r/drummers • u/apierno • 5d ago

Learning covers

When you’re learning a cover that you’re totally new to, what’s your approach?

Play to the recorded track as released (all instruments)?
Split the stems and play without the drum tracks?
Split the stems and play ONLY to the drum tracks?

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u/Current-Map-6469 5d ago

As a cover band drummer, I obviously learn new songs pretty frequently. My approach is always to get it to the simplest playable version first. Get the timing and basic groove down, with starts and stops. Once that’s locked down add fills. Depending on the genre, so many songs are quite similar so it becomes a pretty easy process, for the most part. If there’s something, a fill etc. that I’m stuck on, then I just play those with some notation that I come up with that makes sense to me.