In this lesson you will be applying the exercises covered in our Imitation Twos Using Single Strokes lesson to fill patterns. If you have covered this exercise already these patterns will be very straight forward. All you will be doing is orchestrating the patterns as 16th notes and combining them with groove. These kind of fills work well in any genre but are particularly prominent in rock and metal playing.
In the examples below all fills are written in there full bar version. You can adjust these to half, quarter, three quarter etc... fills by replacing some of the fill with groove.
When moving from the fill back to a groove you need to be aware of what the feet are doing. In a lot of examples the fill will end on two 16th note bass drums and the groove will nearly always start on a kick. This means your feet will play three notes in a row, two at the end of the fill and one at the start of the groove. Make sure you practice this change and get comfortable with how the feet work.
Example 1
Move the hands around the kit in.
Example 2
Play the first set of hands on the snare then split between the high tom and floor tom.
Example 3
Move Between two different drums.
Example 4
Roll around the kit backwards. Notice that this fill ends on a flammed quarter note. This is a good thing to do if you struggle to get from the 16th kicks back into the groove.
Example 5
Move around the kit backwards with the two hands spread across different notes. In this example you end on an eighth note snare, again this eases the transition from fill to groove.
TASK
- Using the 2 minute rule, get all examples up to a tempo of around 150bpm.
- Experiment with shortening the length of all fills.
- Add all fills to a structured piece.
- Experiment with the ideas shown in examples 4 and 5 for easing the transition between groove and fill.
- Create your own versions of these fills
A Short Piece
Below is a short piece that uses some of the ideas presented in this lesson.