Finger drumming novice here. I was wondering if there some sort of library of common grooves across different styles (e.g. pop, rock, country, jazz) in the paid courses? One of the main challenges for me is figuring out how to map a groove played on a drum kit to a 4x4 pad layout and make it comfortable to play. So having a selection of common grooves would be very helpful in that respect. Off the top of my head I’m thinking stuff like “one drop”, “train beat”, “tom groove”, “6/8 ballad” etc. Massively enjoying QFG btw! 
Hey I don’t have something exactly like that. I tried doing this in the past by making a jazz course and a funk course but got stuck in the details that crept up even though I was trying to keep it simple.
What I do have is a play along library with a variety of styles.
Here’s a 6/8 groove for example, which belongs to the song " With You It’s Different" in the library.
This is a reggae type beat, which belongs to the song " Where Are We Going".
And I have a little over 20 songs like that. All real music, most of them using very playable beats and fills.
You might just want to click through the list and listen if there are some songs in there that you like. You can sort them from easy to hard and optionally filter by genre or style or technique.
My guess is if you go through the basics in the curriculum and you make it through the “building fills” course, you can start playing most of these songs as well. I would then also recommend my Moeller technique course which is basically a full Stewart Copeland drum part.
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Oh and one more thing… The Grooving & Improving course is actually 6 basic drum grooves. I honestly never bought about drum grooves by giving them a specific name, but these are 6 very basic but different beats that are used a lot.
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If you’re willing to put some work into it, you can just lookup MIDI Drum loops and try to learn them.
Just found this page when doing a quick google: Drum Patterns: Collection of Midi Drum Patterns & Grooves . Its nice to have the drum visualized in a sequencer grid like that.
XLN Drums also comes with Drum patterns included. When I have some time, I sometimes also try to replicate and learn a drum pattern that I hear / see somewhere on YouTube. You can replicate it in your DAW and then learn to play it there in sync with the original Rhythm. This is all more time-consuming and less nice than what Robert provides in the course, but I think it’s a good skill to learn this at some point.
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Yeah agreed. Figuring out simple beats on your own is actually a great skill. It’s one of those things you need to be able to do to really go further in your musical development anyways at some point.
If you did the QFG core curriculum and worked on some songs you should actually be able to start doing this on your own. My guess is it will be hard for a couple of weeks but then it should get easier.
Just get the basics down first, so you have some sort of foundation or framework to operate from.
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Thanks Rob and Fannon for your great answers! Very much appreciated.
I guess what I’m looking for are some best practices, and I think that will be well covered following the QFG curriculum. My mind had a tendency of jumping ahead, I’m sure things will become clearer as I progress.
Reverse engineering MIDI grooves already crossed my mind as a good idea, but I guess it would be useful to have a repertoire of stuff that works before doing that. For example, a certain pattern may require you to use a different pad layout, and you probably need some experience to figure out what works best.
At some point I guess there will be a point of insight as to the tradeoffs that come with “digitizing” an acoustic drum kit to 16 buttons of limited sensitivity. For example, I’d imagine doing flams and doubles with one pad/finger may be hard to do - but again, I’m jumping ahead 
Thanks again!
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The main thing I ran in to with the pad dynamics was honestly trying to play jazz It’s not like you can’t do it but it just kind of sucks when you want to hit “medium loud” during a typical jazz comp improv and you get a full on max loudness snare hit. The difference between those is so insanely small on a pad controller whereas on a real kit you’d never accidentally hit that loud.
I can see a real kit would work much better for very dynamic improvised music. For most other recorded music the dynamic range honestly seems fine. Probably because all drums are heavily processed in all songs we hear.
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Thanks for the insight 
Just out of curiosity, and slightly off-topic (apologies): Would you say playing a drum part as in the following video is possible using finger drumming?
I’m especially curious about the fast snare rolls and the generally very agile and dynamic drumming style. Would you adapt your technique and/or pad layout for this playing style? Would you even use different snare samples e.g. to play flams?
