While you can have drums in an apartment a lot of consideration needs to be taken to ensure your neighbors don’t file noise complaints. Adhering to quiet hours is a must, but there are also ways to minimize the noise your drums produce like mutes, towels, or using electronic drums.
Yes, you can. How long you can have a drum set in your apartment without consequences is another matter. In an apartment building, your neighbors are mere feet away and the walls were selected with a view to keep you people out of sight, not out of earshot.
Drums are loud. They were made to be loud…It’s what draws so many people to the drums. But, for all the appeal that loud drums have for drummers, it’s rare that neighbors will feel the same way.
If you’re planning to practice any instrument I feel like you should mention it to your neighbors and ask if they have preferred times…I know this doesn’t always work out and not everyone likes talking to their neighbors, but it’s something to consider.
So if you want to have your drums and beat them, too…you have two options. Reduce the noise or move the drums.
Keeping the drums inside the apartment calls for cutting down the noise. How do we do that?
A Second Life For Old Towels
Start low-tech: an affordable and effective way to dampen the volume of your jamming is by using towels. Throw them over the top of your drums and you can keep drumming and your neighbors won’t call the police.
You’ll need multiple towels…basically one for each drum. For the cymbals, you’ll need to cut a small hole through the towel so you can let the rod poke through and tighten the wing nut.
Towels may be good for your neighbors, but they might not be that good for your technique since your drum stick rebound will be affected drastically. Finer points of your technique and other facets of your playing will be much more difficult with towel mufflers.
But if you’re not able to shell out a ton of money on drastic solutions, your old towels will be your profession’s best friend. Muffled drums will be better than no drums at all.
Note that old towels only work on drums that are played without amplification. Electronic equipment that magnifies sound will just make the muffled sound of your drums louder.
Use Drum Mutes
Similar to using towels, drum mutes are useful products that are designed to dampen the sound and reduce the volume output of our loud drums.
Drum mutes do cost more than using towels, but they offer a better fit to your drum heads and cymbals and also have a better bounce-back feel. This can be important for new drummers as they develop their muscle memory. Even veteran drummers might find it awkward going back and forth from a muted set to an unmuted set they might be playing in the studio or at a gig.
Companies in the market for quieter drums make synthetic rubber pads that fit over your drum heads. These products are better than nothing and certainly better than towels, but many drummers have found that a better way of doing things is using clip-on mesh drum heads like the ones offered from RTOM.
Some mesh coverings are meant to completely replace the existing drum heads on your shells, so your sound and playing experience will be quite different…but at least your kit will be much quieter.
The heads from RTOM are different, seeing how they clip onto your existing drum heads and reduce the volume of your kit by a solid 80%.
The mesh heads from RTOM are good enough to save the tone of your drums, so you won’t be missing the sound of your snare drum or toms. They do, however, raise the profile of the top of your real drum head by about an inch and a half. You can easily compensate by adjusting the height of your drums.
For more information and to check current prices, check Amazon.
Consider A Portable Isolation Booth
Soundproofing an apartment is not only difficult is almost impossible. Not only do you need to consider wall neighbors, but you may also have people under and/or over you too. Unless you’re willing to spend thousands (and I mean THOUSANDS) of dollars professionally soundproofing a room it’s just not a feasible option…hanging sheets and blankets on the walls just won’t cut it.
At best, you’ll have a better environment for recording but your neighbors are still going to hear everything as if they’re listening to a recording. The only way to reduce the decibels outside of your living space is to construct a room inside of a room. If you look at the way recording studios are put together, you’ll see that this concept is standard practice.
On top of the high cost involved with building an isolation booth…companies like Studio Box and Whisper Room quote averages of $8000…the technical savvy required is beyond even the most skilled carpenter. This is because building isolation booths is a very niche construction skill.
Studio Box and Whisper Room offer portable isolation booths that cut out the high-end construction requirements. The upsides are that they are easy to put together (basically legos for adults) and you don’t have to do any modifications to your drums.
The negatives are the price. While less expensive than a basic custom-built iso-booth they will still set you back upwards of $5000.
Look Into An Electronic Drum Set
Drum technology has come a long way. True, nothing beats the natural sound of real drums, but an electronic drum kit can not only deliver good sound, but it can also give you the privacy of listening to your work over headphones or recording through a connection to whatever you’re using to capture sound.
The only downside to this is that hitting drums of any kind still produces some sound that may annoy the neighbor immediately next to you. If the walls are thin enough, a sneeze…let alone an electronic drum…is enough to startle someone that lives a few feet away. Reduced noise is still noise.
The drum head bounce back still might not feel the same as an acoustic kit, but I feel like this is the best option for apartment dwellers.
If you stick to playing during the mid-day to early evening and don’t absolutely wail on them your neighbors won’t be bothered by your playing.
If you’re not sure about practicing on electronic drums, I go into more details over here: Are Electronic Drum Kits Good To Learn On?