What I’ve Done is a fairly simple song as far as drums go, it’s only got a few fills to speak of, and the basic groove only gets minor variations. The drums start with hi hat and a stick tapping on a stand, I didn’t add that part in my loops at the bottom of the page.

Here’s the drum music for the basic beat.  Top note is open hi hat, the note below that is the closed hat.  Middle note is the snare, bottom note is the bass drum

Drum Music For What I've Done

Intro and Verse:

The verse uses the closed hat, opening on the 1 ever 2 bars.

• So, we’ve got closed hi hat playing 8th notes, opening on beat 1 ever 2 measures.
• Bass drum on 1 and 3 with syncopations on the & of 2 and 4 to push it forward
• Here’s the cool part, the snare is on 2 and the & of 3 instead of 2 and 4.

Using Reverb to Spice Up the Verse and Intro.

The intro and the verse have the same exact drum pattern, except in the intro (7th measure after the piano starts) there is some heavy reverb making it sound further away.  Then when the guitar kicks in Rob Bourdon is playing 8th notes on an open hi hat.  So it’s the same pattern with a minor variation.  The pattern repeats again without the reverb at the verse (In this fair world…)  Check it out:

Intro - reverb makes drums sound far away:

Verse - less reverb makes drums sound more in your face:

The Chorus and Heavy Guitars

Linkin Park Chorus

After the intro where the guitars kick in is a variation of the intro as stated above.  Just bash 8th notes on the half open hi hat.

Remaining Song Form.

Everything else is pretty much a variation on that. There’s a build up with 8th notes on the toms at “Whatever pain my come” and a tambourine playing 16th notes over the verse part.  There’s also a small fill on the 3 & 4 & at the second chorus (What I’ve done….)

So here are all the parts I’ve mentioned as Garageband loops, these are midi loops so if you import them into Garageband they’ll show up as the green part that you can edit. If you don’t have Garageband you can still use them as .aif files.