In this lesson you will be learning a sixteenth note syncopated fill with some flam and crash decoration. This fill is inspired by the Disturbed song The Vengeful One and can be found at around the 1:10 mark in the song. This combination of simple construction ideas creates a really cool sounding part with many options for variation. At the bottom of the page is a list of lessons you may find useful, if you are struggling with any of the parts have a look through some of these.

Through this page I will build the part up through a few steps to hopefully make the learning process a little easier. Let's start off with the phrasing the fill follows. This will be two sets of six sixteenth notes followed by a set of four, which could be reffered to as a '6 6 4' rhythm. This is shown below with phrase markings.

The phrasing for the fill

This is fairly simple stuff, but play the example above with accents at the start of each short phrase. This will give you a proper feel for the phrasing of the full fill. The next step is to create the basic rhythm of the full part. This is going to involve removing some notes within the same 6 6 4 phrasing and looks like this:

The rhythm for the fill

Again, spend some time familiarizing yourself with this rhythm before moving on. In the next step you will be moving some notes to he bass drum within that same rhythm and phrasing. In the blocks of six it is only the first note of the phrase that will be played on the snare and the block of four will have the second note played on the kick. Like this:

An orchestrated rhythm for the fill

This step is demanding on your hand foot co ordination so don't be afraid to slow things right down. It is important you can play this broken down version before moving on as the next two steps add even more layers of difficulty. The next thing you will be adding are flams at the start of each phrase, so there will be flams on beat 1, the '+' after 2 and beat 4. Like this:

An orchestrated rhythm for the fill

The final step is to add crashes to the first two bass drums in the six note blocks. The movement from the flam to the crash can be tricky so again, slow down if you need to. I find it best to play all crash cymbals with the right hand but see if something else feels more comfortable to you.

An orchestrated rhythm for the fill

And that is the complete fill. The original song is played at a tempo of 85bpm so aim for the sort of tempo. Once you get comfortable with the part start pushing the tempo even higher though.


TASK

  1. Using the 2 minute rule, the full fill upto a tempo of at least 85bpm.
  2. Create your own versions of these fills by varying the orchestrations within the original phrasing.
  3. Include these fills in a 4 or 8 bar pattern.

Lessons

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