Hi, I’m Paul. I joined The Quest for Groove more than a year ago. I took several beginner and intermediate courses here. Now I feel confident enough to focus on identifying drum grooves by ear and playing along at my level.
Here is my first completed drum cover: [Finger drumming] Survivor – Eye of the Tiger - YouTube
Wow, very nice. Thanks for sharing! I commented on Youtube as well, but to go a little more in detail here:
)Oh and one thing that comes to mind when I hear this song:
If you ever wanted to practice the independent hands method, playing the kick and snare with the non-dominant hand and the hi hat with the dominant hand for the beat, this is a good song to practice with.
It’s not necessary to do it this way, not at all, but since the main groove is so nice and straightforward it could be used for this other way of playing. And then, later on, when you might actually need to do it this way because a specific song demands it (mostly for dynamics reasons in my experience) you already have some of the basics down.
It also strengthens your non-dominant hand. Always a good thing.
Yeah, even for a song with a such simple beat it takes a lot of time to reach consistency.
This particular song has a variable tempo (slower in the beginning, faster by the end), so I couldn’t use a click for reference. I had to listen to a bass guitar closely. Also I had to extremely adjust hi-hat curves to get dynamics from MPD218 pads.
Here is how I prepared for a finger drumming cover
You did this so well. Exactly how I would recommend people to do it, with a small twist that makes it work for you personally. Couldn’t be any better!
Okay here is another one [Finger drumming] Green Day – Boulevard of Broken Dreams - YouTube.
This tune has pleasant tempo, so I practiced almost always at 100%.
Speaking about hand independence, I practiced playing accent crashes with a non-dominant hand.
Also I’ve spent a lot of time on tweaking the drum sound.
Yeah! Great cover! Im very happy to see these results trickling in after a long period of hard work.
This one was tough! I’ve spent two weeks on that and decided to stop with this result. Although it is not perfect, it is decent for my level.
This is a song with 99 bpm played with 16th notes, so it is pretty fast.
During the first week I learned how to play grooves in isolation from 30 to 80 bpm. I had a nice and consistent progress.
During the second week I started playing along with a drumless track and faced several problems.
However there is a lot I’ve learned the hard way . I would summarise my learnings like that:
Hey Vokilam,
Nice work! I think you’ve worked your way around those drum fills very well by using mutiple fingers.
Honestly, the track seems to speed up a bit when I listen to it on spotify. Maybe that’s not correct, but it sure feels like it after the intro.
That will be the kind of stuff messing you up, since you’re solid, playing a solid tempo and then the backing track “runs away”.
Focusing on the slow counts (every bar, or every 2 quarter notes), and then really using your own inner clock and filling in those large gaps will make your drums lock in better in those situations.
I really think you did a great job. It seems to lock in nicely!
Also agreed, move on from this. It’s already great. Keep on developing and come back to this next year for fun to see how much you’ve improved.
Dynamics
This song has hi-hat dynamics most noticeable at the beginning. It was hard to get this accents right on MPD 218, so I had to edit the hi-hat curve extremely. I also had to increase a volume of an open hi-hat to match the sound on the recording. Also I played an accented hi-hat with two fingers.
Fingering
The groove is straight 8th notes with one ghost note exception in chorus. So I first started playing all 8th notes with right hand as usual. Next day I thought that, although the tempo is comfortable, what if I divide notes between two hands and play 4ths with a dominant hand and 8ths with a non-dominant. Now I play twice slower and have more room for focusing on the rhythm. It worked very nice, although I spent a lot of time on two hands coordination.
What I learned
Wonderful, all of these things are exactly the kind of stuff I would like all of my students to do.
Thanks for sharing. This is gonna be a great finger drumming year!
This song has a triplet feel and interesting open hi-hat pattern. It is fast but is played with quarter notes. Fills are 8th triplets. Tambourine is played every other back beat in verse and every back beat in chorus.
Haha you’re so right about AD claps… I keep using them because I don’t want to look for something else and I always regret sticking with those samples and not just using claps from another library.
Solid time by the way! The hardest thing with this stuff I found is to play those quarter notes for a long time and then after a long time of that you have to play some triplets for 1 second.
To get those triplets 100% in the pocket is very hard because you sort of need to get into the triplet vibe after playing quarter notes for a long time and you only have one chance. 
Well, now I know that I can learn a medium complexity song in two weeks.
Learning experience of this song was similar to the Offspring’s “Kids Aren’t Alright”. I approached 100% bpm asymptotically. Last step from 105 to 110 bpm was the longest. The most difficult part was to lock with a backing track. Distortion guitars, screaming vocals are far from crisp metronome clicks.
I learned about in-ear monitoring, when a drummer has his own mix in headphones when performing live. So, I tried to do somewhat similar. I applied EQ
Also I continue shaping my way of practice
Hey Paul,
Great work! A mix that works for drums is always a goof way to go. Sometimes the drums will sound the best in the mix when they’re a little more in the back, with the guitars taking front and center. But… when you’re playing you just want to hear everything well. So making the mix sound a little weird in order to play everything well is a great idea.
I switched to a less intense mode and played 5-15 mins a day.
There are a lot of ghost notes in this song. I just placed them where I thought it would be comfortable for me to play and where it sounded cool.
I played ghost double strokes with a rolling gesture (middle then index finger hitting each its own pad). This was the easiest for me.
To make snare sound quiet-loud I tweaked a pad curve like this:
There is a lot of dynamics on an open hi-hat. I tried different combinations and fingerings and ended up with a single open hi-hat sound for simplicity. I wanted to use a foot pedal to control openness, but my sustain pedal was actually an on-off switch
Very nice feel! Man, this brings back some teenage memories The roll works well; with two fingers. Nice and subtle!
What I like about this song is unusual crashes on 1+ in verse sections. There are other places where crashes are played on 2, 2+.
Ghost notes were not so difficult to play. I played single strokes according to a groove and double strokes randomly on 4a.
Fills were also pretty straightforward. I changed orchestration to what I feel sounds better and to avoid finger crossing when playing descending toms. Overall, Fairfax 1 drums sound dry and I cannot make them sound thicker.
Intro section is an interesting one (share notes are highlighted with blue). It shows a limited dynamics of MPD218. Basically, even with adjusted curves the lightest but reliable touch starts from 64.
Good job! With that intro I would probably always draw in a nice velocity buildup in the midi file after recording. Ofcourse this cannot be done live, but if you’re recording, working with a small dynamic range, you can always do that to make the drums sound great dynamically.
