Here’s fill of the week #5:

This fill has a lot of interplay between the hands and the bass drum, I hope you’ve been working on your co-ordination. Let’s break this fill down into simple steps.

The first step is to get the Right hand movement correct. The Right hand plays the biggest role in this fill and everything else moves around it. Here’s the Right hand on it’s own:

If you have worked on Fill Of Week #4, then you’ll notice that the right hand is playing the same pattern as that fill. Now we’re playing the pattern between snare drum and floor tom instead of snare drum and bass drum.

Our next step is to add in the bass drum to get the interplay between the right hand and the bass drum correct.

Make sure your snare and bass drum notes are evenly spaced – we don’t want any unintentionally swung notes. Work on it slowly with a metronome.

Finally – add the left hand to create the flams on the snare and play the final floor tom note.

Now you’ve got the fill happening, you can try some simple things to vary it. For example, play your flams across 2 surfaces so they become flat flams instead:

To rock it up even more, play flat flams between snare and crash:

Alternatively, play the flams on the snare drum and move the other notes around the kit:

Of course, you could always try a combination of these things:

Have fun with fill of the week #5!

If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lessons, contact us through the contact us page.