Fill Of The Week #30

It’s time for fill of the week #30.

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I hope you practiced our Fill Of The Week #5 because this fill is a slightly evolved version of that one. Let’s get to learning.

Learn The Fill

The basis of this fill is alternating singles between the right hand and the bass drum. Let’s look at the basic hand and foot pattern:

Basic pattern.
Hand, Foot, Hand, Foot, Repeat…

Note that we change the pattern on beat four to bring the fill to a conclusion. Practice this pattern carefully with a metronome. Focus on the spacing between the notes, keep them evenly spaced.

The next step for this fill is to add in the hi-hat barks. I play this fill with my left hand on the hi-hat and my right on the snare.

add the hi-hat barks
Woof, Woof, Woof…

Focus on closing the hi-hat together with the next bass drum. Play this pattern very slowly until you can play it cleanly every time.

The final step is to orchestrate the right hands around the drums. Here’s the the full fill as I played it:

the full fill
The full fill

Take It Further

If you check fill of the week #5 you’ll find other ways to orchestrate this fill around the kit, so this time, let’s look at changing the ending of this fill. This will give you more options when playing the fill and help you to develop flow around the kit.

3 fill variations
Change it up

Our first fill variation just changes beat four to 16th notes on the snare. I would encourage you to explore all variations of those last four notes as well.

The second variation has us changing the fill from the “&” of 3. It keeps the spirit of the original fill going by incorporating the bass drum with the hands.

The third variation changes things up from beat 3. As with the previous variation it keeps the spirit of the original fill by including the bass drum.

Here’s one variation of the whole fill that you may find useful. I keep the left hand on the snare for this and let the right hand play all the hi-hats.

hi hat variation
Play those hats

We hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #30. If you’re in Singapore and would like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message via our contact us page.