It’s bass drum workout day!

This week’s drum fill is based around groups of 7 being played between the hands and the bass drum. Its a fairly simple fill to play but it may help you get used to working with 7 note groups. We’ve previously played a similar idea with 5 note groups on fill of the week #26.

Learn The Fill

Let’s look at the basic idea before orchestration. The 7 note grouping is clearly marked along with the 16th note counting.

Play through this pattern slowly at first and count it both ways – using the “1 2 3 4 5 6 7…” count and the “1 e & ah 2 e &…” count. Eventually you’ll be able to feel the 7 note groups within the 16th notes. Note: when I count “7” I count it as “Sev” – it helps to avoid playing an extra note on the “en” of “seven”

Once you have the pattern, you can start to orchestrate it around the kit. I decided to double up the hands, my right hand moves around the kit while the left stays on the snare drum.

Take It Further

Once you can play the fill, you re-orchestrate the fill around the kit as you see fit. Let’s look at some permutations of this pattern. Here’s two fills for you to try:

Here we’ve shifted the pattern so that it starts on one of the other snare drum notes in the pattern. I’ve kept the orchestration very simple, once you can play the basic pattern, orchestrate your hands around the kit as you see fit.

We can also start the pattern on the bass drum. Try these two patterns:

Again, once you are comfortable with the patterns, then orchestrate them as you see fit.

I hope you’ve enjoyed drum fill of the week #69. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message on the contact us page.