How to Practice Drums Quietly

An acoustic drum kit is loud, and most of us share walls, floors or a household with people who didn't choose the drums. That doesn't have to mean not practicing. A large part of drumming is hand control and timing, and neither needs a kit. The trick is knowing which parts of your playing a quiet setup can build, and which parts only real drums can.

The practice pad

A practice pad is a small disc with a rubber or similar playing surface. It bounces the stick back roughly the way a drum does and makes a tap instead of a crack. Put it on a snare stand, on top of your snare, or on a table at about the height your snare would be, so your arms sit the way they do at the kit.

The pad is where sticking lives: single strokes, double strokes, paradiddles, accents, and playing all of it evenly against a click. It's also unforgiving in a useful way. With no drum tone to hide behind, you hear every stroke that's early, late or weaker than the one before it.

A pillow or cushion is quieter still, and it doesn't bounce at all, so your wrists have to lift the stick for every note. A few minutes of that is a fair workout. It doesn't teach you to use rebound, though, so it shouldn't be the only surface you play on.

Feet without a kick drum

Your feet can practice on the floor. Sit as you would at the kit and tap the kick part with your right foot. If the groove has a part for the hi-hat pedal, tap that with your left. Put the hands on a pad at the same time and you can work through the coordination of a whole groove almost silently.

Quieter ways to play a whole kit

If you have a kit and need it to be quieter, there are a few general routes. None of them need a particular brand.

• Mute pads. Rubber or foam pads that sit on top of the drums and cymbals. The kit stays where it is, so your arms still learn the layout, but every surface feels more like a practice pad than a drum.
• Mesh heads and low-volume cymbals. Mesh heads replace the normal drum heads, and low-volume cymbals are full of small holes. Together they turn an acoustic kit into a much quieter one. Mesh heads usually bounce more than regular heads, so expect the real thing to feel a little heavier.
• An electronic kit with headphones. You hear a full drum sound. The room hears sticks on pads and the thud of the pedals.
• Lighter tools and a lighter touch. Thin sticks, rods made of bundled dowels, and brushes all take volume off an acoustic kit. So does simply playing softly, which is a skill worth having in its own right.

What transfers and what doesn't

Anything that's about which hand goes when, and how evenly, carries over almost completely. If your paradiddle is clean on a pad, it'll be clean on a snare.

What doesn't carry over is everything to do with the instrument itself. A floor tom gives back much less bounce than a pad. Cymbals move when you hit them. Getting from the snare to a tom and back takes distance and time that a single pad never asks for. And only real drums teach you how hard to play the kick against the snare so the kit sounds balanced.

So treat quiet practice and kit time as two halves. When you do get to play at full volume, spend the first few minutes on exactly what you worked on quietly, slowly, and notice what feels different. That's where the pad work turns into drumming.

A quiet twenty minutes

1. Five minutes of single and double strokes. Slow, with a click, both hands at the same height and the same volume.
2. Five minutes of paradiddles. RLRR LRLL, with a small accent on the first note of each group and everything else low.
3. Five minutes on one groove. Left hand plays the snare part on the pad, right hand taps the hi-hat part on your knee, and your right foot taps the kick on the floor.
4. Five minutes on one fill. Play the sticking on the pad, count it out loud, and lead back into the groove from step three each time.

If you use Lazy Lopez: Drums, the Rudiments tool shows all 40 rudiments with notation and a sticking line at a tempo you set. Pulse, the app's metronome, has a visual pulse that glows on every beat, so it still keeps time for you with the sound off.

Quiet practice works best when it has a shape, so it's worth reading about building a practice routine if you don't have one yet. And since pad time is mostly hand time, it's a good moment to check how you hold the sticks and to pick two or three of the rudiments to stay with for a while.