FAQ

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.

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.

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. You pay for what you use and if you use a lot, you get a bulk discount!

On top of that, I do not feel comfortable advertising lifetime access as a small internet school run by one individual. That's an easy promise to make, but a hard one to keep. It feels a bit like the early days of the internet where you could get an "unlimited" hosting plan, which would totally crap out on you when you'd actually get some traffic on your website. I can only promise lifetime access and keep it profitable if I assume most people won't really use it and that there will always be a constant influx of new students until the end of time (and the new students will then pay to keep the servers running for the existing ones with lifetime access). That's not how I want to do things.

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 at the bottom of the page and you can cancel simply by clicking that button! If you cannot find the button or it does not work, send me an email at rob@questforgroove.com and I will cancel your subscription for you.

You can easily request a refund by letting me know within 30 days of your purchase. I will issue the refund right away, no questions asked!

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.

• 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!

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!

I tech all my lessons on a 'classic' pad controller with 16 pads, in a 4x4 layout.

The difference with the Yamaha FGDP is actually not that big. All the core features (everything except the toms) of the 4x4 layout can be laid out exactly the same on the FGDP, as mentioned in this part of my FGDP breakdown video on Youtube.

While a future course on translating from a 4x4 layout to an FGDP (with some exercises) might be in the cards, I am not planning on remaking all lesson content for FGDP devices specifically. The difference between a 4x4 controller with the Quest for Groove layout and the FGDP devices is too small and it would cost me years of my life to re-film everything and remake the diagrams to cater to an even smaller niche of finger drummers. A niche that would disappear completely should Yamaha ever discontinue making FGDP devices, in which case all the content I made would become worthless.

I do want to encourage all FGDP users to give the lessons here a try. I am certain that most of you will be able to follow along just fine. I also would like to encourage people with a traditional pad controller to try the FGDP, since it's such a nice, mobile device and it really helps lower the barrier to daily practice because you can play anywhere, anytime.

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.

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!

I built it myself from the ground up (A custom theme on top of WordPress that is).

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!