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I lived in NYC for 8 years, and never had a single complaint about my practicing. The wording of our lease specifically ALLOWED for musical instrument practice from something like 8am to 10pm.

It also helped me that the trombone player downstairs was practicing about 8 hours per day, and only a few doors from the leasing office. I asked them once... they said it's not against the rules, nobody else is home to complain, and he's a pretty good player.

Its worse, when I lived I a flat in Copenhagen, all neighbors made incredible noise all day long. Soap operas for hours at full level, parties in the middle of night, motorbike repairs in the backyard, people arguing and yelling, whatever. But me poor guy practicing flute or trombone for an hour in the afternoon, I was almost thrown out of my rented flat.

Luckily I own my own house now...

Tell him to agree to play something else... then switch to bagpipes!

IIRC, when I lived in an apartment in NYC, you could practice till 11 PM. I was reminded of this once, at 11:02 PM....

This was one of the reasons (among many others) I bought land and got the hell outta there.

He's practicing inside, and they are still annoyed by it? Are the houses that close together and/or townhouses? In my neighborhood one of the younger kids was an aspiring drummer, probably 15 years ago. You could near him all the way down the block. People didn't complain. These neighbors need to shut up.

I feel sorry for the kid. He is serious and talented for his age, yet has to deal with a few "Karens" in his neighborhood who just have to bitch and complain about his practicing.

8am is a little early for that racket....

Now you got me thinking??

Do they call “Karens” Karen down there?? Sheilas, maybe??

smileatom wrote:Karen is a reddit meme...FYI

I don’t recognize that fake news, I trust the Urban Dictionary!!

When I lived in town, my house was situated on a one-third acre lot, which meant at least 50 feet to the houses on either side, and at least 100 feet to the house across the street.

My music room was on the first floor, at the front of the house. The neighbor across the street complained about my playing at the unholy hour of about 8:30 PM. The reason? "We just had a baby."

(I'm recalling my mother running the vacuum cleaner after bedtime, and just learning to block out noise because it was a part of life. I shudder to think what that now-20-something child must suffer surrounded by the noise that 20-somethings seem happy to endure, having been protected from what could not be very much sound coming from across the street. It's not like I'm the loudest player ever. But new parents are irrational in every dimension.)

So, being the neighborly guy I am, I moved my practicing to the basement. The basement of that house has concrete walls, of which only about a foot is above the grade on the front side of the house. My wife tells me that standing at the front door, you could hear that a tuba was being played, but it was not in any way loud.

Yup, at 8:45 one evening, husband from across the street knocks at the door. "The tuba playing is keeping the baby awake and my wife sent me over to ask you to stop." He looked embarrassed, because he knew in his heart of hearts that he was making a wholly unreasonable request. I told him I sympathized, but that I had already moved to the basement and would continue to practice music in the evenings, and that perhaps they should shut their windows and turn on their AC if it's too loud for them. He said okay and left. That was the last time either of them acknowledged that we existed on this earth.

Had it been after midnight, I would have been more accommodating, though I've always used late evenings to practice. It doesn't bother my wife even after she's gone to bed, and she's in the same house.

It was one of the factors (of many more) that motivated our move to a rural area where we have six acres and hundreds of feet to the nearest houses.

But I remember it when my neighbor practices his shooting, which he does every day, using what sounds like a 105mm Howitzer.

Rick "allergic to shared walls for lots of reasons" Denney

Tuba, being a bass instrument, will not only be heard by your next door neighbor, but very possibly another two neighbors down as well (in many flats). Down, up sideways, crossways, etc. Though nobody really cares if a neighbor is bashing his wife's head in every night, or the kids get thrown up against the wall now and again, tuba scales seem to invoke more irritation.

Sollution? Come to grips with the social rule that your home is a living space and not a work space and rent a practice space (or squat one).

And when you do decide to practice, communicate. Get to be friends with your neighbors. Talk to them. If they come to like you they will feel less aggressed about your playing.

P R A C T I C E

M U T E

smileatom wrote:

pjv wrote: Come to grips with the social rule that your home is a living space and not a work space and rent a practice space (or squat one).

While this is one perspective, in the US anyway, many cities have explicit affordances for apt dwellers and homeowners about musicians be permitted during certain hours to practice.
While this doesnt make it an immutable right, it is something. I do have a bassoon player buddy who was run out of his apt in Philly by a landlord quite some years ago.

I guess the answer is "your mileage may vary".

How can that be? You can barely hear a bassoon at the other end of the same apartment.

anotherjtm2 wrote:You can barely hear a bassoon at the other end of the same apartment.

Who’d want to!?

Anyway, if you're gonna play at home, learn who your neighbors are.

And if you're not gonna play at home? Learn who your neighbors are.

Social distancing has nothing to do with building friendships.

