Tasodrums
1. Songsterr
Songsterr.com works great on both a computer and a phone. There's a free version and a paid version, but you can get pretty far with the free one! You can play along with the song using interactive notation: the music always shows where you are in the song.
With the free version, you hear a computer-made synth version of the song. So you won't hear the real instruments and vocals, but of course you can still recognize the song perfectly well. With the paid version, you can play along with the YouTube video at the side of the screen, so you get to play along with the real song.
2. Tomplay
Tomplay.com is a paid service. At the time of writing (fall 2024) it costs €19.99 a month.
That's not a bad price for getting hundreds of songs to play, because finding sheet music for drums in particular can be a lot of work. Tomplay has a 14-day free trial, so you can take your time checking it out and see if it has songs you want to learn.
3. Drumeo
Drumeo.com is the world's biggest online drum school. For almost the same price as you'd pay for Tomplay, for example, you get thousands of songs plus other ways to learn drums. For example, there's Drumeo's own Method and the 30-day live practice sessions they now release regularly. You can also easily print out the sheet music if you need it in the practice room or at a gig, for example.
*Note: In summer 2024, Drumeo ran into some kind of licensing dispute or similar over its transcriptions, and most of the songs had to be removed. I'm sure they're working on fixing it, but for now the song library is a lot smaller than before. Let's keep an eye on it. The rest of the content is of course the same as before.
4. YouTube
This is my personal favorite. Usually, if a song is even a little bit well known, someone has played it through, and often there's a version with notation too. The good thing here is that you see the drummer while you follow the music. So while you play, you also learn technique: you see what kind of stickings they use and how loud or soft they play certain notes, for example. A line of notes alone doesn't tell you these things.
Here are a few channels with lots of songs with notation.
5. Drum covers
Once you've been playing a bit longer, it can be enough to see what someone else plays and learn the song from that. Here are a couple of channels for that.
Note! Remember to also learn to play without sheet music.
Sheet music is a good way to absorb and practice songs, but remember that drumming is also about energy. When you stare at the sheet religiously, a certain freedom disappears and your playing can easily get a bit "engineered", if you know what I mean. So once you've got the song down, practice looking away from the music and learn to remember the parts of the song without it.
