Hey, how’s it going? I’ve been learning finger drumming for weeks and I’m wondering how do advanced drummers find & map the patterns just by listening to songs? I’m learning Robert’s Breakbeat Course and is amazed by how these songs are played. However, when I listen to the songs on YouTube and Spotify, such as Amen Brother, it’s really hard to hear what exactly the drum is playing (kick, snare, etc).
There are other songs that I love which I hope I can map the drum patterns in the future myself. Appreciated if there are some tips Thank you!
One tip I can give you is to see if you can find the stems of the songs. There’s this website that you can find if you google “remixpacks ru” that has stems for a lot of songs. Dunno how legal it is to share these tracks, but just messing around with them should be fine. Usually the drum track is completely separate from the rest of the song and you can turn it on and off.
That’s the easiest way to get the drum tracks isolated and clearly audible.
You can litterally turn up the drum part with that tool. Doesnt always work, but it helps in a lot of cases.
Another trick is to use software to slow down tracks. That helps sometimes with fast stuff.
Then for most famous songs out there there are free youtube lessons from “regular” drummers. Those lessons might provide you with enough info to then connect the rest of the dots into your finger drumming part.
I remember got this DVD about how to play Stewart Copelands most famous drum parts from The Police. After checking out few lessons and understanding some of his tricks I could then also hear those tricks in other police songs and replicate them.
Oh and with all that said: Just learning existing drum patterns like the ones in the QFG courses for a year (or two) is actually a great way to get started with understanding how all of these beats work. The experience from that over time will contribute to this skill of being able to copy other beats from records. That just takes quite some time and somewhat of a developed ear as well.
Im working hard on providing folks with more study material!
The website has a lot of great resources. Even though I can retrieve a solo drum track from the song, it will probably take me a year or two before I am able to draw patterns. The music-balance on izotope sounds amazing but a bit expensive so I’ll skip it for now
Thanks again for making such a great course, I’m still at the beginning but looking forward to any new materials
There are a couple of good sites where you can find MIDI stems (including the percussion) for different songs. Another way to find stems would be to search “song name midi files”. I’ve understood that if someone tries to interpret a song and then uploads their interpretation, then that’s legal. But don’t quote me on that, because I’m not completely sure.
Of course some stems are more correct than others, but I’ve found much luck on a site called Supreme MIDI, for example.
The fundamental frequencies of the drum shells (kicks, snares, and toms) are usually below about 250 Hz. So if you are having trouble hearing the drums in a mix, you could low-pass filter everything else out and try to boost those fundamentals with sharp bell EQs to hear them better.
I’m sure the iZotope algorithm works better, it’s just pricey. I actually have RX 7 but wasn’t even aware of that plugin, so I’m gonna check it out for sure! Sounds fun.
Thank you!