(Nerding out on this is a wonderful form of procrastinating from doing the real work ofc…)
Yes the finger drumming is not the limitation here in terms of possibilities.
But… this guy is a really, really good professional drummer with decades of experience (he works as a studio drummer in Nashville I believe).
So it’s not necessarily easier to learn this on the pads than it is learning it on real drums. Making it groove like this is just as hard.
But finger drumming is not the bottleneck here is what I’m saying. Just for reference: I could probably study this part or something similar in a couple of weeks time. It would not be easy for me either though, and I would probably get to 80-90% of this guys level of groove.
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And to answer this question specifically. I would not change anything specifically. Most of those fills and rolls are difficult because they’re fast but you actually have to practice to alternate your hand fast here to make it sound right.
No change in samples because addictive drums already “round robins” the samples when you repeat on the snare to make these things sound more realistic.
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Here’s an instant demo. I didn’t want to be that guy saying “I could play this” without at least demonstrating a quick version of this type of groove, just to prove that the pads would not stop you.
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Finally replying to your post - sorry for the hibernation! That’s an AWESOME demo and very well informed my decision to go for a paid subscription. Cheers!
Whippin’ out the FGDP!
Curious if you are still using it. I love the layout-LOVE IT! However, I find the pad sensitivity, combined with the “hardness” of the pads, to be a reason I keep coming back to the NI Maschine MK3.
-David
Just +1-ing this. I was also searching for a similar “named genre library” but Addictive Drums 2 has so many beats, and the beats tab gives you an easy-to-follow notation.
-David
Here are two websites where you can also find drum-patterns:
Drum Patterns (has a lot, but I find the visual representation difficult to read)
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Yes I still use it. I agree about the pads. Could be better, but having the FGDP next to me on the couch make me play a lot more.
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Hi there, author of the Drum Patterns website here.
Could you describe what’s so difficult to read about patterns and how would you improve to make it more readable?
Wow, nice that you got back to this here!
I could think of two improvements:
- Color code by type of sound, currently the colors are just a gradient from left to right, having no musical meaning
- Accent and Ghost could be not a separate lane, but be indicated directly on the hit, e.g. have a bigger circle (maybe with second circle around it) for accent, and a smaller or empty circle for Ghost note. There are may ways to visually indicate it, I’ll attach XLN XO as an example.
- Very minor nitpick: The circles are not 100% equidistant from each other.
- I like very much how you implemented the bottom bar, seeing which parts of the pattern are currently playing and the overall order. Just noticed that it already starts creating a […] when there are more than 4 parts. From the visual space, I think you could easily have 8 displayed and only then go for […]
- Maybe have an option to hide rows that are not used at all? It would mess with the nice square layout though.
- Currently the colors/gradients are based on chosen drum machine’s color scheme (e.g. Roland TR-808). Yeah, it would be more readable if each voice had it own color, but i’m kinda liking color scheme based on the machine. Maybe dedicated option in user profile to enable/customize colors?
- The reason the accent and ghost are on separate lanes is because when i started this project i just copied TR-808 layout, and later added ghost notes. I completely agree that your solution would be better user experience. Actually a couple of users already suggested that solution and eventually i will implement it.
- That’s odd. Will investigate that.
- For some time it was 8 but it didn’t fit properly on smaller screens/mobile devices so i changed to 4 temporarily.
- I can maybe add some option to hide unused voices, but overall i like the square layout:)
Thank you very much for your feedback, i greatly appreciate it mate.
Cheers!
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Thanks for considering the feedback!
- Having this as options would be totally fine
- Yes, I realized that you took the 808 as starting point, it’s a classic! Having the choice of ghost / accent per trigger would in general be more flexible though, not just a visual change.
- Ok, I see. Haven’t thought of that. But it’s not really a problem if it stays at 4
- Yes, square layout does look nice and then it’s also consistent. I’m also not sure on this, just a bit used to notations where they keep it minimal and remove unused lanes.