STARKARAENG

T.his next free drum lesson is a great place for learning your first drum fills, or to add new patterns to your ever growing collection of drum fills. In the video, Jared Falk shows you five basic quarter note drum fills, and goes about teaching you how to better practice them so you can achieve your drumming goals a lot faster.

These fills may look easy on paper, but just like with any other pattern you learn on the drums, it’s better to start out slowly so everything lines up perfectly. Don’t underestimate the power of mastering things at slower speeds. The more controlled you get at slower tempos, the easier it will be to play at faster tempos. Take advantage of the quarter note click track lining up with every stroke played on each fill. Work on drowning the sound of the metronome with each stroke. If all of a sudden you stop hearing the click track in the background, don’t worry, this means you’re playing a given pattern with perfect timing.

Drum Fills

The first quarter note drum fill in this free drum lesson is played exclusively on the snare drum. Work on this pattern without a metronome at first. This is just to get you learning the sequence of strokes properly before trying to line things up with a metronome. Don’t get demotivated with the simplicity of this exercise, as you move along this free drum lesson the exercises get more interesting and challenging.

Things get a little more interesting with exercise 2. Instead of keeping the strokes on the snare drum, we’ll be moving them around the toms. Moving the arms around the drum set adds to the level of challenge of any exercise. You may find yourself hitting the rims of the toms and even hitting far away from the drums’ center, which creates an inconsistent sound. This fill can be a cool exercise for practicing your accuracy as well. Focus on hitting the center of each drum with the same strength and stick height. This will make sure you’re playing consistently, enhancing the sound from each drum to its fullest potential. Being an accurate player is an essential asset for being a studio drummer.

Fill number 3 is a variation on the previous exercise. With this pattern, three of the four strokes are played on the same drums and on the same counts as on the previous one. The mid-tom stroke is replaced with a snare drum hit on count 3. After this last snare shot you have to make sure you take the leading hand out of the way of the weaker hand, as it travels to hit the floor tom. You’ll end up blocking you stronger hand beneath the weaker hand, preventing you from hitting count 1 on the crash or on the hi-hat, if you don’t do so.

Exercise 4 is another variation on the pattern taught on exercise 2. This next fill is basically exercise 2 shifted by one count. This means that instead of playing the snare drum on count 1 you’ll be playing it on count 2. The floor tom stroke on count 4 is shifted by one count also. Since 4 is the last count, the floor tom stroke is shifted to count 1. The high-tom is played on count 3 and the mid-tom on count 4.

The last quarter note drum fill on this free drum lesson is based around snare and floor tom strokes. Counts 1 and 2 are played on the snare drum, while counts 3 and 4 are on the floor tom. Remember to start slowly and to focus on getting the sequence down, before adding in the metronome for lining things up. Strive for having a very clean fill, and only increase the tempo on the metronome when you feel you have really mastered the pattern.

Each fill in this free drum lesson is illustrated with a quarter note rock beat preceding it. This will make you work on beat-fill-beat transitions, an essential skill for any drummer. After you get comfortable playing the transitions with the provided beat you can take any beat in this website, or any other you’d like, and use it instead.

After you’re done with this free drum lesson take a look at the free drum lesson “Eighth Note Drum Fills” for further developing your fill library.