cab you will be unsatisfied with the sound. Tubby lows, no deep bass, weird mushy mids.
Yep, you designed and built it right Colt! I studied acoustics and studio building from writings of some of the best in the biz, including Rod Gervais, (author of "Build It Like A Pro"), "Boggy" Petrovic, Andre Vare, John L. Sayers, John H. Brandt, and many more. I did this for 1-1/2 years before my last personal studio build just to learn how to do it right. You've covered all the concepts Mass, Decoupling, Resonance Damping (mechanical and air-borne), Resonance Shifting, etc. using Green Glue, Rubber Isolation Hangers, Staggered Butt Joints, "Safe Door" Step Seals, etc. The only area that your design possibly doesn't cover completely (but it's obviously still great for guitar) is internal volume to get the air in the boxes to be of low resonance (yep, a sealed container has air resonance as well as panel resonance). This too could be mitigated by building a second "breather" iso box that had a "port within a port" out of steel water pipes as a connector-way between the two (separate) iso boxes. A lot of work to make this idea work, but it would yield approximately an octave lower resonance from the standpoint of the internal volume. Then you could design in an accommodation for bass speakers (maybe limiting it to a single 15")! Anyway, great video and excellent writing and playing - rock on!
This is an exceptionally intelligent design and to my ears the guitar tone was open and natural. It triggered an idea instantly. One could have an array of these in a room and create a situation where a band could play a take togther live and the bleed would be almost non existent. Obviously they'd need earphones, but they'd have the visual feed back and feeling. Vocalist would need to be in a booth. All of this aside, have you considered creating a complete design for this? An accurate piece by piece construction manual? I can see why, weight considered it would be difficult to sell commercially because the shipping alone would cost the same as the unit I guess. I would pay for a manual happily, because the level of detail is beyond my Capabilities, or at least it would be way harder without the manual. I have done everything from building furniture, pointing, wiring and I know how an idea expands as you go through the project, but for example the idea of staggering the joints. I don't think I would have thought of that, let alone the decoupling. You should definitely patent this idea if you haven't and you definitely deserved that Pepsi.
I like the hanging inner box concept to remove contact vibrations. When I build my iso boxes, I'll probably do a hanging floor I can just set my amps/cabs onto, as opposed to a second inner box.
Don't stop making videos your a very interesting dude and I love your videos! I know nothing about music but it makes me wanna start learning! Keep it UP!!!
Clever design, my dude.
I’m underway on my own copy of this cab. I work in a cabinet shop with tons of access to scrap plywood. Im trying to make mine lighter and smaller so I’ve gone with 3/4” plywood with 1/2” drywall green glued to the insides. I have 1” thick acoustic panels I salvaged from an old work project. All of this has allowed me to get down to a 36” long by 26” wide by 26” tall outer dimension. I’ve ordered my audio jacks as well as handles and latches. So far I’ve spent less than $60 since I got the plywood and acoustic panels free. If I can get 40 dB of reduction I’ll be extremely happy. If not I’ll have to up the insulation and add more layers of plywood to the outside
That’s amazing!! Keep us all posted!
@@ColtCapperrune will do! I should have it done in a week or two so I’ll report back
@@ColtCapperrune I finished my iso cab build today. I plugged in my Marshall origin 20. Volume on 10, gain on 10, boost switch on... 65 db on my decible reader. I was a little nervous because it was pretty light (198 lbs) but it did extremely well. I went in the other room to listen and all you can hear is faint bass. Nothing blaring but distinguishable. I may add another layer of 1/2” mdf and see if that can knock out some of that bass. Total I spent about $200 since the wood and acoustic panels were free. Thanks for the design and the video. I would have never come up with anything this effective on my own!
@@Notjay95 Awesome! Glad you got it done! I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how much difference adding another layer makes!
@@ColtCapperrune I went ahead and added the next layer. I was trying to play it while my wife was sleeping upstairs and she could still hear those bass frequencies I added 3/4” mdf, which I found out is denser than drywall, to the sides, bottom, and the top. I got it all put back together, plugged in and played a chord... i honestly couldn’t tell if the amp was actually working until I plugged in the microphone. It is 100% silent. I could keep it in my bedroom next to my sleeping wife and she wouldn’t hear it. I had green glue and noise proofing calk left over so I used that as well. I definitely think the second layer of wood is necessary.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing this. I really wanna build myself a nice ISO cab like yours now.
suspension idea is brilliant for taming low end. 65db! that is amazing when folks are buying isocabs for over $1k that only reduce around 30 db. .
