Hello! I am Wes Crawford, and now we’re going to look at some more advanced fills utilizing what we’ve learned so far.
So the way I’m going to do this, I’m going to give examples. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll play one measure of a beat and then do the fill. For right now, we’re going to do one measure fills and then I’ll 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’m going to show you an example of a fill using quarter notes then eighth notes, then sixteenth notes. So, we’re going to show how the different subdivisions can sound, each for one measure. Here comes quarter notes, one-two-three-four. Next, we’ll do eighth notes and I’ll move those in a different way around the drum set [Demonstration].
As you see on my fill, I went one and two and three and four and one-two-three-four. Notice we’re playing eighth notes on the hi-hat so you can keep counting eighth notes, one and two and three and four and. Now, we’ll try sixteenth notes [Demonstration]. Notice that time I went one-two-three-four, one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and one-two-three-four. So when I’m counting the numbers, the one, two, three and four are constant, one-two-three-four, one e and the two e and the three e and the four e and one, so it all stays constant.
Now, let’s look at some of the different stickings or the order that we hit our hands and see how things can vary with those. We’ve been doing single strokes so far, so I’ll move around for single strokes one more time.
[Demonstration]
See, I changed the speed that I was hitting but I used single strokes. I always alternate it. Let’s try double strokes.
[Demonstration]
Same thing, I used double strokes but I changed the speed of them in the middle. Let’s try paradiddles and we’ll do them at sixteenths and we’ll move from one tom to another but keep the left hand on the snare. This is a further example.
[Demonstration]
See, a much more complex pattern, sonic pattern developed just because we did this more complex sticking. We’ll now do three-stroke patterns and at the end, we’ll change it up just a little bit to make it fit right. You always have to make these fit right.
[Demonstration]
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 we played that pattern five times with one remainder. So, I hit one extra snare drum hit as a sixteenth note at the end. These are the kinds of calculations you must make as you do fills.
Rests are also very important. So, let’s do some silence. So far, every fill I’ve done has been constant notes and that can be too much. We want to create more interesting rhythms and more drama sometimes with rests. I’ll give you a few examples.
[Demonstration]
These are just a few examples. There are millions of combinations now that we have different stickings and we can use rest to create all kinds of rhythms and you can even use dynamics, loudness and softness, and we’ll talk about that later.
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