Your house is almost perfect. The gardens and lawn are beautiful. The kitchen, dining room, living room, bedrooms and bathrooms are exactly how you want them. However if you play music, you need only one more thing for it to be perfect: a room or nook where you have instruments, music stand, amplifiers, and chairs.
You’ll want to have natural light from windows or well-designed electrical lighting (or both) to allow you to read print music. However, sunlight should not shine directly on instruments because it can damage them. Heat can make the glue inside the instruments fail, and UV can fade colors.
Ideally, the music room should be in a quiet part of the house were noise from the house doesn’t bother you. Similarly, the music you play should not bother people in your house or in nearby homes. Insulation in the walls and rugs on the floor can help to isolate the sound of your music room.
For wooden instruments, humidity is very important. Instrument makers maintain the relative humidity in their workshops at about 50%. Once assembled, wooden instruments like pianos, guitars, violines and clarinets can crack if the humidity falls to 40% and are almost sure to crack if humidity falls to 30%. In the winter, the air is very dry. A humidifier that maintains a minimum humidity of 45% is essential in a music room.
When you create a music room that has these things, you will have a perfect room that will make your house completely perfect.
By Paula Taylor, Meadowood Music