Great stuff. I will keep watching your vids! Good communicator. Look forward to more. Best to you
So Glad I found you! You've covered quite a few of the things banging around in my head. Thanks dude!!
Man, you are genius! I'm pretty happy with the one I've made my own but this is definitely on another level, awesome playing as well, you're fkn inspiring! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻🤟🏻
Max thanks so much!! Nice Bogner in your pic!
Colt Capperrune thank you man, I love her pretty much :)))
What a great idea!!! Well done Colt!!!
Great job
Looks very impressive
I would love to hear the sound
Hi there... I always enjoy your videos is like talk with a friend...never change your style...
Built one after watching this! Its so great!! Sounds amazing and can be used in my apartment!!(thick walls though). Cannot thank you enough.
man, that is impressive to say the least. well done!!
some serious engineering went into this build. I would have never thought to do the suspended inner cab. Thanks for the knowledge
discovered you the other day, top tips and congratulations on your new studio. I have just spent alot of my money on starting my own PA and live recording set up, I am hoping to use the profits I make to start funding a decent home studio like you have now. Thanks for inspiring!
Most cabinets are about 30-35dB down. If this one is over 60 dB down, that is roughly 99.9% down from an SPL level, or about an 87.5% down from a perceived volume level, because decibels are base-10 logarithmic.
AWESOME JOB!!!
Really like your playing dude. The intro track was killer 👏👏🤘
Would love a short follow up video with how quiet the can sounds!!
Please take us through what you did in the production pretty please Colt
Fantastic job! Would it be possible to post the measurements of both speaker cabinet and the iso chamber?
I was thinking the same thing. It would take a hot minute but it could be extrapolated fairly closely using the speaker as the source. Be a lot easier if he posted the dimensions but I’m sure he’s very busy. Amazing iso cab regardless. Extremely well thought out and built.
thats one badass cab brother
Absolutely fantastic! Issue #1 I’m not handy issue#2 I’m really not handy like this.
I’m working on my own version. I am going to try building the outer box from the inside out so that I can test it as I build and see if multiple plywood/drywall layers are necessary. I think 3/4” Baltic birch and 2” of acoustic panels may be enough and would save my a lot of weight and cut down on size.
To give people an idea on how heavy this thing would be coming from a construction guy of many years (I'm out of that biz for a long time now) 1 4x8 3/4 sheet of plywood (or 23/32) is about 65-70 pounds. Considering all the layers, and looking like this is 8+ sheets, that's about 500 pounds. That would not be fun hauling that upstairs, no sir. What is even HEAVIER is MDF 4x8s, which are by my estimation 2x the weight, it's hard to handle solo. That's what I I'm going to use on my iso box. My studio is downstairs, and I'm happy for it.
Thanks for sharing your design, very cool.
If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you have gaps in the weatherstripping on your inner box at the corners. If you tighten up those corners I bet it will get even quieter! You went through as many measures as possible on the outer box, so it might be a nice, easy improvement!
Man I really enjoy your videos. Great job on your cab however I only managed to watch it till the end after I had to repeat your riff for like 30 times for my 3yo son :D cheers!
Now you just need the trick Sylvia Massy uses for feedback for solos when she has her 4x12 in an isolated room... Patch in a small tube combo in the control room.
You can do feedback with studio monitors, but a lot of people complain it's not the same, kinda like with an FRFR cabinet.
Haven't tried it myself, but I'm no soloist. Normally, I'd do some gibberish and outsource it to someone better. In the meantime, it's usually in the same room, but I'm looking for a quiet solution other than digital.
Keith Merrow has good results with just a Randall iso cab, but he still keeps it in another room, and usually uses the same speaker, and I guess the combination works for him. He just skipped the v30 and uses some WGS speaker that gives him what he needs... But that might not be ideal if one wants to use a different speaker I suppose. That specific combination might just work for him... Could sound like garbage with a different speaker..
Would be cool to make something where you could change the dimensions of the speaker box by adding / pulling boards... But that could make the whole setup bigger...
