It’s time to get groovy with fill of the week #36.

Fill of the week is what I consider to be a groove fill. It mostly keeps the flow of the 8th note hi-hat going and focuses on the snare and bass drum & sounds like a variation on the groove. Let’s check it out!

Learn The Fill

Let’s break this fill down into four easy to digest chunks. Our first chunk spans from beat 1 to the “&” of 2.

The main feature of this first chunk is the alternating hi-hat / bass drum pattern. The snare drums on beat 1 and the “&” of 2 bookend this portion of the fill.

You may need to spend time practicing alternating your hi-hat and bass drum. Focus on keeping the right hand on the hi-hat on the 8th note & the bass drum playing evenly spaced 16th notes in between them.

Once you are comfortable with this, try playing the first chunk of this week’s fill again.

Our second chunk is the quad happening on beat 3.

For this part of the fill, the right hand will temporarily leave the hi-hat and play the snare drum on beat 3, before returning to the hi-hat to play it together with the bass drum on the “&” of 3. The left hand plays the snare drum on the “e” of 3. Again, you might want to practice beat 3 in isolation first before putting it together with the first chunk.

Once you can put the first two chunks together, then you can add in the third chunk.

The third chunk is simply a very common snare fill on beat 4. Again your right hand needs to leave the hi-hat to play the snare drum on the “&” of four and the left hand plays the “ah” of four.

The fill already sounds complete now. However the 4th chunk adds in an open hi-hat to add little exclamation point to beat 4. I think of the open hi-hat on beat 4 as a controlled crash. It adds a burst of colour to the fill but it’s not as powerful, or possibly overpowering, as a crash would be. Focus on closing the hi-hat together with the snare drum on the “&” of 4. Here’s the full fill:

Take It Further

The great thing about learning fills in chunks is that you can switch chunks in and out of fills to create new fills. To start with, lets keep the first chunk of our fill and replace the last two with something different.

Our first variation keeps the groove fill idea going, using a very common snare and bass pattern under the 8th note hi-hat.

The second variation moves from being a groove fill into a more regular fill.

We can also replace the first chunk of the fill and keep the last two chunks the same.

So here I’ve used the same two ideas from the earlier variations, but now I’ve replaced the first chunk of the fill with them and reinstated the original fill ending.

Play around with the variations here and create some of your fills of your own using these ideas.

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #36. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.