This week’s drum fill has us playing double paradiddles to double our drumming fun!

We’re starting this fill early, on the “&” of 4 and going over the bar line. We’ve done this a few times already so hopefully you’re getting used to it by now. The double paradiddle also comes into play for this fill and we’re using it to create a new take on a commonly used accent pattern. Let’s get to learning!

Learn The Fill

Hopefully you’re already familiar with the double paradiddle, we’ll be using three of them to create this fill. The double paradiddle is 6 notes long; three of them will be 18 notes in total. We’re playing in 4/4 and using the 16th note subdivision, therefore, we’ll not be able to get all 18 notes into 1 bar so we’ll need to go over the barline. I decided to start this fill early, on the “&” of 4. Let’s look at the basic rhythm.

The first step in playing this fill is to just play this rhythm on the snare. Work with a metronome, get comfortable starting it on the “&” of 4.

Once you have the basic pattern in your hands then you can look to start moving around the kit with it. I decided to use a common pattern which is accenting every third 16th note. Because we’re starting on the “&” of 4, the accents will fall in a different place than if we started on beat 1. I break from the pattern at the end of the fill to give a more complete ending to the fill.

To achieve this pattern we just need to accent the first and fourth note of the first two double paradiddles and the first and third note of the final double paradiddle. You may want to practice this pattern on the snare first (Accented notes in caps + bold):

R l r L r r L r l R l l R l R l r r

Once you can play that, you can orchestrate the accented patterns around the kit. Here’s my orchestration:

Taking It Further

Now that you have one awesome sounding double paradiddle fill, you might as well develop some more. Here’s some additional ideas:

Our first 2 drum fill variations just re-orchestrate the original fill around the kit. The final variation reverses the pattern so we lead with the left hand. It’s similar to our original fill but has a slightly different ending. Now create some of your own!

I hope you’ve enjoyed fill of the week #51. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, please send us a message on the contact us page.