Bedroom amp sound question

[pocaloc]

I’m a home guitar player and primarily a drummer, so excuse my ignorance. I’ve been playing guitar for years though and the best sound I was able to get was when I played in my sizeable unfinished concrete basement with a deluxe reverb. I’m now stuck with a pretty small bedroom. I’m not worried about bugging the neighbors and I like to play with high volume. The thing is that it’s either blowing my ears up or not loud enough to please my need for pummeling volume. When I bring my amp up to my pretty large living room with high ceilings, I love the sound again. I’ve figured that the room i use is just to small to get the sound I want, like the sound can’t breathe. I currently have a 15 watt el84 based amp. Any ideas for me? Do I need to get a five watt amp? Do I need to put some egg carton’s up in the mall bedroom? Thanks

[rumfoord]

Have you already tried all the different spatial configurations you can think of in the small bedroom? It could be that egg cartons are the opposite of what you need if the sound is already being deadened by the bed in the room. But maybe tilted back, cab on a table, pulled out from the wall, pushed right against the wall, in a different available spot in the room, hung from the ceiling, etc, idk...maybe there's something. ??

Seems like a difficult and annoying conundrum, though, to be sure. Or, maybe just a touch of some kind of reverb is what you need?

Oh, I got it: use the living room as an echo chamber, and mic the cabinet and pipe it back into the bedroom where you prefer to play.

[pocaloc]

Thanks for the response. I will try messing with where I place the amp, etc. I actually wouldn’t mind playing in my living room, but my wife would mind.

[FightingPlankton]

I don't have experience with them... but I think an attenuator will get you where you want to be. That being said, i lIke the reverb recommendation... it Sounds like you like the tone you get in the lager rooms, my guess is this is due to the time it takes for the sound waves to bounce off the walls and make it back to your ears. Adding a digital reverb could help achieve this. Spring reverb is great, but it's not the same as "room" or "hall" reverb.

[pocaloc]

Thanks for the tip. I'm looking at an attenuator today. I was thinking the room is so small that the sound is probably harshly bouncing off a lot of hard surfaces, so I may look into some sort of sound dampening solution.

[Larsongs]

I’m a home guitar player and primarily a drummer, so excuse my ignorance. I’ve been playing guitar for years though and the best sound I was able to get was when I played in my sizeable unfinished concrete basement with a deluxe reverb. I’m now stuck with a pretty small bedroom. I’m not worried about bugging the neighbors and I like to play with high volume. The thing is that it’s either blowing my ears up or not loud enough to please my need for pummeling volume. When I bring my amp up to my pretty large living room with high ceilings, I love the sound again. I’ve figured that the room i use is just to small to get the sound I want, like the sound can’t breathe. I currently have a 15 watt el84 based amp. Any ideas for me? Do I need to get a five watt amp? Do I need to put some egg carton’s up in the mall bedroom? Thanks

Big Amps don't usually work well in small rooms if you're trying to crank them loud enough to break up & get dirty. It takes too much Power in that small amount of space & will blow you out!

Get a little Fender RI Princeton Rev. or Vox AC10C1 (preferably w/ Celestion Greenback) Tube Amp or something like that & you'll be able to accomplish your goal. An Attenuator would be my next choice.

[ElephantDNA]

I agree with the attenuator option. That was also going to be my answer here. A more lo-tech solution might involve simply raising the amp off the floor. Fender amps always sound better in big rooms, though. I don't think anything you do will change that.