Practice Room Setup

[JTeagarden]

General question: How far from a wall should you ideally be practicing from? Are you looking for lots of feedback (close to a wall), or very little? Is the idea to sound good to yourself, or to create conditions closer to how you would hear yourself in performance?

[CheeseTray]

My practice room is about 10 x 16 and I sit about 10 feet from the wall. I don't want a face full of relflection because you never get that in a performing environent. More importantly for me, I set the room up to be somewhat dry - not so dry that it's unsatisfying to play in, but still dry enought to make me actively work to gerenate a warm, resonant sound. That way, when I am out working, I can back off a bit and let it "sing" with increased ease. Its sort of a "running with ankle weights" concept. I am a legit player usually working in large rooms; commercial/jazz players might find a different room concept more effective.

[JTeagarden]

Thanks, that's the tentative conclusion I reached: Too much reflection kind of gives you a false sound in your ears, and you should not have that in your head as the sound you're chasing in performance, and no reflection is very unsatisfying, like you're not playing at all.

I definitely hear every mistake with greater distance from the wall, and especially inconsistent articulations.

[drpmorris99]

I'm no pro at all, but I recently added a significant amount of acoustic foam to the walls in my practice space. It doubles as an office for working from home and now my son's drum kit practice space - hence the foam! The room itself is about 16ft by 8ft so not huge at all. I do play fairly close to the wall just because the way the room is set up very multi functionally! (There used to be my bike sat on a turbo trainer where the drum kit is now!), but now I'm playing into a wall with foam probably just above the line if my bell if not directly at it, but with a set of shelves basically in line! .

It's been interesting practicing in it since adding the foam and things. The room itself is much drier obviously, which is revealing I think for my sound quality. The drum kit is a bit of a pain as the drums will resonate of my playing though! Looking for a heavy ish blanket or something I can encourage my son to throw over it when he's finished practising, but not really sure what's going to work and not be too big and bulky and a pain when not on the kit!

Without the kit resonances, I did think it might make it easier to record my practice and get better outcomes from that, but not got round to finding a mic or anything for that yet... Maybe one day!

[tbdana]

General question: How far from a wall should you ideally be practicing from? Are you looking for lots of feedback (close to a wall), or very little? Is the idea to sound good to yourself, or to create conditions closer to how you would hear yourself in performance?

Both lots of immediate feedback and very little are bad for me. I prefer a room that is simply honest. For me the best practice spaces are not the ones where I sound the best, but the ones where everything is the most exposed and there's nothing to hide my faults.

I think the notion of how far from the wall to play isn't the right question. It's what happens to the sound after it does hit a wall. I practice in my little home theater, because the room is very heavily treated acoustically. Lots of sound absorption (especially in the bass) and dispersion. No direct reflections. No overlapping and competing sound waves. Playing into a reflective wall is, to me, the worst. I want the sound to bounce and then quickly disperse and disappear. I don't need sound waves competing and colliding, and I don't need reverb to cover my flaws.

[JTeagarden]

I have settled on a happy medium, practicing in a room roughly 12' x 20,' lengthwise, in the middle, I can now hear every sloppy articulation very clearly, hard to fix what you cannot hear, also adjusting to find the right effort to fill the horn at different dynamics in a way that makes me sound like the same trombonist, and not three different ones.

[BaritoneJack]

I'm sitting here chuckling, as to when is a practise room "not large". I've just measured mine - which is the tiny shower / toilet room in my small apartment, and the only room I have which doesn't have a thin wall or ceiling between me and my neighbours. After deducting the space taken up by the shower cubicle, I'm left with a space 4ft wide x 4ft 6" long - and only have that much because my 'seat' is a cushion on top of the toilet!

I can't make any alterations, as I only rent the apartment. What's annoying is that the outer walls of the farm building (dating to the mid 1880s) are built of gritstone, and 24 - 30" thick, but all the inner walls and ceilings put in when the cart sheds were converted to apartments have been built as cheap and flimsy as possible. Ho, hum

If I had a 10' x 12' room to practise in, with wall insulation, I'd feel like I was in the middle of wonderful dream, and hoping not to wake up . . .

With best regards,

Baritone Jack

[BPBasso]

In the room I currently practice in, I usually play towards the driest area of the room. Little resonance. Rug and furniture absorb most of the sound. About 8' from a wall.

When I feel I've prepared some music or am sounding particularly good some days, I'll perform facing towards an adjacent wall or corner that allows the sound to resonate and grow. About 10-12'

[baBposaune]

My practice space, by default, is 18' x 24' with 9 foot ceiling. The floor is ceramic tile with a wool area rug. I play in the direction of the corner of the room about 19 feet away. This all came about by experimenting with different rooms and finding one that was not dead or way too live. I say this practice space is by default because other rooms sounded harsh and in others my sound got swallowed up due to wall to wall carpet.

I also use this room for duets, quartets, quintets because we all can hear each other and the volume doesn't get painfully loud. The rug is covering about 1/3 of the tile floor and it seems to have just the right amount of sound absorption.

Pitch, tone and articulation is readily heard but there is no "bloom" to the sound to give me any false feedback. I think in a house or apartment there can be adjustments made to reflective surfaces by adding, repositioning sound absorbing materials that do not have to be expensive, studio grade materials. I like my wool rug because as the Dude would say, "It ties the whole room together."

I don't think there is an "ideal" distance from a wall. There are too many factors that impact the acoustics of any room. Find the sweet spot for the room you have and try moving things, adding, removing soft materials until you can get a practice space you can live with.