Managing Volume! Playing Drums With Neighbours in Mind
There’s no way around the fact that drums and percussion instruments can be quite loud. This problem is compounded by the fact that here in Toronto many of us live in apartments, condos, townhouses, semi-detatched houses, or a similar living situation where you share a wall/floor/ceiling with a neighbour.
I’ll start with the bad news: it’s more or less impossible to soundproof a room unless you’re willing and able to spend a ton of money and do some serious construction. There are lots of myths floating around about cheap DIY soundproofing, but these don’t generally do much, if anything. Sound is like water - it will find even the tiniest gap or space to travel through, and easily flows through duct work, floor joists, pipes, etc. And on top of the actual volume of the drums there are impact vibrations - especially from the drum pedals and the bass drum - which travel through floors, and can be even more aggravating to neighbours than the sound. These can occur even if you are using an electronic kit! If you can locate your drums in a basement or other area where there is nobody below you, you will be solving a lot of problems.
If you keep all of this in mind then you can work in more sensible ways to make drumming manageable and possible in close living quarters.
Talk To Your Neighbours: You are almost certainly going to produce some amount of sound when playing drums in an apartment, even with the ideas I go over below. Get to know your neighbours, talk to them about what you are doing, how often they might expect to hear you play, ask how much they can hear you, and whether there are times that they really need quiet, such as people doing shift work or with toddlers who need naps. 99% of the time people will be open to what you are trying to do, and willing to work with you.
Modify Your Drum Kit: I won’t go into great detail on how to do this - there are many detailed solutions available on the internet. I recommend this video on modifications to the drums themselves, and this one on isolating the vibrations of the drums (this almost eliminates impact vibrations, and greatly reduces even sound vibrations to other rooms). You will see almost right away that a) this isn’t cheap, and b) it takes up a fair amount of space.
Use An Electronic Kit: Electronic drum kits can be a great solution since they can be played using headphones, and the pads of the kits generally don’t make a huge noise. Bear in mind that the quality of sounds and feel of these kits can vary widely, and having low quality in either of those categories can really affect not only your ability to play, but your enjoyment. On the other hand these kits can get extremely expensive, so it’s worth exploring several different kits to find a good balance of sound and price. This list is a good starting place. As I mentioned above, impact noise can be a problem still, although less so than with acoustic drum kits. Some manufacturers make special pedals or platforms to help deal with this: Roland makes pedals with what it calls “Noise Eater Technology”, for example. If your floors are wood with neighbours below, you will probably need to do something to address impact noise with an electronic kit.
Explore Other Instruments: You can get a lot out of drumming with other instruments in the percussion family. Hand drums are a whole musical universe of their own with amazing musical styles, sounds, and techniques to explore. I’ll give you two very different examples here and here. Keep in mind that large hand drums that rest on the floor like congas will produce impact noise, but it will be easier to manage this than with a drum kit (for example, you could move to a room that’s the less problematic, put down layers of foam and carpet to absorb the impact, or even build a smaller version of the drum platform). I’m also a big advocate of doing tons of work on the snare drum (or to reduce noise, a decent practise pad like this). The creativity, musicality, and technicality of this instrument is truly amazing, as you can see from this one small example here. Add a shaker, tambourine, and maybe a cowbell to your collection of instruments and you’ve got a very nice set of percussion instruments to explore. The styles, techniques, and music literacy you can learn on these instruments can easily be applied to drum kit if you have an opportunity to access one occasionally outside your home (I used to practise kit at school when I was in high school).
Final Thoughts: It’s never been easy to practise drums in your home, as there are tons of barriers from price to volume to space that require a pretty serious commitment to overcome. I hope this post might give you some ideas on how to lower some of those barriers, as I think getting into the world of music in general, and drums in particular, is well worth it. I wish that there were more community spaces where people could access shared musical instruments and have fewer sound restrictions. There are many reasons why this could be a more equitable and practical model to explore - perhaps a topic for another blog later on!
