Drum fills are one of the most fun parts of playing the drums.
They can be simple or complicated. They can be subtle or completely over the top. They can help move a song from one section to another, add excitement, or simply let the band know a new section of the song is about to begin.
And there are almost endless possibilities.
In this article, I want to give you a pretty in-depth look at drum fills and some of the different directions you can take them.
If you’re a beginner, we’ll start with some easy drum fills you can use right away.
Then we’ll get into some more advanced ideas, including using your hands and bass drum together to create bigger and more explosive fills.
And finally, I’ll show you a method I use for systematically coming up with unusual drum fill ideas of your own.
So whether you’re looking for a few easy drum fill examples or you’re ready to get a little weird, you’ll find something here to work on.
A drum fill is a short rhythmic phrase that temporarily breaks away from the main groove.
Fills are often used to help move the music from one section to another—for example, from a verse into a chorus. They can also be used to emphasize something happening in the music, set up an accent, create excitement, or simply add some variety to the underlying groove and keeping things rhythmically interesting.
And a fill doesn’t have to be complicated.
In fact, some of the best drum fills are extremely simple.
Let’s start there.
If you’re just getting started on the drums, these 12 fills are a great place to begin.
They’re designed to get you comfortable moving around the drum set and playing some musical fills without having to deal with complicated sticking patterns or advanced techniques.
Click that Blue Button below for a PDF worksheet of all 12 fills demonstrated in the video.
The important thing when you’re learning these isn’t speed.
Play them slowly enough that you can make every note clean and even. Pay attention to your timing as you move around the kit.
Once you can play a fill comfortably by itself, try transitioning to it from a beat (and then back to the beat).
For example, play three measures of a basic rock beat followed by one measure of the fill. Then go immediately back into the beat.
That’s the whole gig right there….making the fill so seamlessly interwoven with everything else that you’re doing that not only does it not disturb the groove…..but its timing is so deeply in the pocket that it is also part of the groove.
When you can do that—you’re really onto something.
OK, now let’s go in the opposite direction.
Here’s a much bigger drum fill that combines your hands with your bass drum.
I call this one The Big MANCIE Fill.
The basic idea behind this fill is a hand/foot combination (RLF).
Instead of playing everything with your hands and simply moving those notes around the toms, we’re bringing the bass drum into the phrase as part of the fill itself.
This opens up a completely different set of possibilities.
It can also make a fill sound much bigger than you might expect from the number of notes you’re actually playing.
Check out the video “L.E.S. Artistes — Santigold (MANCIE Cover)” and to go directly to the fill, fast forward to 2 minutes and 52 seconds.
The fill is transcribed for you on PDF. Just click that Yellow Button.
Once you start mixing the bass drum into your fills, you can go pretty deep and get a lot of milage from the concept.
Yup, this hand/foot stuff is a “thing” unto itself and we’re going to get deep into it right now.
One way to do that is with triplets.
Here are a whole bunch of hand/foot triplet combinations that explore different ways of distributing notes between your hands and feet.
To get an idea of the possibilities here, have a look at this video, “12 Double Bass Drum Hand/Foot Exercises.” Don’t let the idea of double bass intimidate you; there are many ideas here that actually don’t require double bass at all.
Just download the PDF and follow along. There are 12 ideas here for you. Just pick one you really like to get started; don’t feel like you have to do more than that yet.
And if the playing in the video seems too fast to follow, just adjust the video down to half-speed. By the way, in the video I skipped #5 and #6 from the PDF and I occasionally played an exercise or two out of order from how it appears on the PDF. It doesn’t really matter though, because the exercise notation and number always appear on screen, so you won’t get lost. Anyway, watch the video and…
Click the Red Button to download the PDF.
This overall concept of integrating your bass drum into your fills is important: your bass drum doesn’t have to sit underneath your hands all the time (the way it does when playing beats). It can become another voice that you use inside the fill.
