Fake Books

I've been meaning to look into the concept of drum "fake books" for a while now. I remember how you can buy guitar fake books...that distill the basic of a song into a short summary...so you can kind of play all kinds of things. It occurred to me that such a thing for drums would be awesome. So many rock and pop songs use a repetitive groove...you'd only need the basic one to four measure groove plus a note about any fancy sections. Most songs could be summarized in a few lines. And then classic rock cover band here you come...or live karaoke band.

Now granted, not all songs NEED a fakebook...drummers can fake it all by themselves often. But still...I wondered.

A quick web search reveals lots of promising dead ends that lead to fake books for any instrument under the sun aside from the drums.

So no obvious fake books available for drums...drum transcription books of various flavors, but nothing like I had in mind.

I was reminded, though, during my search, of the free drum charts at Gigging Drum Charts...which mostly aren't free at all...but most are pretty cheap even if they aren't free. Taking a look at those that ARE free, I see that theses "charts" are pretty close to what I was thinking of as a drum "fake book"...they just aren't all together in a big book. Here, for instance, is Running Down a Dream by Tom Petty. It seems like they could have reduced this particular song down significantly with short hand and repeat symbols/notation...but oh well. Anyway...I'm gonna do some searches under "drum charts" and add the good links at left.