The free drum lesson on beginner broken 16th note drum fills introduced you to a whole new world of 16th note based rhythmic ideas. With this free drum lesson, DrumLessons.com instructor Jared Falk expands on that new world of rhythmic possibilities by showing you how to combine the rhythmic figures of the beginner lesson into one-bar linear drum fills.
Going through the free drum lessons “Beginner Broken 16th Note Drum Fills“ and “Beginner 16th Note Linear Drum Fills” before this one will make it that much easier for you to master the three intermediate broken 16th note drum fills written especially for this free drum lesson. It’s important that you take a step-by-step approach as you go through these free drum lessons, so you can make the most out of your practice time.
Keeping the strokes evenly spaced is the biggest problem you’ll face while working on these linear drum fills. The best way to work around this issue is to practice the exercises real slowly at first. Increase the tempo on your metronome only when the stroke sequence is heavily ingrained in your brain.
Just before exercise #2 is demonstrated at a fast tempo, Jared plays a very fast roll on the snare drum with only one hand. The technique he uses for doing so is known as the one handed roll or freehand technique. You can learn more about this technique by watching the free drum lesson “One Handed Roll“.
Once you’ve mastered these drum fills as notated, play around with them to see what you can come up with. Altering the dynamics and using the hi-hat pedal instead of the bass drum pedal for some of the strokes are cool concepts for spicing up these drum fills. But the coolest one is converting these linear drum fills into linear drum beats. This is achieved by moving one hand to the hi-hat/ride while the other one is kept on the snare. If you’d rather learn how to play new linear drum fills, the free drum lessons “Cool Linear Drum Fill” and “Linear Drum Fills” are the next best thing for you. They’ll expand on your linear drumming vocabulary by having you learn 16th note triplet and 32nd note linear drum fills.