Want to play drums at home but its too loud for neighbors.?

you have 5 choices .

you can get a drum silencer . its a pad, put it over your drums, and it'll make it quieter.

put it in a sound proof room. that will be fine. our drum set is in our basement and we don't have any complaints.

get an electronic drum set. with these, you can change the volume, or even plug a pair of headphones. they may cost a bit more, some a bit less then acoustic drums, but they are worth the money.

you also have a choice of a drum booth. if you don't have a sound proof room, get a drum booth. the one i found, is portable, and costs over 2,000 dollars. http://www.guitarcenter.com/Cal-Mil-Portable-Drum-... you could check other places for cheaper drum booths.

choice five- get an acoustic drum set, and talk to your neigbors about what time you should be able to play, or a time period when they aren't sleeping or doing anything. this way, you can play, while they won't be annoyed. or let them know when your going to be playing, so they are prepared .

good luck and hope this helps!

Drums Too Loud

I got some little gel-like pads at a music store that you can stick on the heads to dampen the sound. The more you use the more it deadens the sound. They are about 1" by 2" are kind of a clear blue and stick to the top or bottom heads. You can pull them off and move them whenever you want to to get a different sound out of the drum too. They won't deaden the sound completely like pads or using headphones on an electric set but they will reduce it quite a bit and they can be used for making your drums sound better too.

You can buy practice drums from most music shops that have padded heads. If you want a cheaper solution cut some kind of foam to fit your drum and stick it on top. I know it'll sound lame but aside from sound proofing your room (which is possible but expensive and time consuming) it's the only thing you can do.

Go next door and tell them you need to practice. Ask them for times that would work for them. Maybe times when there not home etc. Maybe you and your neighbors can work out a schedule, that is if you have friendly neighbors.

Not everybody has money to spend on electric drums and drum machines and etc

They make these little pads you can place on top of each drum to deaden the sound. The are about $5 a piece

get a MIDI set like this http://www.zzounds.com/item--ALEDM5PROKIT and a pair of headphones

then also you can program the drumpads to trigger any midi sound you want - traditional drum sounds to basically any other sounds, depending on your MIDI sound device (which would have to be purchased separately unless the drumkit comes with its own sound module, I'm not sure) - I like alesis stuff because it's pretty simple and sturdy, but there are many other brands - a cheapie but solid midi sound module is the alesis SR-16 http://www.zzounds.com/item--ALESR16, I've had one for about 15 years and it still works perfectly

it has some nice traditional drum sounds as well as some funkier stuff with a pretty simple programming layout

you'll have to get up to speed a bit on what MIDI is and how it works, but basically, each 'drum-pad' on the SR16 you assign to a channel and set the respective drum-kit pads to the same channel

you can even cheat a little with the quantize function which will snap the trigger event (hitting the drum pad) to whatever note you want while recording, if you're going to record - for example, you set the quantize function to 16th notes, and then if your playing is off a bit, your drum pad note event (hitting the pad with the drumstick) will snap automatically to 16th notes, or set it up to 64th notes on the SR16, the shortest notes available on that machine - or you can turn quantize off

the quantize will not effect the sound of your playing as you play live, only the recorded playback

it also has a swing function which will allow for a triplet type of sound in various degrees

most drum sound modules of this sort will have these functions as well as velocity functions, which are how 'hard' the note sounds - if you set the velocity high, regardless of how hard you hit the trigger (the drum set pad) it will maintain an even volume - and again you can turn these functions off if you just want to play live

and fill features which mean that if you hold the trigger down (by holding the stick down on the trigger, it will fill the notes specified by the quantize function for however long you hold the drumstick down

and again, these functions don't have to be used at all, except setting the channels right for the pads

it's similar in concept let's say, to having several different TVs with separate remote controls, if you hit a button on one remote control, it will only trigger the corresponding TV and not the others, where in this example the TV would be the drum sound and the remote control button are the drumkit pads

but instead of transmitting the data via infrared as most TV remotes do, all of the data is transferred down the MIDI cable - and you'll only need one cable connecting the machine - although you'll probably have to daisy-chain the drum-kit pads together with cables - similar to a parallel circuit in electric wiring

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actually it looks like those midi drums do have their own sound module (that box thing right in the middle)

one difference though from playing real drums, is the surface of the drum-pads - they are not a typical drum skin - they're a type of flexible plastic

check'em out at a Guitar Center or your local music store and see if the tension would be fine for you, as the tension wouldn't be adjustable as drum skins are - midi cymbal triggers are also available, instead of those metal ones - which would still be loud, as you could probably imagine

<<< edit again>>>

and don't think that you just have to stick with the number of pads shown, you can get as many drum pads as you want - that's just an example of a setup, or the number of pads that come in a complete kit, you can buy more pads separately, or build up your own kit if you don't even want that many pads

<<<ok one last edit>>>

actually it does seem the tension of those pads is adjustable - I dunno... just go talk with a MIDI geek at a Guitar Center or whatever and they'll have more specific info

Get DRUM MUTES from Vic Firth, they are 60 dollars but they work and muffle the sound so no police come knocking on your door...

easy

get an electronic drum kit they are really quiet and you can play them with headphones

check out this website

http://www.roland.com/V-Drums/

the pads work well and for your cymbals you can cut out carpet for them it will deaden them without hurting the feel and bounce.