Here’s drum fill of the week #43:

This week’s drum fill is a 16th note accent pattern. Accent patterns always sound musical and there are many ways you can move them around the kit to create something new. We last messed around with accents on Fill Of The Week #10; you might want to check that one out if you enjoy this fill.

Learn The Fill

The place to start with this fill is with the accent pattern we’re applying to the 16th notes to create this fill. Here’s the pattern:

Play this pattern slowly at first and get it flowing. Don’t rush it, make sure to play all the 16th notes with even spacing. Often, when students first start playing accent patterns, they alter the spacing between the notes because of the different stick heights needed to play the accented and unaccented notes.

Play all the accented notes from a high stick height and all the unaccented notes from a low stick height. Really listen to what your doing and try to keep to just 2 sound and height levels and space all notes evenly.

Once you have the pattern in your hands, then it’s time to orchestrate it around the kit. For this pattern I moved the single accents around the kit. These accents happened to fall on beat 1, the “&” of two and beat 4. These are very common places for accents in rock music. For the accents that fall on the snare drum, I use rim shots to make them stand out even more. Here’s the full fill:

Take It Further

Try re-orchestrating this drum fill around the kit. One accent pattern can give you many different drum fills and is an easy way to expand your fill vocabulary.

Another good practice is to play the accent pattern with the sticking reversed. Here’s the same accent pattern with the sticking reversed:

That sounds like a completely different fill to our original fill, but it is exactly the same accent pattern. Experiment with some ideas of your own – Fill of the week #10 might give you some further ideas.

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #43. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.