Hi! I am Wes Crawford, and now as we study the performance on the drum set, we’re going to talk about fills.
Very often as we’ve discussed, we’ll be playing a steady pattern using our four limbs with different sounds on the drum set to keep the beat for a song, and this really holds the band together. The drummer is the heartbeat of the band.
Well, sometimes as you’ll notice, if you watch drummers and listen to music, the drummer will go away from that beat and maybe play something around the drums. It might be something complex, it might be something for a long time, it might be something very short, but we call all of these things fills.
And the drummer does not just play random fills wherever they want. If they do, very often the drummer will be fired. We don’t want to be fired so we want to know when to play these fills. This is the first thing to learn before you even learn what to play as fills, when to play them.
Very often, a song is made up of different sections and it’s very important for us to understand the form that songs are made up of, we call it the song form. The verse as we all know in pop music is where the story is being told, the lyrics or one part of the melody is happening. Then often, we kick it up a notch. We get a little more excited and if there are lyrics, the lyrics might repeat over and over. It’s called the hook and it’s the part that we’re seeing in our minds over and over when we think of that song, then we might go back to a verse and tell some more stories.
If we go to a third section of a song, it’s called the bridge and this will just sound even different, and so we can mix and match these sections up in any number of ways to create full songs in popular music.
As we change from one section to another, very often it’s left to the drummer to do a short or small fill to act as punctuation to show everybody, hey, the next sections coming up. So, that’s the most important place to do a fill. This is one place you’ll probably be asked to do a fill if you are playing a song to mark the end of one section and the beginning of another.
Another place you might do a fill would be in some section of the song that is very sparse or that there’s nothing going on, maybe there’s silence and it’s up to the drummer to fill that up. Maybe that’s where the word fill came from, but we want to do a fill or play around the drums or whatever during the section to fill it up, the space sonically.
So, those were the two main places you’ll need to or want to do a fill in popular music.
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