first layer mud, tape, foam, and caulk done.
i finished treating all the joints/perimeters tonight. joints were done with standard mud and tape. wall perimeters (at this point, just wall and floor corners since there is no ceiling yet) are packed with foam rod and then sealed with acoustic caulk. the full wall treatment isn't hard per se, but a proper explanation is a bit verbose. the john sayers studio design forum has a great post that goes into great detail on the sequence. my sequence is slightly different from what they illustrate since i'm doing wall-wall-ceiling-ceiling rather than ceiling-wall-ceiling-wall, but the general ideas still apply.
my mudding and taping turned out remarkably well given that i'm a total n00b in this area. i ended up with some incredibly smooth joints and only messed up 2 of them (tape's bulging out a little bit). luckily, that doesn't really matter for the first layer, so i can just leave it as is. nice thing about doing multiple wall layers is you can use the underlying layer(s) as practice.
no overly interesting pics tonight, but i did snap one of the completed mudding/taping for a portion of the room:
