band expenses...

[msquared]

Originally Posted by Dave Muscato

For a couple hundred bucks a month, you could buy a very nice electronic drum, headphone amp, couple of sets of headphones, and a little mixer. Run everything through headphones and practice in your garage. If your practice situation ever changes, instead of all that money just going into thin air for rent, you'll have all this equipment you can sell to recoup your $.

Another +1 on this. You don't even need to get the electronic drums as long as there is a reasonable amount of air sealing going on in the garage.

Most of what causes problems in these cases isn't the drums. It's the amps. Drums are very transient and most of the actual noise they kick out is high frequency stuff (unless you're covering Pantera). In a garage with a concrete floor and no furniture to soak up the sound, you get so much echo that everyone is turned way up just to hear each other. What sounds like a reasonable volume in the garage is going right through the door or window and is very loud outside.

In the bands that I play drums for I have my acoustic kit in my basement with mics on it in a room that's separate from the rest of the band. Everyone wears sealed headphones and plugs into the board and I have the aux outs of my Mackie mixer going into a Behringer headphone distribution amp. I don't get complaints from my family or my neighbors.

[nsmar4211]

Turn down! The only one who has an excuse....is the singer. And doubtful someone's gonna call the cops on a singer in a garage. As mentioned, everyone else can turn down. The drummer can throw a blanket on his kit or invest $50 in drumset pads (got em myself) and stuff a pillow in his bass drum. So what if the guitarists amps don't distort at lower volumes? If they can't play their parts without the distortion......they aren't playing their parts right to start with and are using the distortion to cover up their mistakes. Perhaps once a month rent out a place to play at "full volume", much cheaper than renting a place for the whole month.....
If they won't turn down, then it's a power struggle and you've got bigger issues than practice space IMHO....

[Stumpy]

Dunno...

I can't afford practice space either...

We decided to go direct with all of the vox/instruments. The drums for the quiet rehearsals are muted (mute pad things) and we have a mic in the kick and one on the snare and the rest is just what ever can be felt.
We ended up with a really great sound that was akin to that which you get in a studio.

We used a racked eurorack mixer, behringer headphone amp, a couple of outboard effects (compressor, etc.) for the main setup. The guitars went out their DI's as did I off the WT800C. Not the same as lighting it up...but no hassles with the small "thump thump" sound either.
Oh, and we used the Sony 7506 headphones.

Now that we are wireless, in ear/instruments, we use that setup for our rehearsals and it works out fine.

Just a Thought

[punkbassistfc]

Tough call man, but the choice is easier if its between the band and living>

[WordIsBorn79]

Originally Posted by cheapbasslovin

I know this may feel like really crummy advice, but could you convince the band to (gasp) play quietly?

I agree with this. It is going to be difficult at first, but in the long run, it will save money, hassle, and above all, this will make your band MUCH tighter. This happened to a previous band I was in, and it worked.

[MakiSupaStar]

Originally Posted by Dave Muscato

For a couple hundred bucks a month, you could buy a very nice electronic drum, headphone amp, couple of sets of headphones, and a little mixer. Run everything through headphones and practice in your garage. If your practice situation ever changes, instead of all that money just going into thin air for rent, you'll have all this equipment you can sell to recoup your $. That's what my band did. We all live together in an apartment and practice in 1/3 of our living room, 24 hours a day, anytime we feel like it, through headphones, and without bothering anybody. Total cost for everything was under $2,200, ~$200/month even with 10.24% interest on a credit card - that's total cost, not per member. When our lease is over, we can sell everything for about $1,800 (we got a great deal by buying the electronic drumset online for an "email for price" below MAP deal from http://www.bpmmusic.com ).

+1.