Here’s fill of the week #1:

I’ve always like fill with flams in them. They add a lot of power to a fill and are great for making a statement. The challenge of course is to get your flams sounding consistent across the fill.

Taking it further

As with any fill you learn, you want to experiment with it and make it your own. This fill is an easy one to change up. The first change is to the drums we hit. Here’s two examples of that:

You can experiment by changing the drums up as much as you like. Move the flams to a tom-tom, see how that sounds. Find the sound that you like.

When I have a 16th note fill with some space in it, I like to experiment with putting the bass drum in the space. Here’s two examples of that:

Adding the bass drum like this makes the fill sound more complex but also more complete. Variation 3 just adds a bass drum to help set up the flams and variation 4 fills in the space before and after the flam to keep the 16th notes flowing.

By changing which drums you hit and being able to add in bass drums you’ll be able to create lots of new fills from this one idea.

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