I've thought about doing this with Mesa cabs though... To convert an OS to Traditional. One would just have to put small brackets inside, on the top and bottom to change the height from 32" to 30" (doing the math because those are the outer dimensions of the OS and Trad cabs). I suppose that if someone has room, they can just have two cabs, but it saves some cheese and room for people that are in a bit more of a cramped situation, if they want to experiment.
Great Idea, box in box, kinda like a microphone basket.
Brilliant construction and design!
Aaaahhhhh!!!! Get a new stool!!!!!
Nice video and great info, but got dang that creaking is driving me nuts!
I love your stuff so much been watching since 2019 and finally my house is starting to look studio worthy lol got some gears n stuff now , you're a huge inspiration and hero to me. Love to be able to get your autograph with Andrew masters to hang in my jam / studio space, it's not quite there but done put in some work so far lol
Amazing and obviously well thought out iso cab, man! Great playing as well. New sub!
The opening tune was AWESOME😀😀😀😀😣
Andras Remenyi thank you!
Nice Job.. Would have been nice to see a db meter reading inside and outside :-)
Ok after seeing your part 2 i understood how quiet it is.. Great job
Nice choice in microphones!
The M201 sounds so much better than the average SM57.
Also, great project and video - I'm looking forward to more of your videos.
Hi Colt,- thanks for your kind reply. In case you were wondering what progressive operatic symphonic vikingr folk metal actually sounds like ( as I have a feeling it´s probably not THE most in vogue style of music in Nashville, Tennessee :) ) I have taken the liberty to put together a suggestion list to some bands and some characteristic songs,- if for no other reason than to bring y´all up to speed on what the international rock scene sounds like today. Should give you and all of the other hard working music people following your channel a slight competitive edge, hopefully. Hope you´re gonna enjoy it ( even though it´s a bit different from what you people are normally used to).
Here goes:
Nightwish- Storytime and Song Of Myself - Live At Wacken 2013 ( Floor Jansen ) ( Symphonic Metal)
Jinjer - Pisces- Live Session and Teacher, Teacher ( Tatiana Shmaylyuk) ( Progressive Metalcore)
Epica - Sancta Terra - Live Retrospect Show Ft. Floor Jansen (Simone Simons) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal )
Nightwish - Phantom Of The Opera - End Of An Era dvd 2008 ( Tarja Turunen ) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal )
Epica - Consign To Oblivion and Cry For The Moon (studio version)( Simone Simons)( Operatic Symphonic Metal )
Arch Enemy - Nemesis - Live At Wacken ( Alissa White-Gluz) ( Melodic Death Metal )
Eluveitie - Thousandfold and Rebirth (Chrigel Glanzmann / Anna Murphy) ( Folk Metal )
Faun - Federkleid and Walpurgisnacht ( Fiona Rüggeberg / Katja Moslehner) ( Think Euro Bluegrass and Good Ole Boys from the Middle Ages :) )
Blackmore´s Night - Name Of A Rose ( Candice Night / Ritchie Blackmore)
(Faun and Blackmore´s Night - The precursor genre of music for modern day Operatic Symphonic Metal, Power Metal, Folk Metal and Viking Metal - modern day European Folk)
Amon Amarth - Guardians Of Asgaard - Live At Summer Breeze and Twilight Of The Thunder God- Live Official Video ( Johan Hegg) ( Papa Bear King Vikingr and his raiders having a ball - Swedish/ Finnish Viking Metal )
Tyr- Hold the Heathen Hammer High and Sunset Shore - Official Videos ( Faroese Viking Metal )
Eivor Pálsdottir - Trøllabundin - (live or studio) ( Eivør Pálsdottir) ( Faroese ancient pagan Roots-Folk)
Blackbriar - I´d Rather Burn ( official video) ( Zora Cock) ( Dutch Power Metal )
Delain - Masters Of Destiny and Burning Bridges - Official Videos ( Charlotte Wessels ) ( Dutch Symphonic Metal)
Frozen Crown - Neverending ( Italian Power Metal )
Wardruna ft. Aurora - Helvegen - live ( Einar Kvitrafn Selvik / Aurora) ( Original Viking Age lyrics,- modern Scandinavian Vikingr-Folk )
Heilung I Lifa - Krigsgaldr ( Maria Franz) ( shamanistic Late Bronze Age tribal music )
Give them all a listen,- you will not regret it.
