Welcome to a new series – FINISH THE FILL! The idea is for you to decide how to finish the drum fill. I’ll give you the start of the drum fill and four possible endings, but there are many more ending options available. Your job is to find as many as you can.

Doing this exercise should help with your movement around the kit and your spur of the moment creativity. It’ll also increase your drum fill vocabulary and give you more musical options for drum fills. Let’s check out this week’s fill.

Learn The Drum Fill

Here’s the basic fill that we’re working with:

It’s a simple 8th note drum fill with the last beat being left up to us to decide.

How To Finish The Fill?

Here’s the four ways that I finished the drum fill:

My first ending was just a flat flam between snare and floor tom on the “&” of 4. This gives a syncopated feel to the drum fill.

My second ending featured 16th notes played on Tom 2 and the Floor Tom. This adds more energy to the drum fill.

My third ending stayed with the 16th note subdivision but features a flat flam on beat 4 to help accent that note and includes the bass drum to add more weight to the rum fill.

My final ending used 16th note triplets. This more of a show off ending. It might not be something I’d use often, but it’s good to practice all possible endings.

What’s Your Ending?

There are many possible endings to this drum fill. I suggest trying to play it at a few different tempi to see what you can do at a range at tempos. I won’t be playing 16th note triplets at 200bpm!

For beginners, I would suggest sticking to the 8th note and 16th note subdivisions and a tempo range between 80-120bpm.

For more advanced beginner students, try using more complex 16th note patterns (including 16th note rests) and maybe flams and the bass drum.

For intermediate students increase the tempo up to 15obpm, try to incorporate drags, 8th and 16th note triplets.

For advanced players, include 32nd notes and more advanced rudiments and maybe try extending the drum fill over the bar line and finish with a Crash + Snare on beat 2.

Good Luck!

I hope you enjoy finishing this drum fill. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message via the contact us page.