FAQ
Pricing / Subscription
So, this website is completely free?
My beginner course is 100% free. It will help you buy the right gear, set everything up and then it will teach you the system I use for finger drumming as well as a couple of nice beats and fills. Just a matter of creating an account, logging in and enjoying the content. After that course, you can enjoy a couple of courses with a free start. That means that you get the first few lessons in the course for free and at some point you will have to become a premium member in order to continue.
Why do I need an account? So you can spam me into buying your premium stuff?
No. I will actually send you one email explaining how things work around here and then I leave you alone forever.
You can voluntarily sign up for email updates like gear updates, information about newly released courses, discounts etc. It’s a revolutionary new way of communicating that I call: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by annoying people with crap they don’t want™.
The reason all students need an account is that I actually built a great lesson system on this website that can be tweaked to students preferences. Like different diagrams and mirrored videos for left-handed people, quickly picking up where you left off and more stuff like that. If you’re learning with me, for free or not, I want you to have the complete experience.
Ok… so how much does it cost to become a premium member?
You’ll find the current pricing in big letters on the Premium Subscription / Pricing page!
I hate subscriptions!
I tried to make the pricing for the courses as much value for money as possible and a subscription based plan simply turned out to be the best for the way the courses are structured here. Most people do not need the whole curriculum and will be done in a couple of months. Other people want to go more in depth and can then pay for a yearly plan which is a lot cheaper. Buying everything once with lifetime access is something I am considering as an option, but I’m struggling with the idea of lifetime access since I wonder if a one man endeavour like this website can actually promise lifetime access. That’s more of a bigger company type of thing where the owner can die and things still keep going 🙂
I’m a premium subscriber and got this payment charge from “Paddle.com” or “Paddle.net”. Is that you?
Yes, Paddle handles all international payments for me which is super important if you have to collect and pay sales tax to a lot of different governments around the world. That’s pretty difficult if you have a diverse international audience like The Quest for Groove has.
How do I cancel my monthly subscription?
It depends on if you’re a member through Patreon (the old way) or a member through Paddle (all subscriptions since 2021).
Since 2021, every new subscription is neatly integrated with this website, which means there is a cancel button in your user dashboard and you can cancel simply by clicking that button!
Please note that a yearly subscription cannot be cancelled because it does not automatically renew. It simply stops after a year, so the cancellation is built in and automatic.
Patreon Cancellation Instructions (for older subscriptions)
- The Patreon account page where your subscriptions are located is: patreon.com/pledges.
- After logging in, you can click edit next to your Quest for Groove subscription and then there should be a small, grey text link (Edit or Cancel payment) there that you can click to cancel. It is right below that big button that they use to distract you 🙂
- Step by step instructions on how to cancel your membership on Patreon can be found on this Patreon FAQ page as well!
Becoming a finger drummer
What equipment / software do I need?
You can either enroll in my free beginner course in which I talk about this in detail, or you can check out this summary of everything I ever made about the stuff you might need.
How do I know your method is the right method? What if I accidentally waste my time?
Of course, what is 100% the right method always depends on the person, but I can assure you that the core of what you’re learning here will never be a waste of time. The Quest for Groove in the end is about musicianship, playing in a tasty, functional and especially groovy way, which are all qualities you can take with you even if you switch from the pads to playing the saxophone. Also, we’re spending our time here learning what effective learning is and how to get the most out of your practice time every single day. Again, stuff that can be applied to your new Mongolian Throat Singing passion after you’ve left the finger drumming scene for good (Mongolian Throat Singing is awesome by the way, if you’ve never heard it check it out).
I also made a nice video on Youtube about called How to get good at finger drumming? A summary of years of practice. I think this outlines my curriculum pretty well. On top of that, it will give you a feel for my approach to both learning and teaching finger drumming.
Besides all of that, you probably just want to enroll in the free beginner course and after that start with the first free lessons in the Grooving & Improving course. Just see how you feel and how you progress. If you’re happy and it feels good, you’re in the right place for now!
How long will it take before I’m the best fingerdrummer ever?
The truth is that learning to play drums on a pad controller is just like learning any other instrument. It just takes a lot of time and practice to really become good at it.
The trick to becoming an awesome musician is to make the journey of learning an interesting, fun and rewarding one from the moment you begin. That way you will keep playing, time will pass and eventually you will be awesome :-).
With this website I hope to provide people with exactly that.
About the website
Do you provide the material in other languages?
As of 2021 I’m going all in on automatic translation solutions since those are cheap, they allow the material to be translated in basically every language in the world and the A.I. that does the translating gets better by the day. For a small endeavour like this one, this is by far the best solution as opposed to hiring professional translators for every language… that’s just too expensive at the moment. All of the lesson videos are captioned in English, which makes it possible to instantly translate them with the Google Chrome browser and google translate enabled. Check out my guide on translating this website if you’re interested!
Who are you guys?
Right now it’s only me, Robert Mathijs. I’m an Amsterdam based producer / guitar player / singer who started finger drumming in 2014 to speed up my workflow in the studio. The whole background story of The Quest for Groove project (which also happens to be my personal background story) can be found on the ‘about’ page.
Why a website and not just Youtube lessons?
This website is built specifically for online courses and therefore has a lot of nice functionality that Youtube doesn’t have. It is built with effective and distraction free learning in mind. Go ahead and do one of the free lessons and you’ll immediately understand what I mean.
Who designed the website?
I did. I already knew some html and css and in 2018 I got introduced to this new way of designing websites called CSS Grid, which I then learned a lot more about from Jen Simmons and her channel Layout Land. With that new technology under my belt I took this great course called Become a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power With Code and I just built the whole thing. Once you’re in the habit of learning new, challenging things regularly, magical stuff happens!
What about the safety of my data and your privacy policy?
I’ve dedicated a special page to that subject, written in plain english (no complicated legal jargon). Check it out over here.
Something else
I have another question
Ask your question to a bunch of knowledgeable people (including myself) on the Quest for Groove Message boards or contact me directly with your question(s) at rob@questforgroove.com (It might take some time for me to respond, since I’m running this whole operation by myself).
