“Only you can ensure that you learn to drum better. But with a little help from the community, you can grow even faster!”
The fills in this chapter ensure that you learn to find the toms blindfolded. What we do here is play simple snare drum etudes, but now spread the notes over the toms. A new building block is added to each paragraph.
The exercises are written in even feel, but can also be played in a triplet feel.
What we practiced in chapter 1 can also be done in blues rock feel. This makes the notation a bit different because we normally write blues rock in a 12/8 time signature.
Now that we can find the toms pretty well, we can add the nicest drum to the fills: the bass drum, or kick drum. Your bass pedal will occasionally replace a normal note of the sticks (substitution). This makes the sound of your fill way cooler & much hipper!
As you would expect, now we do bass drum substitution in blues rock feel (12/8).
While you play a solid beat you can occasionally add a little musical joke or statement. You could call this a mini fill.
First we do this in even feel (1-10), after that the same in triplet feel (11-20).
Big accents… It is all about playing hits. The drummer, bassist and the rest of the band all interrupt the normal rhythm to put together a few big bangs.
The audio package (free download) provides many mp3’s to play along with every exercise (70bpm, 105bpm and 135bpm).
Everyone knows the independence exercises from the old snare books. Incredibly valuable of course! But in this chapter you can practice them like fills. This gives you a lot of super cool, powerful and spectacular rock fills.
The right hand plays on the floor tom (bottom line in the book), the left hand on the snare (top line).
You may have seen other drummers do it before; in one movement via the ride cymbal to the floor tom. We call this a “swipe” (as well as “sweep”). This seems simple, but give it a try… And don’t forget to make them sound good!
This is perhaps the holy grail for fills. And 1001 books have written about it. Long ago by men like Gary Chaffee and nowadays by drummers like Benny Greb and Jost Nickel. They provided us with beautiful books for every drummer.
Now, what I do is different from all the others. It is applied a little more to the daily practice so that you can learn and apply the systems faster and simpler to your favorite songs.