Practicing Problems

I'm slowly driving everybody nuts, including myself.

It's a daily thing...going down to the basement, pulling out the trumpet, warming up, and practicing.

Often it happens twice a day. It's never less than forty-five minutes, and often runs close to an hour and a half. I think that to the uninitiated, the idea of living in close quarters with a professional musician might have some appeal. Don't you get to hear beautiful melodies all day?

No, you don't. You get to hear lip-slurs. And etudes. And exercises designed to stretch the outer reaches of one's range, up to those shrieky high notes that only dogs can hear. And then comes the part where I look at my folder for the following week and put on loud, blasting drones. (They have to be loud, otherwise I can't hear them over the loud trumpet.) The drones go on, well, droning, for a very long time, and then the metronome starts.
TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK
It keeps on going while the kids have utterly given up reading quietly and are now throwing legos at the stairs and shrieking.
TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK
And then, just when J is almost certainly going to start ripping out her hair in clumps in frustration at the drone and the metronome and the second trumpet part that is very beautiful in the context of a whole Beethoven symphony but isn't anything other than the same two notes over and over again when practiced on its own, it's all of a sudden time to switch--to the piccolo trumpet. Or to a bunch of audition excerpts that she's heard me preparing continuously for the last eight years. Or to some awful extended technique work.

Actually, that's pretty much normal life for a trumpet player. The problem is that it takes place eight feet directly below her feet, and the floor isn't particularly soundproof. And the kids, while handling it pretty well for a four-year old and a 15 month old, tend to just get even louder when there's trumpet noise coming from the basement.

I think it's going to kill her, eventually. When I go downstairs to practice she looks happy and fresh and cute and rosy-cheeked, glad to accommodate my professional obligations for an hour or so. She'll play with the kids, she'll maybe bake something, and be sure to come up by lunch, because it's going to be good today.

When I return her hair is matted and sticking up in odd directions, and there's a wild, desperate look in her eyes. She looks like one who has aged many years over the course of just one hour-long practice session, and she has the haunted expression of one who has seen war and destruction. (Maybe this means that I'm beginning to get the right sort of character for Ein Heldenleben.) She winces every time the kids make a noise, and she has a slightly unsteady gait...yes, the trumpet playing is definitely going to kill her one of these days.

So the question is, what should I do?

Here's what I've come up with so far:

1) Practice after hours at the church down the road. This isn't a bad idea at all, and I do it sometimes. It means being gone in the evening, when we finally have a chance to see each other alone, but I can play as loud and as long as I need to, and it doesn't disturb anybody. Granted, it's a bit of a walk and it's usually pretty cold in there, but that isn't the biggest obstacle--the biggest problem is that I can never tell when there's going to be somebody else in the facility. A few weeks ago I waited around until almost 11 PM just for a group to leave. That turned an hour of practicing into three or four hours of frustration.

2) Soundproofing the basement. At J's parents house, which was designed for musicians by musicians, the soundproofing is excellent. I can disappear into their teaching studio and play as loud as I want. I think that it's audible in the rest of the house, but it doesn't have nearly the same piercing, penetrating, soul-sucking volume that it does at our place. When I practice there, no one is driven insane by the volume of the trumpet noise or the click of the metronome. They are only driven insane by the repetitive repertoire choices and the fatherless children running about. The obstacle to soundproofing our basement is that it would probably be really expensive and I have no idea how to do it. If we ever build a place for ourselves--and I very much doubt that will ever happen, but you never know--we will make sure that there is an airtight trumpet-proof chamber located somewhere in the bowels of the basement. Preferably with a coffee-maker installed right into the wall.

3) Outside shed. I used to practice in outside "practice sheds" at one of the summer festivals I attended. They were hot and dark and unpleasant, but there's something kind of appealing about practicing in the great outdoors. The upside to this would be that I would hardly be audible at all to J and the boys. There are multiple downsides, however. First of all, acquiring a shed would be an expensive proposition, and then there's the whole issue of winter in Western New York. I suppose it would be possible to run a space heater out to the shed, but that means running power out to the shed...and that sounds complicated. Then there's the question of whether or not you keep instruments/music/mutes out in the shed or not, and finally the big issue--does it disturb the neighbors in our relatively close suburban street? (Probably yes.) So, there's a lot arguing against the shed.

If anyone else has any great ideas about how to deal with the practicing problem, I am ALL EARS. Because I think that if we let things go on like this indefinitely I could be in real peril. You wouldn't want to read a headline like this:

An area man is dead and his wife is in custody today after she unexpectedly bludgeoned him to death with his own metronome. The husband, a trumpet player, was apparently practicing in his own basement when the wife suddenly ran shrieking down the stairs, seized the metronome, and began rhythmically pounding it against his skull. Much of his equipment and numerous mouthpieces were also damaged in the attack, and while she was removed by mental health authorities, the assailant emerged from her catatonic state long enough to whisper to herself "No more lip slurs...no more lip slurs ever again."