Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
OT: Alesis Surge Mesh kit drum loudness test
How loud are the drum pads on the Alesis Surge Mesh kit?
Comments
Thanks for an interesting demonstration! However, this only really deals with sound traveling horizontally. The real problem in an apartment building is sound traveling vertically, particularly the room directly below the drum kit. This kind of contact sympathetic vibration of low frequencies is nearly impossible to demonstrate in a video, and the only real way to hear it is to put your ear up against the wall or floor.
I've done some tests, and in the room below it can sound almost as bad as someone pounding right on your ceiling. You'd be surprised how bad it can be. My friend who lives in an NYC apt w/ V-Drums couldn't understand why his neighbor below him was complaining so much, until I had him actually go down there and hear it for himself. It mostly has to do with contact with the floor, which acts as a big resonator, amplifying the sound. What I have done, and what I advised him to do, is put at least two layers of carpet padding and then two layers of thick carpet under the drum kit, especially under the kick and hi hat pedals. (He had only one thin rug and no padding, which was doing next to nothing.) Multiple layers of padding and carpet can help a lot, but for superior sound isolation, you may even need to look into an acoustically engineered riser that properly decouples the kit from contact with the floor.
Here are a couple of interesting videos I found:
I can only recommend living in a basement or on top of a store/business if you wanna practice on e-drums. That's pretty much what I've always done. I'm lucky though where I lived for the past 21 years are mostly musicians's lofts so I can jam on my real drumset with a full band t'ill 11 pm but I also practice at night on my 2box so nobody hears me. Never had a complain. It's all concrete though and I have a nice thick carpet.