DRUM SONGS

Funk and soul drum songs

Hundreds of charts, 55 to 235 BPM, averaging 113. Each one is read from a real score: play it along to the record, take it down to any tempo, or work through the course underneath it.

MOST PLAYED

TEMPO: 55-235 BPM
AVERAGE: 113 BPM
MOSTLY: BEGINNER

MOST PLAYED FIRST

The whole shelf, where you can narrow it further or sort it easiest first.

ABOUT FUNK AND SOUL DRUM SONGS

Funk is the genre where what you leave out matters more than what you play. The grooves are mostly sixteenth notes on the hi-hat with a kick pattern threaded through them and ghost notes under the snare -- quiet notes that do not sound like anything on their own and make the whole bar move when they are there.

Beginner, intermediate and advanced parts are all here on the source catalogue's own difficulty tiers, with beginner the largest of them. Most of the shelf has not been through that ranking at all, which is true of two thirds of this catalogue and is why the difficulty filter is something you turn on rather than something applied for you. Tens of hours of playing at the tempos written, all told.

A good place to start is "Thank You For The Music" at 55 BPM, the slowest of the funk and soul songs on this shelf, or "Be My Baby" at 11 bars, the shortest. Every chart here downloads as sheet music, tab, MIDI and MusicXML if you would rather read it away from the screen.

QUESTIONS

What are ghost notes?

Snare notes played so quietly that you feel them rather than hear them, filling the gaps around the backbeat. They are what separates a funk groove from the same notes played flat, and they are written into these charts as the quieter marks on the snare line.

Why is funk hard if the tempo is slow?

Because the subdivision is fast even when the song is not. A groove at 95 BPM with sixteenths on the hat is asking your hand for as many notes a second as a rock song at 190, and asking you to place the kick between them accurately. Slow is not the same as easy.

How fast are funk and soul drum songs?

From 55 to 235 BPM, averaging 113. That number is where the record sits, not where you have to play it: every chart here runs at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, with the recording following where it can.

What is the slowest and the fastest of them?

"Thank You For The Music" by ABBA at 55 BPM is the slowest, and "We Own The Night" by Dance Gavin Dance at 235 BPM is the quickest. Neither number is a wall: every chart here plays at any tempo from a quarter of the written one upwards, so the fast ones are learnable at the speed of the slow ones.

Which one is quickest to learn?

"Be My Baby" by The Ronettes is the shortest part on this shelf at 11 bars. Short is not the same as easy, but a short part is one you can get all the way through in a sitting, and playing something end to end teaches more than looping the first eight bars of something longer.

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Rock drum songs Metal drum songs Punk drum songs Jazz and blues drum songs Pop drum songs Easy rock drum songs Hard metal drum songs