Sangeet Yatra

Fills

A fill is a short break in the groove that says “something is about to change”. The hard part is not the fill. It is arriving back on beat 1 exactly on time.

The one-beat fill

Play the groove for three beats, then use beat 4 for four sixteenths that walk down the kit: snare, then the toms high to low. The hat stops — you need that hand.

Count the fill out loud as “four-ee-and-a”. Four strokes, one beat, no more. Most fills that go wrong are a fill that would not fit.

Landing on 1

The point of a fill is the beat after it. Here is a two-bar phrase: a bar of groove, then a bar whose second half is the fill, and a crash on the 1 that comes round when the loop repeats. Let it loop and listen to the join — that crash is the whole reason the fill exists.

Play the landing, not the fill. If the crash is late, the fill was too full. Take a note out of the fill rather than hurrying it: an empty last sixteenth is invisible, and a late beat 1 is the most audible mistake a drummer can make.

Which toms

The obvious fill runs down every tom you own, but this kit's middle two toms are tuned about a semitone and a half apart — walking all four sounds like three steps and a repeat. The fills here use toms 1, 2 and the floor tom, which is a clear descent you can hear.

Before you go on

  • A one-beat fill on beat 4 that does not steal time from beat 1
  • The two-bar phrase with the crash landing exactly on 1
  • The same fill at 60 and at 90 BPM
  • Four bars of groove, one bar with a fill, repeated without stopping

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