It’s fill of the week time! Here’s number 6:

This is a cool 16th note fill incorporating flams and the bass drum. When I’m playing flams in a 16th note fill, I like to play the bass drum just before the flam. This gives me plenty of time to set up my flams so I can make them sound big while keeping the 16th note flow going.

Learn The Fill

To learn this fill, we can break it down into smaller steps. Step 1 is to get the Right hand moving correctly. Our Right hand is playing 8th notes between the snare and the toms. The left hand and the bass drum will fill in the 16th notes between these 8ths. Here’s the Right hand pattern:

Our next step is to add in the Left hand. This will create the flams on beat 1, the “&” of 2 and beat 4 and, fill in 16th notes on the “&” of 1, “e” of 3″ and “ah” of 4. I’ve included the counting on this one to help you out.

Step 2 actually sounds quite good as a fill on it’s own, try it out with some of your favourite grooves. We’re going to take one more step which is to add the bass drum in the spaces. Here’s the whole thing:

Practice this slowly at first at 40 – 50 bpm. You may want to build it up a note at a time. Start with the first 4 notes and then add the next one, and then the next one and so on. If you can play the first 6 notes you have most of the fill already because the next 6 notes are just the same thing repeated and beat four is just the first four notes played on a different drum.

Spotting repeated patterns in fills can help you learn them faster. The phrasing of this fill is 6-6-4. This is a very common pattern employed in 16th note fills. Here’s the fill with the 6 6 4 groupings pointed out:

Let’s change it up

A simple way to change this fill is by removing some of the bass drums. Here’s the fill with the bass drums only after the flams:

Here’s the fill with the bass drum only before the flams:

Another simple variation is to play on the move the non-flammed notes to different toms – this still gives you the impact of the flam on the snare.

But of course, you can also move the flams around as well:

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #6 – play around with it some more and create your own variations.

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