Best drum mutes and silencer pads

There is a specific situation this page is for: there is already an acoustic drum kit in the house, and somebody has started objecting to it. Replacing the kit is the obvious answer and it is also an expensive one, so the question is what can be bought for a fraction of that to make the existing kit liveable.

The answer is not one product. It is three, they address different parts of the noise, and the one most people buy first addresses the part that was not the problem.

Every pick below states its Starter Path band, and we have not fitted any of them — the method is on how we pick. Volume-reduction figures are the manufacturers’ own published claims, cited at the bottom, and not measurements of ours.

Three products, three different jobs

Mute pads are rubber discs laid on top of the existing drum heads and cymbals. No tools, no modification, on and off in a minute. They are the cheapest option and the most reversible, and they change how the stick feels more than the alternatives do.

Mesh heads replace the batter head on each drum with a woven mesh that is tensioned like a real head. Fitting them is a head change — drum key, dismantling, retuning — and the original heads have to be stored. In exchange the stick bounces off something tensioned, which is much closer to the real playing experience.

Low-volume cymbals replace the cymbals with perforated ones made from a different alloy. They are not a mute at all; they are a second set of cymbals that happen to be quiet.

These are not three grades of the same thing. A household can reasonably end up owning mute pads and low-volume cymbals, or mesh heads and low-volume cymbals, and the right combination depends on what the actual complaint is.

The cymbals are the problem, and pad packs do not include them

This is the single most useful thing on this page. A four-piece mute pad pack covers the toms and the snare. A crash cymbal is a thin sheet of bronze designed to ring for several seconds at frequencies human hearing is most sensitive to, and it is comfortably the loudest and the most carrying part of a drum kit.

Quieting the drums and leaving the cymbals produces a kit that is maybe half as annoying and still unmistakably a drum kit. People buy the four-pad pack, find it has not solved the argument, and conclude mutes do not work. The mutes worked; they were fitted to the wrong half of the instrument.

So the recommendation here is to skip straight to the box set version, which Evans lists as including tom and snare mutes plus bass drum, hi-hat, ride and cymbal mutes. The four-pad pack remains on this page as the cheap way to find out whether the approach works at all before committing.

Airborne noise and the noise mutes cannot touch

Everything on this page addresses airborne noise — sound traveling through the air, through a door, through a window. That is the noise a person in the next room hears.

The bass drum pedal produces something different. Each beater strike is an impact transmitted into the floor through the kick drum spurs and the pedal, and that travels through the building structure. A neighbor below hears a thump that is completely unaffected by any mute, mesh head or low-volume cymbal, because the sound is not going through the air at all.

The fix for that is mechanical decoupling — a riser, a thick rubber mat, mass between the kit and the floor — and it is covered properly on how to soundproof a drum room. It is worth knowing before you spend, because if the complaint is from the flat below rather than the room next door, none of the products here will fix it.

The picks, and what each one is actually for

The Evans SoundOff Standard 4-pack#ad is four rubber pads for the toms and snare of a standard-sized kit — D’Addario specifies the Standard set as 12, 13, 14 and 16 inch. It is here as the cheap experiment: if an afternoon with these does not materially change the complaint, you know to look at the cymbals or the floor rather than buying more pads. If your kit is fusion-sized (10/12/14), the Fusion versions are the same pads in the other size set.

The Evans SoundOff Standard box set#ad is the actual recommendation. Standard sizing means 12, 13 and 16 inch toms with a 14 inch snare, which is the configuration most beginner kits are sold in, and the set adds the bass drum, hi-hat, ride and cymbal mutes. Check your tom sizes before ordering — a fusion-sized 10/12/14 kit needs the Fusion box set instead.

The Remo Silentstroke Propack#ad is the option for a kit that is going to stay quiet for a season rather than an evening. Remo publishes up to 90 per cent volume reduction on single-ply mesh, and because the head is tensioned the rebound stays close to real. It includes a 22 inch bass drum head, which matters: the kick is the loudest single drum and the one no pad pack covers well.

The Zildjian L80 Low Volume LV348 set#ad is 13 inch hi-hats, a 14 inch crash and an 18 inch crash-ride in a perforated proprietary alloy. Zildjian states it compared decibel levels with a sound level meter and measured up to 80 per cent quieter than a traditional cymbal. They are real cymbals on real stands, so nothing about the physical motion changes — and they cost more than many complete beginner kits, which is why they sit in the overspend band.

What we did not list, and why

Unbranded foam mute pad sets are sold at roughly a third of the Evans price and several are well reviewed. They are not listed because none of them publish a volume-reduction figure, a material, or a thickness, and on a page whose entire subject is how much quieter something gets, a product that publishes no number cannot be compared with one that does.

Vic Firth’s mute prepacks are a genuine alternative to the Evans sets and cover the same ground. They are not listed because at the time of writing every size configuration we checked showed only a handful of units in stock, and recommending something that may be gone by the time you click is not useful.

Tea towels and wallets on the snare deserve an honest mention, because they work. A folded cloth on a drum head is a perfectly effective mute and costs nothing. What it will not do is stay put, cover a cymbal, or come off cleanly, and it is worth trying for an evening before spending anything at all.

Drum shields and baffles are for stages, not houses. They redirect sound away from a congregation or an audience; in a domestic room they reflect it back at the drummer and do very little for anyone outside.

Protect your own hearing while you are at it

There is an irony in this page worth naming. Everything here protects other people from the kit. The person sitting at it is closer to the cymbals than anyone, for longer, and is the one most at risk — and mutes do not change that for the hours the kit is unmuted.

Musicians’ earplugs cost a small fraction of any product on this page and attenuate evenly rather than muffling, which means you can still hear what you are playing. Our hearing protection roundup covers them, and how loud drums actually are has the decibel numbers that make the case.