A few weeks back I went an bought a drum kit. I live in an apartment so it had to be an electronic drum kit for noise reason, but what I didn’t know at the time was just how loud it’d actually be. There is tapping on the pads, but mainly its the base drum pedal and it’s pad that seem to create the noise. Or at least noise for the apartment below.

Roll on for the home made drum riser.

The Concept

I had read about others with electronic kits building risers, such as this one, which gave me the idea to search out a rubber mat and something to raise it up off the floor with. The closest thing I could find was a large rubber gym mat, approx 2cm thick, but it looked like it would do the job. I could figure the other parts out as we went.

The Journey

Somethings seem simple on paper but turn out to be much more difficult in practice. This was one of those occasions. The task was simply to drive down into Wicklow, buy a large rubber mat, then get it home. Abbeylawn was the company selling the rubber gym mats also sold rubber cow mats which seemed to offer more give and hopefully more sound proofing. Things started to go a wrong once I picked the initial mat after the helpful attendant showed me through the different mats. Turned out they were down to two of that mat, and one was damaged leaving only the display one.

To put this into perspective, the company is pretty much based on a sort of farm yard. As such things were a bit wet and mucky. At the time I just thought that its a rubber mat, it’ll wash off, not thinking about just about everything else. But into the car it went and onward home.

Once home the next problem popped up. These mats weight 20kg, and while that may not seem much on paper, it is a whole other story with a 3m wide rubber mat that you can only grip with your fingers. Worse was that it didn’t roll up fully and with the muck and water, it made a bit of a mess getting it up the stairs. It then took a whole four days to properly dry off on both sides due to the honeycomb bottom.

But still, I had my mat.

How to float the boat

One of the last steps was just how to raise everything up off the floor. My biggest concern was actually that the whole thing was highest restricted due to its location right beside my wardrobes. Queue looking at types of rugs, carpets, carpet mats, rubber stoppers, foam…

Eventually it hit me. Ice cube trays! Ikea sells some rubber ones, and cheap enough that it would be worth a try. The end result of 5 trays cut apart and tacked on is a follows.

How it all feels

The end result is a raised platform for the drum which bounces slightly when playing. Feels a little odd but I’m sure I’ll get used to it pretty quickly. Does it stop the noise to below? Well that I don’t know yet. Since the kick isn’t touching the ground any more, the only noise that should be left is the noise around the room itself, so hopefully it does.