After you become comfortable playing simple rock fills, you’ll probably want to learn to play more advanced fills. In this lesson I’m going to teach you 3 drum fills. For each fill example I’ll show you the thought process and technique used to create the fill so you can create fills of your own.
I’m going to use a triplet 16th note idea for these examples. You should first practice these fills exactly like I’m going to demonstrate here. Then use these ideas to create some of your own fills.
Note: One thing I do need to point out about the written examples for this lesson is the notation. To be clear, these are to be played on 4 drums – the snare, small tom, floor tom and bass drum.
1. Use your bass drum in your fill in place of a tom. Using your bass drum as a tom always sounds more interesting. This is common in jazz but much less common in rock drumming.
1. Set up unusual or unexpected groupings of notes. For instance, in 4/4 time most listeners expect to hear accents in very predictable places. 4/4 is usually divided into groups of 2 or 4, in other words even numbers. If you place some type of accent every three 8th notes instead of every 4, this creates an unexpected and interesting sound. It creates a 3 against 4 feeling, which is a poly-rhythm. It creates a bit of tension, which definitely sounds interesting.
3. Start your drum fill in an unexpected place. Most rock fills start right on the beat. They start on count 4 for a very short fill. For a longer fill they usually start on count 3, or maybe on count one, at the beginning of the measure. An example of an unexpected place to start your fill would be the last 8th note of the measure right before the fill measure.
Again you want to learn these examples first as they’re written. Once you understand the principles presented here you can create your own fills using 16th notes, 32nd notes or whatever ideas you come up with.
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