Enjoy.
Amazing concept! Really great idea, especially with the decoupling :-)
Michael Firmont thanks!! Appreciate you watching!
Great cab.ive seen a couple of commercially available cabs that are terrific. One was featured on henning pauly's eighth channel. The othe was German made, in a flight case and the speaker baffles slid in and out so you can swap speakers easily and opens like a flight case. Really good and there's a band that tours with them. Also I heard about a big band that has huge isocabs under the stage that 8x4 or something crazy, with a 4x12 inside.they must weigh a ton.
I'm subscribing just because you're from Peoria, Illinois! Land of Lincoln Baby!
Great playing buddy!
A sample of in room volume with cabinet compared to iso box would be nice.
Very nice! I am sure that you took extra precaution around those saws and fingers, lol 👍
Awesome job. Not to nitpick but what about vibration noise from the metal to metal suspension hooks on the inside? Would at least wrap them in teflon tape or something to be on the safe side. In either case, I love the cab! Nice work man
You deserve more subscribers!
chang li Really appreciate that! The channel is continuing to grow, just trying to put out the best content I can, and content I enjoy making. Thanks so much for following along!
wow!! That's a pretty robust construction.. phew!!
Akurios haha that’s it is! Thanks!
226KG !! thats a big fella. great design love the decoupling idea.
Awesome video amigo. Great to hear more rock out of Nashville
Zach Martini Thanks man! Probably 50% of my production work is country based, and probably 90% of my session guitar work is country as well, but I produce a lot of rock, and my background is all rock. Felt good to shake off the dust and play something heavy LOL, thanks for watching!
Pretty awesome work. I am impressed!
Dude, you didn't make an isocab, this is a bunker! I'm researching some projects to build one, and I got a lot of lessons from yours, Thank you.
That's awesome. My wife and neighbors would love this..lol
Good information. Been thinking of building my own iso cab as well. Might want to oil that squeaky chair though.
thanx for showing this impressive isocab, subscribed!
Not exactly the same, but a number of years ago, we built something similar for a very loud server that was going into a small office with no server closet. It worked wonders to keep things quiet. The big challenge with that was creating a dramatic drop in noise while building in a fan system to air cool the server that ran pretty hot. Anyway, nice work!
great video, super informative! thank you for taking the time to make this
I have one too in my studio, works well with a greenback.... I think i might need to do one with a 10" driver though... could be cool
Nice job, Colt,- would the same idea work for bass recording or do you just go active DI with a parallel signal path for preamp and OD ?
Would still want the option of hooking up an actual bass speaker and a couple of mics,- in my case Sennheiser e905 for top and Sennheiser e602 for low end.
The speaker is a 35 yrs. old Peavey 15" and I just love the sound of it.
I´m normally a modern day Progressive Operatic Symphonic / Vikingr-Folk metal guitar player but it seems to me that nowadays if you ain´t chickin´pickin´you ain´t shite,- so I gues I´ll be going for a Tele and dusting off my old Peavey Classic 50-410 combo very soon and learn some of that kind of playing technique.
( Yes, I like the old school Peavey gear,- can throw it down a flight of stairs,- just keeps on working! )
Thank you for your channel,- it´s very interesting stuff even to me half a continent and all the way across the Atlantic in Scandinavia away, - so many greetings,- will be checking back in with you! :)
Ulf Danielsen I normally record bass direct, whenever I have both a microphone, and a DI, I always end up preferring the DI anyway. I’m certain you could make something like this for bass guitar, but it would have to be much bigger, and probably wouldn’t be nearly as quiet since the lower the frequency, the harder it is to contain. Thanks for watching!
Amazing design, will build one this summer. what are the measurements for the plywood sheets?
Super helpful. Thank you very much. I’m ok with a lot of digital stuff on my UA Apollo system BUT not guitar modeling stuff. I live in a condo in Chicago, so this is what I need to do. I CAN SAY I would have done it badly had I not seen this. Sounds a lot of money but compared to a Kemper... or building the ISO cab twice because the first one didn’t get the job done, it’s not bad. Thanks again!!
Great video, it’s a beast that iso box
This is amazing Colt!! so cool, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the in-depth explanations!