Eating fish regularly is good for your health. Playing buckets of fish on your drums is good for your drumming health. Here’s a another fill featuring the classic “bucket of fish” lick.

We last saw the “Bucket of fish” lick in Fill Of The Week #17. I call this fill “The loud bucket of fish” as we’re ending each bucket with a crash. Let’s get to it.

Learn The Fill

Let’s start this fill by looking at the basic rhythm that we’ll be playing.

Play this basic rhythm with a metronome first and make sure you’re playing cleanly and accurately before moving on.

Our next step is to add in the bass drum and the crashes. Let’s look at that.

Pay attention to your accuracy here, make sure the crashes and bass drum really happen together. To hear it clearly, play the crashes on a closed hi-hat first. The shorter, drier sound of the hi-hat will help you to hear if you are really hitting together with the bass drum.

The final step of the fill is to add in the classic bucket of fish orchestration – Snare, High Tom, Floor Tom, Bass drum. Let’s do it.

Take It Further

This is a great sounding fill, but with all the crashes it is rather loud. So our first variation with be the quieter version:

Now that our hands are not playing with the bass drum, we can add a note in between the bass drums to create a slightly busier fill.

Obviously you can orchestrate the additional notes anyway you like, if you want to bring the crashes back play the new notes between the snare drum and crash.

If you’d like a smoother fill, you can add in extra 16th note triplets instead of a 16th note.

I hope you’ve enjoyed you buckets of fish with fill of the week #29. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like drum lessons, send us a message on the contact us page.