Once you start thinking that way, you can create all kinds of phrases that wouldn’t be possible—or at least wouldn’t sound the same—using your hands alone.
And these 12 patterns will really give you some different ways to think about this stuff.
So, start with one pattern. Pick the one that excites you the most. Get it comfortable. And really nail it. Don’t move on to anything else until you can crush with it.
Once the pattern itself is nailed, try experimenting with changing the drums you play with your hands. Changing the orchestration of a single pattern can give you several completely different-sounding drum fills.
Here’s another way to get away from the “standard” everyday sounding fills that everyone plays. Sounding different can set you apart from other drummers and make you sound unique. I think that’s important.
One way I like to try and sound different is to play fills “backwards”–going around the drums counter-clockwise instead of clockwise.
Here is a video and corresponding PDF of one specific way to do that.
Just click that Black Button below to download the PDF.
The video shows an idea I like to play, but it’s just one example of another overall concept of creativity that you can apply using many other specific strategies.
The concept is simply to change one aspect things that you already know.
And you can do that by:
Eventually, you’ll want a way of coming up with your own unique fills from scratch. Like literally from out of nowhere.
One of my favorite approaches is to deliberately create a rhythmic pattern and then manipulate it until I get something I like.
I actually have a systematic method for doing this, and it’s all detailed on this PDF called “5 Steps to Great Drum Fills.”
Download the PDF by clicking the Green Button below.
The basic idea is that instead of sitting behind the drums and hoping that some brilliant new fill magically pops into your head, you give yourself a set of rules.
What’s interesting about working this way is that you can come up with things you probably wouldn’t have played if you’d simply sat down at the drums and started improvising.
Your hands tend to go where they’ve gone before.
A system can force them somewhere else.
And that’s where some of the weird stuff comes from. Weird in a good way.
If your fills are starting to sound predictable and you want to freshen things up, try deliberately constructing something that feels a little strange. This method will get you there.
You may hate nine things you come up with.
But number ten might be fantastic. Try the system. It’s all on the PDF.
Whatever kind of fills you’re working on, there’s one principle I think is particularly important:
Don’t just practice the fill. Practice getting into and out of the fill.
A fill isn’t much use if you can play it perfectly in isolation but can’t keep the groove together when using it in “real life.”
And “real life” means you play grooves and those grooves need to flow and continue flowing. Fills need to maintain that groove and flow. Your bandmates rely on you for that, and nothing else matters if everything falls apart when you try to use a particular fill in a groove. Don’t allow that to happen. It’s how you lose gigs.
To work on making sure your fills maintain that flow, try this:
Play three measures of a groove and one measure of a fill.
Then repeat.
Make sure you can do this with a metronome.
Once that’s comfortable, start putting the fill in different places. Try landing on a different beat when coming out of the fill. Try a half-measure fill. Try a fill that starts somewhere unexpected. Try playing the same fill at different tempos.
And always pay attention to what happens when you return the groove.
You have to know where you are, and you have to land back into the beat confidently and seamlessly.
That’s far more important than the fill itself.
We’ve covered a lot of territory.
You have some easy drum fills you can start playing right away.
You’ve seen how bringing the bass drum into your fills can elevate their impact and create endless possibilities.
You’ve got triplet ideas and different ways of moving around the toms.
And you’ve got a systematic method you can use to start inventing unusual drum fills of your own.
But this is really just the beginning.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about drum fills—how to create them, how to develop vocabulary, and most importantly, how to make fills actually sound good when you’re playing music.
So, if you’ve ever struggled with fills and you long to be that drummer who always has the right fill ready for any situation, then I have something that can help you.
It’s my course, Pro-Sounding Drum Fills for Beginners (aka PSDF).
The course includes 150 drum fills, with in-depth, multi-camera video instruction that shows you exactly how to play them and how to start incorporating them into your drumming.
For more info, click that Blue Button below.
Feel free to explore our online drum lessons for beginners.
Enter your information below to receive your free digital copy of 5 Killer Drum Licks now.
