Apartment Drumming, Or "Operation Woodshed-in-the-City"
One of my biggest worries about moving to the city was that I wouldn’t get to play drums, or at least not at home. Having been lucky enough to live in places where I could play pretty much at will for the last several years, this would have been a huge loss – of a daily pleasure and of skills built up over many, many hours. But thanks to a combination of buying some new (cheap) gear, finding a good teacher, and having cool neighbors, I still practice regularly. Some of this stuff will sound pretty obvious - just mute your drums and talk to your neighbors! But when I was preparing to move I found precious few useful, first-hand accounts of how drummers had solved the apartment drumming dilemma. Hence, this entry.
The low point in my search for how to outfit my drums for a second-floor apartment came at the otherwise reliable Explorer’s Percussion in Kansas City.
ME: Hey, I’m moving to an apartment and want to muffle my drums. I’m getting mutes for the drums and cymbals, but can you think of anything else I could do?
DRUM SHOP GUY: (squinting and looking over his shoulder like this is insider information) You could lay down, like, a rug? Like on the floor. Under the drums.
ME: Are you serious?
DSG: Yes. Totally.
Most drummers don’t just have rugs at home, they also have a rug they take to gigs. It’s practically part of the kit because playing on a rugless floor means the bass drum and hi-hat slide all over the goddamn place. So I already had a rug plan. But I bought some mesh heads made of woven plastic and mutes for my ride cymbal and hi-hats. I thought about the bass drum muffle but it looked clunky, and I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work and neither could the DSG, so I left it. Instead I stuffed my big drum to bursting with two full-sized sleeping bags and taped a hand towel across the spot where the mallet hits the head.
As soon as I moved into my apartment I talked with my upstairs, downstairs, and next door neighbors, telling them I’m a drummer but I’ve quieted my kit and I’ll never play past 8:00 pm. I had already played a few times, so I asked if they’d heard and most said ‘no.’ The couple below me, who I was most worried about because I know the sound travels best through the floor (despite the rug!), has a super noisy kid (miserable, long-suffering screaming at least twice a day), and when I talked to them the guy said, “We’ve got her [pointing at the kid] and you’ve got drums. So.” Making noise past a certain level in an apartment is a kind of community resource of limited supply, and my neighbor acknowledged that we were using it equally. A perfectly reasonable sharing of the commons.
I don’t wail on my mesh-headed, sleeping bag stuffed kit, but I can play beats for accuracy, steadiness, and some dynamics. The heads don’t sound particularly good (though they do have a little bit of resonance), but they feel way closer to regular heads than foam or rubber muffles. And unlike muffles and like regular heads, they’re tighter closer to the rim and more slack in the center, and you can tune them – seemingly small things that make all the difference in keeping them feeling like full-on drums.
The biggest downside, though, is that they are most certainly not full-on drums, so they’re not as fun to play. Not even close. So, to keep my motivation up I also found a good teacher. This is my first time taking regular lessons, so maybe my experience isn’t typical, but the combination of learning new things and having someone to be accountable to means that I play my crappy-sounding drums just as often as I would if they were my great-sounding drums. And I’m focusing on things I never seemed to get around to on my regularly-outfitted kit because it was too much fun rocking out beats I could already play (I’m not the most disciplined practicer). But now I’m working on my rudiments and my reading and learning brushes, things I can spend time on without making lots of noise. Besides the reading, these were things I asked to be taught – they were part of my apartment-woodshed plan. But they’re also things my teacher, Sol, has specialized in for years. So I got lucky. Sol keeps me motivated and honest, and he’s helping me take my drumming to new places.
And a couple/few times a month I rent a room at a rehearsal space called the Music Garage to play some real drums – all their rooms have a full set. At these sessions I can turn the rudiments I’m learning into beats. I can do that on my muffled kit too, but there I don’t really hear how the beat sounds and so it isn’t the same – like trying to sing a melody underwater. At the Music Garage I can also just do whatever – practice a song, follow a hunch, mess with sounds – play. Being able to practice is great, but playing is where it’s at. Next step: other people.
Playing with Other People
Jay Jay - Rise
My old band Jay Jay in Baltimore in 2005 (I think). The bass doesn't come through but the energy is still there. Marc Rey lays down a typically killer solo at 2:55.