Beginner Drum Fills
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Learn How To Play Beginner Drum Fills!
Welcome to the first video on playing drum fills. You may have questions like why play fills? Where to play fills? How to play fills? First, a drum fill is the opposite of a beat. We have learned quite a few beats, but now we want to adventure around the drumset. A drum fill can be played at the end of a section, maybe the end of a 4 bar pattern, or an 8 or 12 bar pattern.
The purpose of the drum fill is to release musical tension. If you keep playing the same beat throughout the whole song, you will begin to sound like a drum machine. As you learn more about music, you will notice that there are various parts that make up a son. Verses, choruses, various instrument solos, etc. A great time to play a drum fill is when one of the sections is ending and you are setting up the next section.
A drum fill can be any length, even approaching a mini-solo. The first thing you need is a good knowledge of rhythm. You'll want to understand all of the note values, they all apply to drum fills. It's also important to make sure that the fill you play fits the style of music that you are playing. Throughout the program we are going to explore various styles of drum fills.
If every drum fill you could play was in a book, it would be about 10,000 pages long and have 50 exercises on each page. If you ever see that book, let me know where I can get it. This system clearly won't teach you every fill possible, but we will be learning over 150 drum fills which is a very good foundation. Especially when you consider that if you play a 20 song set you'll only need maybe 50 fills.
Remember that playing a drum fill doesn't mean that you need to go crazy around the set, sometimes the simple fills are the best. It really goes back to playing the proper fill for the style. A top 40 gig with a double bass, three china cymbals, and 7 splashes will probably get some funny looks from the crowd.
In this course we are going to start with some of those simple, but effective fills and then move on to more complex ones. When I show you a fill, pay particular attention to the rhythm, and feel free to move that rhythm around the drumset. Don't feel like you have to play the same drums in the same order that I do. So let's take a look at how to play some to drum fills.
Let's start with some beginner fills. We have 50 examples to show you. We've written these as one bar of a beat followed by one bar of a fill. This will allow you to practice the feel of transitioning from a beat to a fill. They examples start off very simple. As we go on, we'll introduce some new note values and start adding more drums.
