Nobody wants to discourage young musicians from nurturing their talents but it depends who is playing what and where and how often.
QUESTION: The teenage son of a neighbour directly across the driveway from my townhouse practices in their garage on his full size drum kit seven days a week. I can hear the drumming on my back deck area all the time. If he leaves the garage door open, I can hear it inside the house above the TV.
I approached the mother asking for quiet on weekends when I use my deck most and offered a compromise of one hour on Saturday mornings but was told that might clash with his soccer and he needed to practice the drums every day.
Things are at a stalemate at the moment, any suggestions please? – Snared (via Forum)
ANSWER: You don't need to put up with any of this. You'll almost certainly have recourse under by-laws that forbid residents from disturbing the peaceful enjoyment of others' lots. Get the EC to issue a Notice To Comply to shut the drummer up or move him on.
Installing a wannabe drummer in a strata development is the absolute height of selfishness. There are plenty of rehearsal spaces available and if this mother's so worried about junior's career in music, she can shell out for electronic drums that only he will hear.
One Flat Chat Forum participant calling himself John Bonham was having trouble with a Ducati-riding, yuppie EC member who was fond of showing off his noise machine to his mates on otherwise quiet Sunday afternoons.
“I fixed it by recording the noise ambiently from the middle of our kitchen and sending the sound file and an explanatory note by email to him, the rest of the committee and the strata manager, showing how loud it actually was,” he says.
“You'll be amazed at the ease of operation and excellent quality of the recorders built into mobile phones and such and it's usually easy to just drop the audio files on to your computer and into an email.”
This is one recording deal Junior won't want.
The original responses to this complaint are elsewhere in this forum under the headline “Drummer Driving me Mad.”