It’s paradiddle time!

This week’s drum fill features the paradiddle – three of them to be precise. The last time we played with the paradiddle was on Fill Of The Week #39 when we played paradiddles around the kit with a right hand lead. This time, we’re leading with the left hand and using singles on beat 4 to give a comfortable ending with the right hand landing on beat 1 of the next bar.

Learn The Fill

Let’s start by looking at the basic sticking pattern we’ll be using for this drum fill.

Your first job is to get comfortable with this sticking pattern. Because this pattern doesn’t lend itself to automatically restarting (you need to play 2 lefts in a row), I suggest playing this in a loop with a simple groove.

If you normally start your drum fills with the Right hand, this might feel strange. Pay attention to the first note; I found that I was starting a little earlier than beat 1 because my left hand is more used to playing on the “ah” of 4 than it is on beat 1. A little bit of focused practice will iron out any problems like that.

Now all that remains is to orchestrate the drum fill around the kit. Here’s my orchestration:

I just moved the Right hand single strokes around the toms and then played a common pattern for the single strokes on beat 4 to end the drum fill.

Taking It Further

One thing I like to do with drum fills is vary the ending. This helps to increase your fill vocabulary and allows you to tailor the end of the fill to the suit the mood of the song you are playing.

Here’s three suggestions for the end of this fill.

Our first variation just moves the final four sixteenth notes around the toms in a different way. There are thousands of variations of that you can put on the end. As an exercise I suggest you play the fill in a loop like the one suggested earlier and try to come up with a different sixteenth note ending every time.

The second variation has us change the subdivision at the end to triplets. This always sounds more dramatic to me.

The final variation adds more energy to the fill with a sixteenth note triplet ending.

Play around with each of the variations and create your own versions.

I hope you’ve enjoyed drum fill of the week #63. Check out the archives for more drum fill ideas. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.