Fill Of The Week #26

It’s fill of the week time, let’s get to it.

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This week’s fill is another 5 note grouping fill. Once you find something you like with drums, it’s always good to explore how many ways you can play it. This helps to increase your drum kit vocabulary a lot. Our last 5 note grouping fill was fill of the week #23 which was a KRLRL grouping, let’s have a look how this one differs & gives us a different take on the 5 note grouping.

Learn The Fill

As mentioned this fill is a 5 note group played over 16th notes. Let’s check out those five notes.

the five notes
Five notes of fun

To learn this fill, start by playing this five note group continuously, move smoothly from one group to the next. Count as you go – 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 etc.

If we string 3 groups of 5 together, we get 15 notes. Let’s try that.

3 groups of 5
5 x 3 = I need to use my toes to count that high

Once you have that, we just need to put an extra note on the end to finish the bar. I decided to just continue the pattern and put a snare/floor tom combination on the last note. However, at faster speeds that may cause trouble with getting to a crash or back to the hi-hat/ride on beat 1. You may want to experiment with the last note or possibly leave it out all together as we did in the exercise above.

the full fill
The full fill

Take It Further

The easy way to take this further is just to hit different surfaces with your hands. I think it would be more fun to try out different permutations of the 5 note groupings We’ll stick with the formula of having 2 notes on the hands and 3 notes on the bass drum.

Let’s look at our four permutations:

variation 1
Bass, Hands, Bass, Bass, Hands.
variation 2
Hands, Bass, Bass, Hands, Bass
variation 3
Bass, Bass, Hands, Bass, Hands
variation 4
Bass, Hands, Bass, Hands, Bass

I’ve left the last 16th note off of all these permutations. You can choose to add something on the end or finish the fill on the “&” of 4.

Working through all of these permutations will increase your 5-note group vocabulary and give you more options for playing these as fills.

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #26. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message via our contact us page.