Just as you learnt all the other aspects of playing the drums from beats to rudiments to drum fills and even setting up the kit in the first place and keeping it well tuned, all your funny weird grey areas can be fixed up with the same process. PRACTICE.

Let’s analyse what may be happening at this point.

As you approach the tricky part or let’s say drum fill to use a common example, rarely do you know exactly what you are going to do. When I say exactly I mean most of us don’t actually think about every tiny hit and nuance every time but rather we have an idea and a concept and we let our skill, experience and our emotion go into play and viola out pops the part we wanted perfectly performed. Not always the case is it.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we shouldn’t go with emotion when playing, quite the reverse actually, use plenty of emotion PLUS careful planning and practise to get the best result. A fantastic blend of both concepts.

Watch any top player in any style of music and you are hit by the EASE and FLUIDITY of their performance. I believe these artists have reached that spot of perfectly blending their skill and their emotion so all of it works toward the best outcome. You sit there and watch and hear beautiful grooves and fills rolling out, each section moving seamlessly into the next like there are no changes at all, do we think this is accident, I think not.

Emotion is easy for all us to put into our playing, if you love to play then you are using emotion in a good and positive way to bring out the best in your playing. If we feel bad, sick, angry or upset it effects our playing and conversely if we are happy and pumped up then it also effects our playing. So we can see the way our emotional situation changes our playing now imagine if our skill level could match our emotional level.

Let’s take some simple ideas first.

If we look at the typical drum fill after 3 bars or even 7, 11 or 15 bars then we can start to really look at this process.
I want you to play a relatively simple 1/8th note style rock beat and play it for 3 bars. Now on the 4th bar play a 1/8th note drum fill on the snare or any other drum and then go straight back into the ORIGINAL beat from before and do the whole exercise again and over and over for at least 5mins.

Work your way through a tempo range of say 80 through to 160 bpm, using a digital electronic metronome preferably. Depending on what increments you move up the speed this could take about 40 -50 mins and what you will have done is to really hone down the FEELING of how this beat, drum fill and length of bars works for you.

Now do exactly the same thing but do a 1/16th note drum fill and follow exactly the same procedure as before. What you have accomplished here is the FEELING of both these drum fills in this 4 bar format and at many different tempos.

Now we will do the same idea but do it for shuffle or triplet style beats and do a 1/8th note triplet first time through and a 1/16th  (if you know how to play this)  note triplet the second time through.

So now you will have covered three simple beats and four simple drum fills which will have smoothed over these techniques so you should never stumble over them again ( all things being equal ).

Now if you followed my rudiment classes and my online rudiments pages you will have many other examples to play as a drum fill while still STAYING in the 1/8th and 1/16th note basic counts.

I know the patterns seem simple to a lot of players out there but to some people these are great as the ideas have never been fully explained nor a way to practice them.

I also have only outlined the 3 bars and 1 bar of drum fill pattern above but offcourse you/we should also put as much time into other lengths of turnarounds i.e.: 8 bars, 12 bars, 16 bars etc. only after honing these basic concepts and achieving relaxed concentration can we let our emotive ingredient come into play for the best result. By turnaround I mean the length of music played before you start to play the same pattern again from the start.

In addition to the rudiment workshop material I had given you previously there are hundreds of books out there will basic to impossible fill, patterns etc to use in these ideas. Just make sure you focus on one at a time and don’t try to do everything at once.

The practice technique wont work this way, it needs to be done with lots of repetition to achieve the highest level of BASE SKILL As I said above yes they are simple but if practised will enable you to start your beautiful seamless drum fill or break to really soar above a HIGHER BASE LEVEL OF SKILL than you had before and the real concentration can go into feeling of the performance as most of the technical or skill side has been sorted.

Please do try this practice technique in your regular routine, I think you will be happy with the result you get from it. Also remember that you can eventually change the difficulty of the beat and the drum fill for your own personal skill level but don’t change the concept, keep that the same, only change WHAT you practice not HOW and what order it is in.

Good luck
I know it will work
Dean Tucker