Tips for Quieter Drum Practice

Family members or roommates complaining about your drums being too loud? Practice pads are a great option for quieter drum practice, but if you’re itching for your actual drumset, there are ways you can quiet it down without too much sacrifice.

Here are a few great tips for making your drums quieter when you need to:

Mute the bass drum with a pillow. This method is quite simple, and is commonly employed even in situations that don’t require a noise reduction. Remove one of the bass drum heads and place a pillow (or other soft material) inside the drum so that it just touches both heads. Replace and re-tune the head. The pillow deadens many of the bass drum’s ringing overtones, yielding a clearer tone as well as a slightly quieter one.

Place mute pads over the drums and cymbals. To quiet a drum set in a practice setting, you can purchase rubber mute pads that are designed to fit on top of each drum head (and onto cymbals if desired). These pads almost entirely mute the sound of the drums; this makes them an excellent choice for quieting drums played in an apartment or shared house. The downside to mute pads is that they don’t allow the player to hear the drums as they are meant to sound.

Install sound insulation in the room in which the drum set is located. For further sound reduction in a practice or recording setting, you can insulate the room against sound. There are many different types of soundproofing materials, from attractive acoustical panels that mount directly onto a wall to thick vinyl sheets that are installed underneath the drywall. These solutions provide effective soundproofing while retaining the full sound of the drums, but are often very expensive.

Readers, what other ideas do you use to quiet down your drum set? Leave a comment below, or stop by our Facebook page to join the conversation!

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