In my neverending quest to reduce Rock Band drum noise to an absolute minimum, I experimented with padding the inside of the drum heads.

Here’s how I did it. First, I popped off the drum head. This may take some effort depending on which kind of drum kit you have — EL drum heads come right off, whereas the QM drum heads take a bit more force. But if you’re careful you won’t hurt anything. Give em’ a tug and see what’s under there!

My main drum set is a QM, and the bottom looks like this with the top removed.

Lots of areas for sound to resonate and bounce around inside that drum. Let’s fix that!

I then took a little bit of thin fleece fabric that I had, cut it into small strips, rolled it up and placed it wherever I could inside the drum head. Now that I’m looking at this picture, I think it’s safe to put fabric all along the bottom of the drum, too.

I did the same on the top, but there’s not a lot of room between the foam and the sensors.

I added the same sort of padding to each drum — red, yellow, blue, and green.

That’s a QM drum set. An EL drum set is quite different internally, but the theory of padding is the same. If you want to see how to add padding to an EL drum set, I found a set of pictures on the ScoreHero Rock Band hardware forum:

The results are pretty modest. There’s a mild reduction in the hollow, resonating “thunk” sound you get from hitting an empty plastic container.

If you really want to reduce the noise of your Rock Band drumset, start with those gum rubber or neoprene drum covers. They are extremely effective.

Still, adding a bit of padding to the interior of the drums is cheap and easy, and it does reduce the rock band drum noise a little more… I’ll take all the noise reduction I can get!