Building a practice room - Part 1

Being a drummer comes bundled with a number of obstacles. The instrument alone can be expensive when you include all the hardware and cymbals to round out the drum kit. Then consider that, unless your bandmates are rehearsing at your place, it’s difficult moving your gear back and forth and you have to have a vehicle that can fit all of that gear. As for any live performances, you can plan on always being the first one in and the last one out given the amount of time required to set up, tear down, and load that gear. But one of the biggest challenges can be having a place to play your instrument. Drums are LOUD and unless you’re playing on an electric kit, there’s no volume knob. For your dwelling, you can rule out living in an apartment. So you’re left with having to rent or buy a house and for anyone living with you (few single people own their own house) the “music” you think you’re creating as you practice determinedly is really just noise to them. Hammering, thumping, low frequency noise. And unless you live out in the country, there’s your neighbors to consider as well.

I’m extremely fortunate to have a decent job, a truck to haul my gear, and most importantly, a modest house with a sound-isolating practice room. But it’s only been for the last 5 months that I’ve been able to enjoy my “Beat Locker” (aptly named by Jim Leno for the vault-like door and the room’s resemblance to a meat locker) and prior to that, I hadn’t played drums in over 20 years!

When Jim Leno, Kevin Teagle and myself reunited at a dinner party in February 2020, talk began of a recording project. Keep in mind, we hadn’t worked together in 27 years. But a creative urge and collective spirit to work on something new filled the room, freshly sown from resurrected tales of “the good ole’ days” and an ounce (a lot of ounces, actually) of wine-filled bravado. Still, it was there! The hurdles and barriers to doing such a DIY project had been lowered quite a bit since we last worked together and so talk continued and once it was clear this wasn’t just the alcohol talking (“We’re getting the band back together!”), we agreed to turn our talk into reality. 

This meant I would first need to purchase a set of drums and then find a place I could play them. Like I said, I didn’t own a drum kit and drumming had been in the rear view mirror for over 20 years. The reasons why are best saved for another story. The main point is that we were about to embark on a year-long process of recording, mixing, distributing a full-length album and I didn’t even have an instrument to play. Hell, even if I had an instrument, I wasn’t even sure I could play anymore! 20 years is a long time.

I purchased a used set of drums and after cleaning them up and buying new heads, began acquiring hardware and cymbals, piece by piece. Determined to find a way to play my drums in our suburban house, I also began researching a DIY project of my own: building a drum studio. I quickly determined the only two options available were a bedroom in the daylight basement of our split level home or the garage. The bedroom was the more desirable option being inside and climate controlled. The garage was unfinished, which meant several challenges; temperature extremes in the summer and winter, moving a bulky home gym out of the way, giving up shop space and last but not least, giving up much needed storage space. But building in the bedroom presented its own set of obstacles. I knew that to build a “room within a room” design - the best way to isolate sound - I would need to re-engineer the room in order to be left with something that wouldn’t discourage a buyer once we eventually decided to sell the house. That would be expensive. To build a structure that I could later tear down, a shed, essentially, would require enough space within the room to be able to get around all 4 sides and the roof in order to construct it. The latter obstacle proved to be the deciding factor once I realized the studio space would be too small and there wasn’t enough room to get materials in and around the building space. Back to the garage.

I mentioned some of the problems building this studio in the garage but there were some benefits too. For one thing, it would mean we’d finally be getting around to finishing the garage - something that would add value to our home and make it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. It would also be easier to load my gear in and out. It would certainly be easier to build with more space to work and that would also mean larger internal space for the studio. Last, it would be easier to disassemble the room once we sell the house. Because let’s be honest… unless a musician moves in or someone with a grow operation, most buyers aren’t going to be thrilled with a two-car garage that is, in effect, a one-car garage.

I began designing, plotting out how much room I had to work with (8’ x 12’ outside dimensions), and researching the best way to go about constructing this thing. All I can say is, thank goodness for YouTube! This was a big undertaking for me. While I consider myself handy and armed with some basic building knowledge I learned from my dad, I had never built anything this big before on my own. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist and the foreknowledge of all the mistakes that were bound to happen can be paralyzing.

As Jim and Kevin began writing and putting together material, my ideal plan of constructing a drum room in a few months (yeah, right) and then practicing my parts and coming into the studio prepared was quickly beginning to look like fantasy. Just the cumulative time spent on research alone probably ate up 2 months! So I pivoted and decided I was just going to have to go in cold to do my drum parts and we’d see what would come of it. Because, hey, who doesn’t like added stress? Our reunion/pandemic recording project would now chart along parallel lines with my drum room project as I jumped into the deep end to discover if I still knew how to play drums and if I could build something larger than a scrap-wood box.

To be continued…