Get a brimful of this drum fill on your way to the corner shop.

This drum fill is taken from the song Brimful Of Asha by Cornershop. The drum fill happens at around 3’33” and serves as a pickup to restart the song after a brief pause. Let’s learn it.

Learn The Fill

This is a fairly simple fill, but don’t let that dissuade you from adding it to your arsenal; often simple fills sound the most musical. Let’s start by looking at the basic rhythm.

Note the sticking pattern that I recommend for this fill. It keeps the Right hand on all the eighth notes and Left hand fills in any 16th notes. This should help your flow while you’re playing this fill.

The two tricky spots on this fill are the first note on the “ah” of four, and, the two 16th notes on the “e” and “&” of 2. Play this fill slowly with a metronome and check your rhythmic accuracy.

Once you are comfortable with the fill then you can orchestrate it around the kit. Here’s the full fill:

Take It Further

The opening two beats of this fill provide a great setup for any fill you want to put over the last two beats. So let’s take this further by varying the ending. Here’s 3 variations:

Our first variation just adds a simple 16th note fill to the end.

The second variation is also a simple 16th note fill with a slightly different rhythm.

The final variation is a slightly trickier rhythm but still using just 16th notes.

For all of these fills I recommend using the sticking idea discussed for the original fill: Play all the 8th notes with the Right hand and fill in any “e”s or “ah”s with the Left hand.

I suggest you play around with this fill some more and come up with your own variations.

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #34. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.