Advanced Drum Fills

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• sneto Flag

  Drumming
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Transcripts

Wes Crawford: Hello! I am Wes Crawford and now we are going to look at some more advanced fills utilizing what weve learned so far. So, the way I am going to do this, I am going to give examples, Ill tell what I am going to do, Ill play one measure of a beat and then do the fill. So, right now we are going to do one measure fills and then I will go back to the beat to show how you get back. So, one of the problems drummers have to confront is how do you get out of your fill and back to your beat very smoothly. So, this is important to notice too.

First, I am going to show you an example of a fill using quarter notes then eighth notes, then sixteenth notes. So, we are going to show how the different subdivisions can sound, each for one measure. Here comes quarter notes.

1 2 3 4Next, well do eighth notes and Ill move those in a different way around the drum set.

As you see on my fill I went 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 2 3 4. Notice we are playing eighth notes on the hi hat so you can keep counting eighth notes.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 andNow, well try sixteenth notes.

Noticed that time I went 1 2 3 4, 1.

.

e and a.

. 2.

.

e.

. and a.

. 3.

.

e.

. and a.

. 4.

.

e.

. and a.

. 1 2 3 4So, when I am counting the numbers the 1, 2, 3 and 4 are constant, 1 2 3 4, 1.

.

e and a.

. 2.

.

e.

. and a.

. 3.

.

e.

. and a.

. 4.

.

e.

. and 1 so, all stays constant.

Now, lets look at some of the different stickings or the order that we hit our hands and see how things can vary with those.

We have been doing single stroke so far so I move around for single strokes one more time.

See I changed the speed that I was hitting but I use single strokes, I always alternate it, lets try double strokes.

Same thing, I used double strokes, but I changed the speed of them in the middle.

Lets try paradiddles and well do them at sixteenths and well move from one tom to another but keep the left-hand on the snare, just as a further example.

See, a much more complex pattern, sonic pattern developed just because we did this more complex sticking.

Well now do three-stroke patterns and at the end well change it up just a little bit to make it fit right. You always have to make these fit right.

See, we played them at sixteenth notes, if we had 16 sixteenth notes in the fill and we had a three-stroke pattern, three goes into 16 five times, so weve played that pattern five times with one remainder. So, I hit one extra snare drum hit as a sixteenth node at the end. These are the kinds of calculations you must make as you do fills.

Rests are also very important. So, lets do some silence, so far every fill I have done has been constant notes and that can be too much. We want to create more interesting rhythms and more drama sometimes with rests. Ill give you a few examples.

These are just a few examples, there are millions of combinations now that we have different stickings, now we can use rest to create all kinds of rhythms and you can even use dynamics, loudness and softness, and well talk about that later.

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