Ergonomic Seating… for Musicians

Ergonomic seating is a word that appears to be common place in today’s office industry which is all together not a bad thing. More and more office workers are complaining about work related injuries due to the amount of time that they are spending sitting in an office chair that may not necessarily be ergonomically correct for them. There are full ranges of ergonomic chairs available that have been designed to help office workers with these problems, however there is another group of people that spend a lot of time seated that have been overlooked. This group of people are the musicians.

Professional musicians are most often required to use the seating that has been provided by the theatre or concert hall that they are playing in. The problem with this is that the musicians use different instruments and the seating is not always the most comfortable.

Trying to make a standardised chair for professional musicians is no easy task, however after spending 18 months researching the needs of various musicians and their positions whilst playing, David Brothers has created a 3 legged chair that is adjustable and helps to promote a good posture with all musicians as well as helping with their breathing techniques.

Musicians spend countless hours rehearsing, not to mention the amount of time they spend performing. They are expected to give their best performance, often sitting on a folding plastic chair or if they are lucky a plastic chair with a cushion. After these 18 months Brooks saw that even though woodwind, brass and string players all had the same seats, they all had very different physical positions whilst playing.

His solution to this was a 3 legged chair that can be adjusted to accommodate different needs and styles of playing. The chair has a variable seat height, lumbar support and a telescopic rear 3^rd leg that that aims to “reduce the strain of the backward pelvic rotation”.