Neighborhood drumming too loud?

skipreid

Junior Member
I have the luxury of having my closest neighbor over 200 yards away. My next closest neighbor is almost a mile away. So I can play as loud as I want without disturbing anyone.


How do you guys who live in a subdivision or neighborhoods where your homes are about 25 feet apart play drums in your house without getting complaints? Do you have soundproof room or something?
 
When my wife and i lived in our old house we had neighbors on all sides and they were very close, maybe a few hundred feet or so. It was annoying but i always tried to play during the day off and on when they were at work or gone. Out of respect i never played past 3:30 p.m because that's when everyone includeing my wife was getting home from work. I never had sound proofing by the way.

Since then we have bought a new house and moved. Now i have no neighbors and my drums are down stairs. It's the happiest i've been in over two years!
 
same here, I am surrounded on three sides by close neighbors.

Luckily I work only three miles from home and I can play on my lunch hour
when most people are not home.

I also play after work for about 45 minutes. Been doing this for a solid year
and never heard a complaint.

1. never playing after 6pm
2. never playing more than 1 hour at one time
3. never playing more than twice a day or maximum 2 hours.
4. Sometimes going an entire week without playing
(rare but I give 'em a break once in a while)

those 4 things have kept the compliants non existant but think I am lucky that I even get away with that.

My neighbor (guy I went to school with-so not a total stranger) was launching his boat
4 blocks away and he told me he could hear me playing (mostly my kick drum)

The thing is that bass drum in a small room the room actually becomes a resonating chamber for all that bass essenially turning the room into a giant sub-woofer.

just being really conscious of your neighbors & maintaining some boundaries is the key to playing in a neigborhood and a lot depends on your neighbors too - playing in an attached place or apartment are not an option.

Although one time when i lived in Nashville my apt neighbors were all musicians
so I went and asked each one if they minded if my band practiced a couple times a week and they all said "as long as we can come by and watch sometimes"

They would show up in the middle of our practice and it was like "rock on dudes!"
we're all full on pa rehearsal marshall stacks going on in this one bed apartment haha....
Funny....
 
I live in an apartment, on the corner, stairs on the other side, and the neighbors below moved out due to er other noises long before I got a drum set. So my closest neighbors are across the hall now. I play only for brief periods during sunlight as a general rule (keeping it under a half hour at a time seems to be infrequent enough), after sundown I put on silencer pads until maybe 8:30'ish on weekdays, 10 on weekends. I'm naturally under powering everything I play because I'm conscious of its disturbance, that's my complaint. Living in MN may be a factor, we tend to keep to ourselves and avoid confrontation like it's leprosy.

Wife says when the pads aren't on she can hear it from the main elevator, which in this complex is 2 bends and about 150 paces away. Yes, I'm currently looking for a house.
 
I majorly envy anybody who can play acoustics at home, I have been stuck on e-drums for years (and even then I have had to build a platform and avoid playing late due to stick noise) and end up playing acoustics only every few weeks when I rent a practice space for a few hours...
 
Surprisingly none of my neighbors have complained about my drumming. I drum upstairs, and it's easily audible from the homes around me. I have no sound proof or anything, and I play acoustic.

I guess I got a little lucky with the 3 homes closest to mine.

On my left there is a small rental house. Often unoccupied.
On my right the residents are rarely home.
Across the street is a fellow musician. He understands.
 
same here, I am surrounded on three sides by close neighbors.

Luckily I work only three miles from home and I can play on my lunch hour
when most people are not home.

I also play after work for about 45 minutes. Been doing this for a solid year
and never heard a complaint.

1. never playing after 6pm
2. never playing more than 1 hour at one time
3. never playing more than twice a day or maximum 2 hours.
4. Sometimes going an entire week without playing
(rare but I give 'em a break once in a while)

those 4 things have kept the compliants non existant but think I am lucky that I even get away with that.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I also close up all of the doors and windows to trap the sound in as much as possible (no sound proofing). Also using multi-rods and brushes helps quite a bit as well. I've been able to get away with playing until 10 or 11 at night when using brushes with out hearing a word from any of my neighbors. Although I've really got to control my bass drum during those hours. My only issue is I'd really like to take the time to properly practice several things (i.e triplets around the kit or jazz ride licks, etc.) and I don't get that opportunity for fear of being that guy in the neighborhood and then getting complaints. Oh well, I can still beat the life out of them for a 1/2 - an hour straight without any issues.

I've got a friend however who, unfortunately, has been getting periodic complaints from his neighbor ever since he got a kit about a year ago. Poor bastard spent a grip of money on trying to soundproof his garage so he could play, and still gets complaints from time to time. It is only one neighbor though. Although it didn't help that when he got his kit the first thing he did was start in on the double bass pedal almost nonstop. I still attest to the fact that even though I really enjoy the double bass sounds; no one wants to listen to anyone learning to play the double bass pedal (or triplets, or jazz ride licks).
 
I got a noise complaint from the people who live behind my house. There were cops that showed up and said they liked my playing, which was weird. They told us to keep our time under 10 pm. I used to play past 11 pm and it hasn't bothered anybody but since the cops showed up, my parents kept worrying a little bit. I'm planning to do insulation in the basement.
 
I've been playing at my house for 8 years and I've had no complaints ever, which is surprising. I like to think it is because where I live is so mundane and boring that it might be a breath of fresh air to see a neighbor have a hobby. When I used to practice in the garage, I'd leave it cracked because it gets extremely hot in Texas, and people would always give me compliments. Even though I've moved my drums inside now, I still catch kids stand outside my house when they are walking home from school.

I do have a couple of rules which is that I never play before 12pm and never after 930ish pm.
If I need to practice something like a fill or a new groove, I'll usually only repeat it for about 15 minutes and then just play around the kit so it doesn't get too monotonous for the neighbors.
 
My neighbors either can't hear it, or don't mind it. I actually went around to the closer homes in my culdesac and asked my neighbors, (all of whom are elderly women), and some said they don't hear it, others said they don't mind. I even asked what time was too late, and one said, "If it's something you love, then play all night." It was pretty cool.
 
I never drum past 6 pm, or i hit the edrums after that hour, but i found just simply throwing t-shirts over my drums, cuts the volume way down, and I use multi-rods...my landlord is a working musician, and his bands practice in the front house sometims, so my little drums are nothing compaired to that. I do wish i could play later at night though, seems that's when i have the most urge.
 
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