Free drum-only backing tracks, sorted by genre and tempo | Hacker News Reader

Free drum-only backing tracks, sorted by genre and tempo

smarthobbymusician.com

63 pointsTwoYears22 comments

Using this incredibly rare opportunity to plug my dad's 90's-tastic website: http://bluesblast.com - full backing tracks for blues guitarists.

That is amazing.

Archive.org has a history of it going back to 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20020116171531/http://www.bluesb...

I like the original background better.

very late side note: I'm finding this to be pretty great distraction free work music.

If you want something better, recorded by great drummers in great analog studios, try https://drumdrops.com/. It's not free though.

These are all links to Youtube videos, nothing more. If you want to actually download music files, you must sign up first.

YouTube Video and Audio Downloader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-video...

Something similar: http://bandhub.com - there are more than 100,000 multitrack collabs (containing virtually all recorded music), where you can isolate (or mute) drums or any other instrument.

I want the exact opposite of this. No drums, but everything else!

not free, but have you tried http://www.jammit.com/ ?

certainly looks interesting, thanks

Since these tracks are here, does anyone fancy recording solos over these time-keepers and upload them here for fun?

This is mediocre. It's not nice sounding, just sounds like a MIDI drum machine with mediocre sounds and mediocre beats.

Does anyone know of good freely-licensed (CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA) MIDI drum beat collections? That would be much more valuable, and everyone could just open them in Hydrogen drum machine and use them with all free software. That would be worthwhile.

A set of YouTube videos of crappy drum machine things is not great at all.

You're being really harsh on this site. It's just a collection of drum loops from Youtube, which vary greatly in quality. For instance, this one is actually analog drums played by a pretty decent drummer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ulV4KTNIbU

"Mediocre" is not an extremely harsh thing to say. And drum loops on YouTube is a lousy way to have drum loops. They should be available in MIDI if they're just MIDI stuff, and should be downloadable. Taking MIDI and rendering it to YouTube where playback and tempo are particularly fixed… c'mon. I assume the point of YouTube is a mix of being able to show ads (not sure, I block ads) or just be there because it's popular.

Honestly, I'm trying to be critical not just of the site but of the idea that Hacker News folks think this is notable. I don't know how to express that distinctly, given that much of the points are the same for both critiques.

It seems to me the author's intent is mostly for people to use for backing tracks for them to practice with, not necessarily sampling for production. Though, honestly having a bunch of beats sorted out like this could be handy even just for a starting point/inspiration.

I've been trying to find a simple dataset of music to experiment with and this is perfect. Thanks!

happy practicing

Why is this on HackerNews? I understand the policy for what's acceptable is pretty broad but what relevance does a list of Youtube videos of drum tracks have? I'm assuming I'm missing something as there are quite a few upvotes.

I assume many hackers play instruments

dwiel a few comments up seems to have found a "relevant" use for them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065611

"I've been trying to find a simple dataset of music to experiment with and this is perfect. Thanks!"

This is a rare case of me seconding your question. I'm stumped also.

Yeah I'm not usually the guy to ask about relevance to HN but I really am stumped on this one too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com