Noise B-gone - One man and his drums vs the neighbours

I'm a drummer, I love gadgets. About 4 years ago whilst at uni I decided to combine the two and bought an electronic drum kit. I figured that this would be pretty quiet. How wrong I was! My first electronic kit was a basic DTXpress from Yamaha which used rubber pads. These didn't feel great and they were noisy to hit - but it was still a good kit. I'm just thankful that my housemates and neighbours didn't complain.

About 2 years ago I moved house to an area not infested with students and as such, I was required to be a little more considerate about the noise. The house was part of a terrace (an end terrace luckily) and much newer which meant that the walls were very thin. Having very little room I decided to put the kit upstairs but the noise was terrible.

The first step to improving the level of noise was to upgrade to a Roland TD-12. Alright, this wasn't just to control the noise but it was a nice excuse. The mesh heads on the TD-12 helped a little but the noise from the bass pedal was still phenomenal for a supposedly silent kit. The next step was to put as much padding under the drums as possible. Again, it helped but only slightly. Instead of spending £300+ on commercial solutions I thought that I would simply only play when my neighbour went out. This meant that I could only get the odd 15mins in here and there - hardly enough time to warm up. To his credit though - my neighbour never complained but I still felt quite bad about all the noise.

About 1 month ago I moved house again (I actually own this one!!!). The problem with this house, whilst being older and better insulated, is that the floors are all laminate and the neighbours never go out. So basically, noise travels better and its always heard. Not so good. Again, I tried to pad the drums out and it kind of worked but I was still limited to 15-30mins at a time.

The problem is not the noise of the drums, its the vibrations traveling to the floor caused by hitting the bass pedal and the drums attached to a rack.

I'm in the middle of changing jobs at the minute which has basically worked out in my favour giving me about 3 weeks at home! Today I finally resolved to fix the problem once and for all. In the past I had read articles about a home made drum riser made with plywood and tennis balls.
Its a pretty simple concept. Take two pieces of wood, drill a few small holes (about 1 3/4 inch) in them, place tennis balls in these wholes to create a tennis ball sandwich and your done.

I took the basic idea and altered it a little. First I swapped plywood for mdf. No real reason why, I just prefer the look of mdf. Second I decided to cut out an area in my drums so that my throne can sit on the riser but without adding any pressure on the tennis balls which would reduce the effect of the dampening. Third I decided to add all my extra padding to the riser just to help a little more. Fourth I decided to reduce the size of the hole to 38mm so that I could take full advantage of the dampening from the tennis ball and finally I decided to add material to the inside of the riser (i.e. where the tennis balls sit) in order to block the effect of echos.

So what I ended up with was:

• 2x MDF boards - 1.6m x 1.0m x 18mm (I had B&Q cut them to this size)
• 18 tennis balls - 6 packs of 3
• 38mm hole cutting drill
• jigsaw

The cost of materials (minus the tools which I already had) was about £40.

I cut an almost semi-circle shape with a 300mm radius out of one of these mdf boards to allow my throne to sit 'in' the kit without being on the riser. The other MDF board I left alone. I put the boards together and drilled right through them in 16 places. I then took the whole lot, put it together and put the drum kit on it. Disaster - it didn't work. It was better, but not by much. Before I broke down in tears and sold my kit I added the additional padding which had a minimal effect but I also removed a few of the tennis balls (eventually leaving only 9 in place) from around the board. The result of this last step was phenomenal. Now I can play the drums upstairs and all you can hear downstairs is a dull thud which kind of sounds like someone walking around. Unfortunately the whole thing is pretty unstable. This is probably due to my holes being quite small though.

So there you have it. If you have an e-kit or a muffled acoustic kit and you still think it is too loud because of the vibrations. Grab enough wood to put your kit on, grab a few tennis balls, grab as much padding as you can (polystyrene ceiling tiles work well and cost very, very little) and put the whole lot together. Make sure you done sit on the riser though. Your weight will really have a bad effect on the whole thing.