On the rental end of things, as a small time landlord (one unit) I have a slightly differing perspective on things. My rental is a good part of my retirement income and we (my wife and I) keep it because it diversifies our income stream. We don't discriminate on a racial basis and try to be fair, but fair housing laws say you can't discriminate based on things like family size, but there is no one looking into your head to see if you are being honest. If you want to rent to someone with no kids instead of someone with four kids, two to a bedroom, you merely have to find a plausible legal reason to refuse the person with kids. The same would be true of refusing a musician with a loud instrument to practice daily. I don't live that close to my rental unit...about a quarter mile away, but I've known the rental unit's closest neighbor, a 90 year old lady, for twenty years. It might be my inclination and in my best interest to keep her happy and pick someone else over the family with the tuba playing kid. Not a decision I would make lightly or without agonizing over the poor tuba playing high schooler looking for a college scholarship, but it could end up being a tough one. And in my suburban area, once a lease is up, I'm not under any obligation to rent again to a tenant and might decide to move along to someone else who is less trouble. Something to consider if you are getting complaints from the neighbors in a high housing demand area. The landlord is probably not under any obligation to re-rent to you again.

marccromme wrote:Its worse, when I lived I a flat in Copenhagen, all neighbors made incredible noise all day long. Soap operas for hours at full level, parties in the middle of night, motorbike repairs in the backyard, people arguing and yelling, whatever. But me poor guy practicing flute or trombone for an hour in the afternoon, I was almost thrown out of my rented flat.
..

I lived in a small village in Germany for five years courtesy of my employer (Uncle Sam.) Germany has strictly enforced noise ordinances; they go to bed early and they take noise seriously. My landlord said music should not be a problem, Germans respected the arts. I think. He had very little English and my Deutsch was not great. But I lived in a corner house, with foot thick masonry walls, who would possibly notice? I played every morning around 5:00 or so, before getting on the road to work.

and then one summer Saturday, around 0400, the village assembled the town band in my garden under my bedroom window, played one tune, and departed. I guess they were sending a message - probably appreciation for my playing, most likely. Or maybe not.

16. A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood

If it please your neighbor to break the sacred calm of night with the snorting of an unholy trombone, it is your duty to put up with his wretched music and your privilege to pity him for the unhappy instinct that moves him to delight in such discordant sounds. I did not always think thus: this consideration for musical amateurs was born of certain disagreeable personal experiences that once followed the development of a like instinct in myself. Now this infidel over the way, who is learning to play on the trombone, and the slowness of whose progress is almost miraculous, goes on with his harrowing work every night, uncurled by me, but tenderly pitied. Ten years ago, for the same offense, I would have set fire to his house. At that time I was a prey to an amateur violinist for two or three weeks, and the sufferings I endured at his hands are inconceivable. He played "Old Dan Tucker," and he never played any thing else; but he performed that so badly that he could throw me into fits with it if I were awake, or into a nightmare if I were asleep. As long as he confined himself to "Dan Tucker," though, I bore with him and abstained from violence; but when he projected a fresh outrage, and tried to do "Sweet Home," I went over and burnt him out. My next assailant was a wretch who felt a call to play the clarionet. He only played the scale, however, with his distressing instrument, and I let him run the length of his tether, also; but finally, when he branched out into a ghastly tune, I felt my reason deserting me under the exquisite torture, and I sallied forth and burnt him out likewise. During the next two years I burned out an amateur cornet player, a bugler, a bassoon-sophomore, and a barbarian whose talents ran in the base-drum line.

I would certainly have scorched this trombone man if he had moved into my neighborhood in those days. But as I said before, I leave him to his own destruction now, because I have had experience as an amateur myself, and I feel nothing but compassion for that kind of people. Besides, I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument, and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, that are bound to wake up and demand attention some day. Therefore, you who rail at such as disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a fiddle, beware! for sooner or later your own time will come. It is customary and popular to curse these amateurs when they wrench you out of a pleasant dream at night with a peculiarly diabolical note; but seeing that we are all made alike, and must all develop a distorted talent for music in the fullness of time, it is not right. I am charitable to my trombone maniac; in a moment of inspiration he fetches a snort, sometimes, that brings me to a sitting posture in bed, broad awake and weltering in a cold perspiration. Perhaps my first thought is, that there has been an earthquake; perhaps I hear the trombone, and my next thought is, that suicide and the silence of the grave would be a happy release from this nightly agony; perhaps the old instinct comes strong upon me to go after my matches; but my first cool, collected thought is, that the trombone man's destiny is upon him, and he is working it out in suffering and tribulation; and I banish from me the unworthy instinct that would prompt me to burn him out.

After a long immunity from the dreadful insanity that moves a man to become a musician in defiance of the will of God that he should confine himself to sawing wood, I finally fell a victim to the instrument they call the accordeon. At this day I hate that contrivance as fervently as any man can, but at the time I speak of I suddenly acquired a disgusting and idolatrous affection for it. I got one of powerful capacity, and learned to play "Auld Lang Syne" on it. It seems to me, now, that I must have been gifted with a sort of inspiration to be enabled, in the state of ignorance in which I then was, to select out of the whole range of musical composition the one solitary tune that sounds vilest and most distressing on the accordeon. I do not suppose there is another tune in the world with which I could have inflicted so much anguish upon my race as I did with that one during my short musical career.

