I practiced in a Masonic Temple too! It was still in use but had an old apartment on the bottom floor. We'd run around in the Temple part at night when no one was around and found all kinds of weird stuff.
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Weirdest place your band has practiced...
- Thread starter bound'n'blocked
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I practiced in a Masonic Temple too! It was still in use but had an old apartment on the bottom floor. We'd run around in the Temple part at night when no one was around and found all kinds of weird stuff.
Our first band back in the mid '70s practiced in the back of a second-hand store - more like in the middle of it, I guess. Pretty cramped space, and the acoustics were terrible with all the stuff vibrating and stuff.
And then there was the time when our band was abducted by aliens. Lucky for us they took our equipment too, and we were able to get a few good practices in before they let us go. Come to think of it, maybe that's WHY they brought us back... (jk)
And then there was the time when our band was abducted by aliens. Lucky for us they took our equipment too, and we were able to get a few good practices in before they let us go. Come to think of it, maybe that's WHY they brought us back... (jk)
I've had several bandpractices in both a refurbished slaughterhouse and in the basement of out local chistian missionary or something, and that's with a metal band.
I also remembering practicing ONE TIME in an old body shop. We practiced in the room where they put the cars back together. We only practiced there one time because shortly after they tor it down and now a major highway runs thru in the EXACT spot where we practiced was.
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old abandoned warehouse. we brought a generator, hid it off as far as possible, plugged in, and hoped that the ceiling would hold through all the noise. It was actually pretty nice, and was basically untouched by nature.. and there were no neighbors to complain, a definite plus.
I spent a few years in a boarding school. I started a band with some friends, we played in our rooms. One day, we broke into an old storage facility on the edge of campus, by a forest. We just started playing there. But my guitar amp (played guitar at the time) started to pick up some classical music radio. Weird thing, when you play Metallica at night, by a forest, hearing the occasional gothic chants coming out of your amp...
When I was in my last band, our singer moved and we couldn't practice in his basement anymore. His brother owns a heating and air conditioning shop that he would let us practice in. We didn't practice in the actual shop, however. We practiced in the weight room. To get to this particular weight room, you had to go up two flights of stairs, through an abandoned office, up a "secret" staircase, and across the parts storage area. It was tons of fun carrying half stacks, my Ampeg 410, heads, the drum set, PA equipment, and instruments through there, let me tell you. /sarcasm. The best part was that there was this huge, immovable weight machine right in the middle of the weight room that we had to circle around. The only way we could see each other was through the mirrors that covered 100% of the wall space. It smelt like stale sweat, too. The only heating came from a tiny space heater, and we practiced there mostly in winter, so we pretty much froze the whole time. Regardless, it was still a pretty fun time. We would joke that we'd be the buff-est band in the area 
We used to practice in a barn too. That was a great place to rehearse since it had good acoustics and was isolated in the middle of a 55 acre farm. However, it had 2 problems. It became a major party hangout so we could never really rehearse without a big group of people wanting a show. It also had a goat that would eat all of our paper. We could never keep a setlist, flyer, or lyric sheet laying around without the goat making a snack out of it.
Many, many years ago...........Jazz/rock band I was playing in used to practise in the crypt under a cathedral. The flute player was the assistant choirmaster or something, and got permission for us to use the place. It was underground, massive stone walls with a winding stone staircase to get there. There were assorted dead folks behind carved stone plaques in the walls, large candleholders retrofitted with electric lights, and ventilation ports where the walls met the roof.
We jammed in there a quite a few times. During breaks we would stand on a massive table under one of the vents to smoke doobies, and ended up writing a song about all the stiffs in the walls.
I don't remember what the flute guy told them we were rehearsing, but the first time one of the priests actually heard us, we got chucked out. Creepy but the ultimate in soundproofing!
We jammed in there a quite a few times. During breaks we would stand on a massive table under one of the vents to smoke doobies, and ended up writing a song about all the stiffs in the walls.
I don't remember what the flute guy told them we were rehearsing, but the first time one of the priests actually heard us, we got chucked out. Creepy but the ultimate in soundproofing!
a tiny tin shed that my drummers grandmother stored everything in. we had to make a hole for the drummer, by forcing everything this woman had ever collected against the walls. To get in I would have to crawl over the bass drum stand slightly to the side of the back then the drummer would have to crawl in the guitarist would put the toms on stand directly in front. And after the door was shut(leaving about 3 inches the guitarist and it) we would start to play the worst music that I have ever heard in my life. Oh did I mention the microphone was dangled from a rafter directly in front of my face? 9 years later and I still have nightmares about it.
2 places come to mind
a youth center in castelmilk while the guy next door was getting lifted by the rozzers
my grans living room... while she was in it
a youth center in castelmilk while the guy next door was getting lifted by the rozzers
my grans living room... while she was in it
No where too weird for me I don't think. Parent's living rooms, basements, porches. An old barn, just once, unfortunately.
Everywhere else I think has been rented jam spaces or drummer's basements, I think.
Everywhere else I think has been rented jam spaces or drummer's basements, I think.
