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 right hand leads, and the hands take turns down the toms, so that hand is free for the crash.

The one-beat fill

Play the groove for three beats, then use beat 4 for four sixteenths that walk down the kit: snare, high tom, mid tom, floor tom. The hat stops. The right hand was playing it, and that hand leads the fill. The hands take turns.

• four — right hand, snare
• e — left hand, high tom
• & — right hand, mid tom
• a — left hand, floor tom

The floor tom sits outside the right leg, so the left hand reaches for it. Say the hand with the word. Left-handed, mirror the hands. The crash stays with the hand that was on the hat.

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. The crash is the right hand. It can land on 1 because the floor tom, the note before it, was the left. Let it loop and listen to the join — that crash is the whole reason the fill exists.

Which toms

A fill runs down the toms on the kit: high tom, mid tom, floor tom. On the staff they sit in the top space, on the fourth line and in the second space (the staff key). The recording has a fourth tom that sits too close to the mid tom: walking all four sounds like three steps and a repeat, so this room leaves it out. The hands stay right, left, right, left.