After I had been playing "Lang Syne" about a week, I had the vanity to think I could improve the original melody, and I set about adding some little flourishes and variations to it, but with rather indifferent success, I suppose, as it brought my landlady into my presence with an expression about her of being opposed to such desperate enterprises. Said she, "Do you know any other tune but that, Mr. Twain?" I told her, meekly, that I did not. "Well, then," said she, "stick to it just as it is; don't put any variations to it, because it's rough enough on the boarders the way it is now."

The fact is, it was something more than simply "rough enough" on them; it was altogether too rough; half of them left, and the other half would have followed, but Mrs. Jones saved them by discharging me from the premises.

I only staid one night at my next lodging-house. Mrs. Smith was after me early in the morning. She said, "You can go, sir; I don't want you here; I have had one of your kind before – a poor lunatic, that played the banjo and danced breakdowns, and jarred the glass all out of the windows. You kept me awake all night, and if you was to do it again, I'd take and mash that thing over your head!" I could see that this woman took no delight in music, and I moved to Mrs. Brown's.

For three nights in succession I gave my new neighbors "Auld Lang Syne," plain and unadulterated, save by a few discords that rather improved the general effect than otherwise. But the very first time I tried the variations the boarders mutinied. I never did find any body that would stand those variations. I was very well satisfied with my efforts in that house, however, and I left it without any regrets; I drove one boarder as mad as a March hare, and another one tried to scalp his mother. I reflected, though, that if I could only have been allowed to give this latter just one more touch of the variations, he would have finished the old woman.

I went to board at Mrs. Murphy's, an Italian lady of many excellent qualities. The very first time I struck up the variations, a haggard, care-worn, cadaverous old man walked into my room and stood beaming upon me a smile of ineffable happiness. Then he placed his hand upon my head, and looking devoutly aloft, he said with feeling unction, and in a voice trembling with emotion, "God bless you, young man! God bless you! for you have done that for me which is beyond all praise. For years I have suffered from an incurable disease, and knowing my doom was sealed and that I must die, I have striven with all my power to resign myself to my fate, but in vain – the love of life was too strong within me. But Heaven bless you, my benefactor! for since I heard you play that tune and those variations, I do not want to live any longer – I am entirely resigned – I am willing to die – in fact, I am anxious to die." And then the old man fell upon my neck and wept a flood of happy tears. I was surprised at these things; but I could not help feeling a little proud at what I had done, nor could I help giving the old gentleman a parting blast in the way of some peculiarly lacerating variations as he went out at the door. They doubled him up like a jack-knife, and the next time he left his bed of pain and suffering he was all right, in a metallic coffin.

My passion for the accordeon finally spent itself and died out, and I was glad when I found myself free from its unwholesome influence. While the fever was upon me, I was a living, breathing calamity wherever I went, and desolation and disaster followed in my wake. I bred discord in families, I crushed the spirits of the light-hearted, I drove the melancholy to despair, I hurried invalids to premature dissolution, and I fear me I disturbed the very dead in their graves. I did incalculable harm, and inflicted untold suffering upon my race with my execrable music; and yet to atone for it all, I did but one single blessed act, in making that weary old man willing to go to his long home.

Still, I derived some little benefit from that accordeon; for while I continued to practice on it, I never had to pay any board – landlords were always willing to compromise, on my leaving before the month was up.

Now, I had two objects in view in writing the foregoing, one of which was to try and reconcile people to those poor unfortunates who feel that they have a genius for music, and who drive their neighbors crazy every night in trying to develop and cultivate it; and the other was to introduce an admirable story about Little George Washington, who could Not Lie, and the Cherry-Tree – or the Apple-Tree – I have forgotten now which, although it was told me only yesterday. And writing such a long and elaborate introductory has caused me to forget the story itself; but it was very touching.

smileatom wrote:A little mahler never hurt anyone.

I am reminded of the true story of a friend of mine (who was later Principal Trombone in a full-time Orchestra) practicing Mahler 4 when he heard a bang! in the appartment above him. The occupant had just committed suicide (for other reasons, but it makes for a great story!).

I've been playing tuba in my back yard some and nobody has complained yet. They might be hoping if they don't say anything I'll stick to tuba and not bring out the trumpet again.

smileatom wrote:.... As a side note, when I first learned the tuba, I spent weeks playing the Jabba the Hut solo from Empire Strikes Back (I guess) copying Chester Schmitz. I had no sheet music. I just learned it by ear, by playing every note until it was right. ....

All kids with instruments should learn to play by ear. It's so useful and so much fun.