Fill Of The Week #73

This week’s fill sees us welcome back an old friend: The three 16th note pattern.

Watch drum fill of the week #73 on instagram

This a great sounding rock drum fill. The snare drum plays every third sixteenth note, the floor tom provides warmth and heaviness on the 8th notes and the bass drum fills in any spaces to give us a 16th note flow.

Learn The Fill

Let’s start by looking at the basic ingredients that go into making up this fill.

First we have the snare drum pattern. This is a pattern you want to become very familiar with. It crops up in a lot of places and always sounds good.

On the left

If you’re not comfortable with this pattern yet, then I suggest you spend some time with it. Your left hand will be playing this on the snare drum during the fill.

Your right hand will be busy doing this:

On the right

Hopefully playing eighth notes on the floor tom is well within your ability…

Let’s mash these two rhythms together.

All together now

Get comfortable playing this pattern. It can be used as a drum fill as it is and always sounds great – especially at higher tempos.

Our final job with this drum fill is to add in the bass drum. The bass drum will occupy any note that doesn’t already have a snare drum or floor tom being played on it.

The full fill

Take It Further

Whenever you are playing a three 16th note pattern, you can always displace the pattern 2 times to create 2 new fills. Here’s the new snare drum patterns for this fill.

Two snare patterns to go

Again, get comfortable playing these patterns first before combining them with the floor tom and then adding the bass drum in the spaces. Here’s the full fills:

Two drum fills made to order

I hope you enjoyed fill of the week #73. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial lesson, send us a message via the contact us page.