In my youth in Long Island, basements were the standard. In Florida, converted garages are standard.
But when I started playing again, it was with a band made up of mostly doctors. Our sax and trumpet players were partners in a large gynocology group. We used to rehearse in the large central waiting room after hours. We'd be in the middle of a rehearsal while their partners would catch up on dictation in their private offices.
I never did it, but it being a gynocology office, I wanted to lift all the toilet seats one night for the next day. To this day, I wish I did it... just once.
But when I started playing again, it was with a band made up of mostly doctors. Our sax and trumpet players were partners in a large gynocology group. We used to rehearse in the large central waiting room after hours. We'd be in the middle of a rehearsal while their partners would catch up on dictation in their private offices.
I never did it, but it being a gynocology office, I wanted to lift all the toilet seats one night for the next day. To this day, I wish I did it... just once.
Thought this might be a neat thread...
What is the weirdest rehersal space your band/bands ever used?
For me, it was my first band. I was still living with my folks, and behind our house was an old storage building my mom always called "The snake house", I guess to keep me out of it when I was a little kid. Inside this place was about 100 years of CRAP. Litterally. My grandmother had stuff stored in there from when she was young. It was two stories tall, about 20 feet by 15, and as soon as you opened the door there was a set of steps that went to the upper floor. Upstairs, the hole for the stairs was in the middle of the room, not the side of the room, so if you were hammered you needed to be careful. There was a hinged covering that folded over it to cover it if you didnt need to go up and down alot. The downstairs was two seperate rooms with no windows. The whole building was made of rough cut oak wood, and the building was seriously probably 85-90 years old and dusty as hell. The splinters were vicious. There was no electricity, and you could see the vinyl siding on the outside downstairs thru the spaces between the wood. Driving a nail in the wood was next to impossible unless you used a masonry nail. We cleaned all the junk out of it, and ran a couple of extension cords from the outside outlets to the building, then ran one upstairs and one for downstairs. The neighbor man gave me some old carpet he had replaced and we put it on the floor upstairs. The downstairs room was about 16 feet by 10 feet and we put styrofoam on the walls and ceiling. This turned out to be a mistake because in the summer, if it was 80 degrees outside, it was 125 in the building. We called it "The toaster" and would have to stop every few songs just to cool off. The PA board was upstairs, and then we put one speaker upstairs and one speaker downstairs. The singer and the guitar players were upstairs, and the drummer and bass player were downstairs because there wasnt enough room for all of us in the same place. Practicing in two different rooms was strange, but it made us tighter because we couldnt count on seeing each other for the changes!!
Over time, we made some changes to the place. We replaced the clip on light at the door shining into the downstairs room with a bare bulb hanging from the center and carpeted the walls upstairs. I came home one day and found the guitar player had taken a chainsaw and cut the stairs out, turned them 180 degrees, cut a new hole in the floor upstairs and moved the stairs to the side of the building from the middle of the room, basically making one large room downstars that we all could fit in, and one large room upstairs. We practiced there for about a year, but also just hung out and drank beer and tried to score....LOL, hey, we were young!
Sadly, we broke up and it became a storage building again. I still wont let my mom go in there. Some of the posters are more than she could handle. This all happened abut 22 years ago, and I think every beer can we ever drank is still piled up in there!
Ah, the good ol' days!
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Great story. Great memories for sure.
Our manager lived with his mom. They had a huge 3.5 car garage that was behind the house and below street level due to the pitch of the lot. Above the garage was a pool house. Outside the garage was a small mobile home.
The back of the garage was next to a wide gully. The only neighbors that could hear us were on one side and they liked us so it was no problem.
The problem was that the entire garage was filled with crap left over from some warehouse fire. We filled a couple of 20 foot stakebed trucks cleaning all the junk out. Ran into some huge rats and their families that had move in from the gully.
Finally, we were able to set the band up on the side of the garage underneath the pool house. The front wall was brick. We got some carpet on the floor, some full length drapes around the rest of the area. Their was also a small storage loft that we put curtains around and that also was used for a bed.
On the other side of the garage was our meeting/kick back/party area. Couches,chairs, coffee table and refrigerator. The night we got the place done we had a flier party with about 150 people attending. We played a couple of sets and spent the rest of the evening with the ladies in attendance. Great times were had by all.
We were together for a couple of years so many memories came out of those times.
Cleaning up the place was weird(and fun) but we turned it into one the coolest places that I've ever seen to rehearse.
Has to be in a children's hospital auditorium. Our keyboard player's dad worked there. In exchange for using it, we would do a dress rehearsal for the patients from time to time. That's not the "weird" part. Being the teenagers we were, at breaks, we'd go "exploring" the various quarters of this old building. We discovered labs and such and human bones and other like stuff. A bit creepy at night in partial darkness. 
Band practice - I wonder what that would be like? Since the (ahem) band I do gigs with never practices, ever, any place would be weird.
The 2 strangest were a wide elevator machine room at the top of a building (janitor a friend of mine) and a prison cell (singer's father worked in the police).
