I am a huge fan of Jim Riley’s book “Survival Guide for the Modern Drummer”, an amazing encyclopaedia of drum grooves and fills for all modern popular music styles covering rock/pop (in all its forms), blues, funk, jazz, latin, reggae and more.
As well as being a very useful reference book of grooves and fills, the Guide includes 2 CD’s loaded with recordings of the 318 grooves and fills notated in the book, together with 124 backing tracks to play along to. The drumless backing tracks are really well recorded, with percussion mixed in to act as a click, each track seeming to be very authentic in terms of instrumentation, melody and playing style. Frankly, I think this book should be in every aspiring drummer’s collection, and you can buy it on Amazon here: Survival Guide for the Modern Drummer: A Crash Course in All Musical Styles for Drumset, Book & Online Audio
You will find here recordings of my performances playing along to some of these tracks, some played on my Roland TD-25kv kit, some on my acoustic kit.
Track 001 – Slow Moody Rock
Track notes: Recorded direct from the Roland TD-25kv via USB to Presonus Studio One DAW on a MacBook Pro (mid-2010), recording both audio and MIDI. I then played the MIDI track back through the EZDrummer2 plugin to create the mixdown. EZDrummer kit is the “Distorted” kit from their EZDrummer2 Modern Rock pack. MIDI data was not quantized or edited. In other words, what you hear is what I played – and yes, it could be better! 🙂
Recorded: July 2017. Uploaded 12 December 2017
Track 010 – Four On The Floor Pop
Track Notes: Recorded 27/01/2018
Source file: TD25 SGMD – 010 Four 20180127 : Mix 002
Recorded direct from the Roland TD-25kv via USB to Presonus Studio One DAW on a MacBook Pro (mid-2010), recording both audio and MIDI.
This mix uses the Roland audio (House 909 kit).
Ade Drums 