Cheapskate’s Corner: drum dampener

Keo Percussion has offered this lovely drum dampener for a few years.

It’s basically a hunk of wood and rubber with some magnets attached on the backside, so the pad will adhere to the inside wall of the drum rim.

It’s a smart design, and I went looking for one.

The only one I found was being sold used on Reverb, for twenty bucks.

Then I tried finding one new and saw that they start at $35 retail. If you can find one.

Apparently, Keo Percussion recently shut down and their products are now quite hard to find.

After pondering my options, I decided to try and make something similar for myself.

Using scraps of leather, drum mute foam, cork and some magnets, I created a similar product.

Since I don’t have commercial cutting tools at home, the best I could do was to use sharp scissors and cut my chosen shape over and over for each layer. 

The results weren’t gorgeous but they lined up well enough for m e to glue the layers together and call it good. (I may paint a little glue around the edges to seal the cork and keep it from crumbling.)

What turned out to be slightly off-canter also added a nice accidental feature: I affixed the magnets so that the dampener could be set two different ways to adjust the degree of dampening, something the Keo version didn’t look like it offered. It’s a nice bonus, and it works really well.