I built a website for drummers

I've been a musician for 35 years. Growing up I played the piano, flute, piccolo, guitar, bass guitar and saxophone, my degree was in music composition, and in 2023 I started learning how to play the drums. Since starting drum lessons, I've been eager to learn to play a variety of different songs in eclectic styles. Given my musical history and training, it's been fairly straightforward for me to pick up reading drum notation, and I'd often go in search of "free drum transcriptions" online to print out and play.

However, many of the songs I've wanted to learn over the years have been impossible to find transcriptions for; most drum transcription sites tend to hold catalogues of the rock classics in bulk, rather than niche jazz performances by emerging artists, for example. There's also an increasingly frightening amount of "AI generated drum transcription tools" surfacing on The Internet, and we all know how useful that's going to be (not useful). And so, I took to transcribing the songs I wanted to learn myself.

It turns out (according to my drum teacher), that I'm pretty darn good at transcribing drum tracks, and I really enjoy it. Slowing the tracks down using the Amazing Slow Downer, carefully listening to the intricacies of the part, and translating it to a written score has given me a deeper insight into a variety of playing styles and techniques, and as a result it's really helped improve my playing. At some point I thought to myself: I can't be the only one searching for these weird and obscure songs to play drums to, right?

And so, I decided to put my drum transcriptions on The Internet, on a brand new Website of their own, for everyone in the world to enjoy.

Today, I'm releasing DRUMSAUCE, a catalogue of free PDF drum transcriptions, created by my own human ears and hands.

About the website

The website consists of five main areas. The home page shows the three latest transcriptions, there's a transcriptions area, which currently shows all transcriptions (there are only three so far!) but will need some categorising, searching and filtering at some point, but I didn't want to over-engineer it too soon. There's the single transcription page, such as Painted Lady by Salin which contains the album cover art, a preview of the first page of the PDF, a download link, and an embedded YouTube video. There's a little about page, and finally, a request form where you can make a transcription request. Additionally, if you're into RSS feeds, you can also subscribe to the DRUMSAUCE RSS feed!

The tech

Honestly, I don't want to talk too much about the tech behind the website, because ultimately it doesn't really matter. I used a framework to create a static site (and the astute among you will inspect the DOM to see what framework that is, or you know, stalk me on GitHub), and I deployed it to a well-known deployment platform that has support for forms.

However, I will mention that pdfjs-dist is a great little library for working with PDFs on the web, and it's what powers the PDF preview on the transcription pages. I thought about using an image as the preview instead, but I didn't want to create too much extra effort for myself when adding new transcriptions to the site. All I need to do when adding a new transcription is:

• add a new object to a data.json file that contains an array of transcriptions

• find the MusicBrainz release ID for the track

• upload the new pdf to the repo

Regarding the MusicBrainz release ID, I use this to show the album cover art for the transcription. Ideally, I wouldn't be requesting resources from random third-party remote servers. However, I did this to minimise effort on my part. When the list of transcriptions fills up, this may have to be revisited.

You can just make stuff

It's bewildering to think that in the 19 days since I wrote my (not) a 2025 wrap up post, where I bemoaned ungraciously that I had zero time for creative projects, I completely redesigned my website and launched a whole new project. I guess this is my rebellion era.

p.s. I also made a website for guitarists in 2020.