Soundproofing Question

So i live in a one bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. The bedroom is separated by a short hallway to the living room and the living room doesnt have a door. Just walk in/out. My girlfriend is starting to get annoyed at my several hours of guitar practice. And i normally play via headphones so shes getting bothered by the actual acoustic sound of the electric guitar when i play lol. Is there anything i can do to lessen the sound. Some sort of sheet i can hang in the living room entrance?

Bothered by the acoustic sound of an electric…in another room….? Even if you bash the strings it can’t be that loud in a separate room… or is she just annoyed that you pay more attention to your guitar…? :eyes:

EDIT

Oh wait, there is no door? There are room separating curtains you can get which help absorb sound. It won’t be total soundproofing but should be enough

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To be fair sometimes it is at night when she is trying to go to sleep. The bedroom has a door but i guess i play loud lol

There are “soundproof “ curtains you can buy, but curtains can’t soundproof a room. You’d need to build a room within a room for that , and I’m pretty sure that’s not an option for most people haha.
Id suggest thick curtains if there was no door separating the room but Apart from that, I’m not sure there are a lot of options. Foam and panels etc will only control the sound within the room but not affect the sound leaving the room.

Is it the sound coming through the wall or door where she hears you? If it’s the door, you could try thick drapes over the door

I had a bit of a nightmare apartment situation last year and I found reducing/reinforcing the paths sound travels (door, wall, window, pipes, etc) is a bit of a goose-chase. This is because as soon as I lowered the noise floor by fixing the door, my body begins to hear quieter things, such as noise through the pipes, more.

The best way I found to “quiet a room” is to raise the noise floor with something my brain doesn’t care about and is dull so it 1) covers up anything that could intrude sonically and 2) I won’t have any emotional response to it (“gahh my selfish neighbour pacing in their bedroom at 3?!” now I’m emotionally activated along with roused from my sleep).

So I think a white noise generator or something equivalent is going to go a longer way than the lost cause of plugging the leaking/crumbling sonic dam that are apartment walls, sheets, and doors.

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To avoid neighbour complaints ( I play E-drums in a small apartment), I play music in the room right next to my neighbours when playing. I’ve never gotten a complaint about music, just the drumming. Either playing music in the adjacent room helps mask the kit or my drumming just sucks so much it warrants a complaint…

Ear plugs… :rofl:

Sorry, I had to go there!

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Don’t necessarily want to turn this into Amateur Couples Counselling Hour, but I wouldn’t go down the rabbit hole of trying to silence the already fairly quiet noise of unplugged electric playing (though you could always just practise your Holdsworth hammers-only for a bit, maybe combine it with learning new scales and arpeggios or whatever) without discussing whether it’s definitely a sound issue and not an issue of perception of time spent on “self” vs “couples” activity.

I mention this only because in my first year of marriage Christine mentioned that she didn’t like that I played guitar and she didn’t have something that she did, and I petulantly responded to this by not playing guitar for almost two years, which wasn’t what I would call the best response.

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I was actually gonna say earplugs also… haha

Has she tried brown noise to help cover other noises. Works wonders in my house

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Right? Soundproof the ears!

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