Let’s flam our way through fill of the week #37.

Fill of the week #37 features flams split across drums and some hand foot co-ordination that may be a little tricky. Let’s get learning!

Learn The Fill

Let’s start learning this fill by looking at what the hands are doing. Here’s the basic rhythm that the hands play throughout this fill:

Play this rhythm carefully with a metronome and get used to the sticking pattern.

Now lets spice it up with some flams.

Again, play this rhythm carefully with a metronome.

Next, lets orchestrate the right hand around the kit. Because the flams will be split up, they can be played either as regular flams or as flat flams – where you hit both hands at the same time. Experiment with both ways and find out which sound you prefer.

That fill actually sounds pretty good as it is, but let’s complete the fill with some bass drum to fill in the spaces. Play this fill slowly with a metronome and focus on getting the notes evenly spaced.

Taking It Further

This is a great fill to orchestrate around the kit in as many ways as you can. Here’s a few suggestions:

Our first variation changes the flams that were between snare and tom to flams between crash and tom. This adds a lot of energy to the fill.

The second variation moves the fill down the tom toms, the flams are now played on a single surface.

The final fill creates a tribal sounding fill, with the flams being played between the floor tom and snare drum, and the rest of the notes being played between the floor tom and bass drum.

How many variations of this fill can you think of?

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #37. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.