How Many of You Wish You Had a Place to Get Away to 4 Music?

[dave999z]

when i lived with a girlfriend, it was a must to have a space elsewhere. mostly for vocals (i'm too self conscious to think about someone hearing my dry solo vocal takes), but even for other things.

these days i live alone, so making music at home is fine. (standalone house, so neighbors aren't a problem. except when i turn up my Marshall.)

if you're in a band, having a practice space somewhere where you can leave you crap setup is awesome, and you can just go there anytime to work on (live) stuff. most band practice spaces don't make great recording spaces though. and unless you have a truly mobile setup conducive to dragging your computer back and forth, you won't have your recording gear there anyway. my music computer is a Mac Pro, and i use it for a ton of things other than music. so i couldn't just leave it at some music-only space.

[su]

actually went the opposite direction, sort of...

my studios have typically been in basements. In my current house, the basement is always dark and is cold in the winter

Moved my stuff up to a spare bedroom that sees much more social activity than the basement. It also has windows and isn't cold. Getting much more done upstairs. Not wanting to isolate from others when making music was a motivating factor in all this and it's paid off

Music making is pretty quiet for me - I work completely in the box though I drum on a controller pretty often. I'm a drummer who sold the acoustic kit decades ago , so I can relate to the noise/housemate issue

[n8tron]

I would love this. I have a hard time working with other people around, but I've learned to get by doing it out of necessity.

I've worked with other composers who don't mind if your in the same room, and they will work shit out, sing out bad melodies until they get it right and do boring edits without a care that you are there. Sadly I'm not to that point.

But... don't make not having a space for music an excuse for not making music. If that is the case, if you ever do get a separate space chances are it will just be something else hindering your creative flow. Learn to work through those with what you got.

[humnumb]

Great discussion that I'm sure is relevant to many of us. Reminds me of this talk by John Cleese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug

[starving student]

Great discussion that I'm sure is relevant to many of us. Reminds me of this talk by John Cleese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug

great clip humnumb thanks, I never get tired of Cleese.

I've got a nice little space at my rest, I would probably find it almost Ideal if the other people I live with weren't here, and lately even my little kitty whom I love dearly has been contributing to the problem. I'm very sensitive to my environments and when someone needs something I'm not the type of person that can ignore that if I'm in close proximity. When my cat is calling me then I can't just let her keep calling and not respond and so forth and when the other occupant of my dwelling is home it's almost impossible to keep focus and I think it has allot to do with how my creativity is wired and also the people I live with. First of all I'm not really creative in the least, if anything I just catch the ideas as they float by and they go by quickly so I'm always trying to put the song down before I forget it all, and then there are all of these other signals coming my way in the household that are interrupting the signal that I'm trying to capture. I once had my girlfriend move around the corner for a few months and it was wonderful, It felt like I didn't need to sleep eat or breathe just do music, but things didn't work out well were she was and she came back and so did my signal interference.

[polyslax]

My room is one of the most high traffic areas of the house... it's not even a fully enclosed room, so I have constant interruptions. I have no problem with that, and it's probably better for me to be forced to be in touch with other members of society.

[hacktheplanet]

I share a studio space with a few other people. It's $75 per month per person, and I have all my crap there. We can be as loud as we want whenever we want, and it's totally awesome. I did the bedroom studio thing for years. And while it's convenient, it's WAY too easy to just play computer games while my gear sits collecting dust.

If I were rich, I'd have a separate studio in the basement that you enter through a little tunnel with a ladder under a secret door in the closet. Barring that, I'd put it at the top of the house in a room surrounded entirely with windows.

[oblique strategies]

I have been the most creative in spaces that can accommodate higher volumes & that have limited access to other people.

My favorite places I have lived in have been warehouse & commercial spaces that allowed me to explore anything at any hour. Bring nocturnal this is very important to me. I could be loud, I could sing, have musicians & collaborators over, record, all without any hindrances.

So, I prefer to have my studio where I live, but I prefer to live in a space that is more of a studio than a home.

I am also very sensitive to my environment, so the quieter the better. Both of the spaces I mention above were dead quiet at night. Perfect environments for creating the delicate, spooky, dark ambient music that I primarily make... Also good for tearing it up with drums & for DJ practice.

In the past I was fortunate. Not so anymore, I'm stuck in suburbia. But for being in suburbia I have a decent situation & can make music all night at reasonable volume levels without disturbing anyone. It's just not a creative environment, quite the opposite.

My advice is to find a warehouse that you can live in, then you can have it both ways!

[martinkellogs]

edited

[Saxer]

i work at home and as i does music for living, i got the "living room" as my studio. it´s the most used room in the house (beside bed room) and i´m mostly alone there during the day. the studio is "switched on" all time, so i can go there any time and work immediately. sometimes i work at night, sometimes in the morning... the only "disturbing time" is in the afternoon, when my wife comes home. she get´s me back to social contacts, eating, moving...
i could not imagine to go out for making music (exept live gigs of course), i like the way of mixing work and living... i actually can´t divide work and spare time.

[UncleAge]

I've got a place for my hobby but it's not the best space to be creative. It's quiet and private and my girlfriend is totally supportive of everything I'm trying to accomplish. However, when I look at the stuff I've worked on over the last 20+ years it seems that I was the most creative when I was living in places that were sparse, domestically speaking, and dedicated to just this one thing, my music. It's a balancing act that I'm still getting used to really. My limitations are not space related nowadays, I'd say they are more time related than anything. I no longer have the time to let things just evolve naturally like I used to. I'm slowly turning that into a positive though.

[evon]

I've got a place for my hobby but it's not the best space to be creative. It's quiet and private and my girlfriend is totally supportive of everything I'm trying to accomplish. However, when I look at the stuff I've worked on over the last 20+ years it seems that I was the most creative when I was living in places that were sparse, domestically speaking, and dedicated to just this one thing, my music. It's a balancing act that I'm still getting used to really. My limitations are not space related nowadays, I'd say they are more time related than anything. I no longer have the time to let things just evolve naturally like I used to. I'm slowly turning that into a positive though.

Trust me the fact that you did better music 20 years ago has nothing to do with location. It is just a fact of life that we do our best creations when we knew little about music production. The more we know the worse our music sounds.

Doesn't seem logical though, it probably has to do with the ratio of creativity to know-how. The more Know-How the less the Creativity. Therefore, I can see a formula right away: Success is being able to achieve the optimal mix ("mix"-pun intended)of both.

[UncleAge]

Trust me the fact that you did better music 20 years ago has nothing to do with location.

Not necessarily 20 years ago but more like periods during those 20 years. They usually coincided with moving to a new place (city) and having ample time on my hands. I wasn't getting frequent calls from folks and having to participate in things that were distractions. At least not as much as when I was around friends and family. It allowed for massive amounts of creative time. So in some respects in did have to do with location. It's just a little more relative in nature than absolute.

[n8tron]

It is just a fact of life that we do our best creations when we knew little about music production. The more we know the worse our music sounds.

I personally couldn't disagree more with this. A teacher of mine once said: (paraphrasing here) you are at your best when your mind and your heart work together to their fullest potential...

[beats me]

My room is one of the most high traffic areas of the house... it's not even a fully enclosed room, so I have constant interruptions. I have no problem with that, and it's probably better for me to be forced to be in touch with other members of society.

At one of my dwellings my music area was in what would be considered the dining room and one of the walls had a bar separating it from the kitchen. It was extremely difficult to get in the zone with my roommate's doucher boyfriend constantly in the kitchen deep frying mozzarella sticks and making blender chocolate milkshakes under the bright fluorescent lights.