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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how instruments will fare in the "raise your family in a downtown studio apartment" world advocated here.

Instruments take space, and some amount of separation from neighbors (and other household members) seems necessary for practicing to be socially acceptable.

How does children's music practice work in tiny apartments with paper-thin walls? Do European parents rent space in communal practice rooms or something?

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In the rush toward luxurious cappuccino bars and climbing walls I don't know if college dorms still have music practice rooms but in the old days we used to have those in the dorm basements.

This should scale to apartments, but in the dog eat dog world of urban living those little windowless rooms are probably be rented out for thousands of dollars per month.

I used to work with a guy who smoked (yeah I'm old, nobody smokes anymore) but the point is if he spent fifteen minutes every hour on smoke break I should be able to take my flute to work and get in a quick practice session maybe twice a day.

I think this is part of it. You can't really practice acoustic in an apartment building, unless you're my rude upstairs neighbor. You can practice electric piano, FLP, and rapping - which just happens to be the major modes of musical production these days.

Odd. Good thought, thanks closeparen.

Electric instruments fare very well in this world, thanks to constantly improving micro amplifiers and amps for headphones. Also, in dense areas, practice spaces are common and affordable because there is enough demand for them. There are two within a quarter mile of my apartment in Boston, one of which (the one I use) has at 60 rooms. There are several more such spaces in the city. I split mine with others but it would be affordable in any case, and I can drive my big amps as hard as I want there. It also doubles as storage space for some of the more ungainly equipment (100lb bass cab, etc), removing a lot of the difficulty of keeping things at home. Frankly, it's also more secure than my apartment -- heavier door, heavier deadbolt, no windows.

Electric guitar is perfect. Headphones. The unamplified strings are almost inaudible from the next room.

A guitar doesn't take up much physical space, but if you want to play with amplification, the noise issue does become a big factor. It is possible, however, to play with headphones, so that your neighbors won't hear you at all.

I'll also add that with an electric guitar, it's totally normal to practice without amplification. If you're playing non-distorted parts, and your room is quiet, and you're not totally deaf, an unamplified electric guitar is loud enough to be heard well, while not being loud enough to be heard outside the room. Playing distorted parts doesn't work so well, however, because you can't really hear all the harmonics very well without the amplifier, and the distortion changes the sound so much.

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