Drum Fills for Beginners: One-Beat and Two-Beat Fills

A fill has one job: it tells everyone, you included, that something is about to change. The verse is ending, the chorus is coming, the song is about to stop. For a beat or two you leave the groove, play something that leans forward, and then land on beat 1 of the next bar as if you'd never left. The landing is the part that matters. A plain fill that comes back in time sounds better than a clever one that doesn't.

Count sixteenth notes first

Most beginner fills are built from sixteenth notes: four even notes on every beat, counted "1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a." Before any toms are involved, play a full bar of them on the snare or a practice pad with alternating hands, right hand first, so every beat is R L R L. Count out loud while you do it.

Look at what that sticking does. Your right hand plays every number and every "&". Your left hand plays every "e" and every "a". So however many whole beats of sixteenths you play, the next beat always starts on your right hand, and that hand is free to hit the crash on beat 1. Every fill below relies on that. If you lead with your left hand, swap every R and L on this page.

Start from a groove you already have

A fill only means something next to a groove, so use one you can play without thinking. The examples here use the Money Beat from the first grooves to learn: eighth notes on the hi-hat, snare on 2 and 4, kick on 1 and 3. Here's one bar of it with a one-beat fill at the end. Each character is one sixteenth note and a dot is a rest.

One-beat fills

Fill 1: four on the snare

Play beats 1, 2 and 3 of the groove exactly as usual. On beat 4, both hands go to the snare for four sixteenth notes. Then comes beat 1 of the next bar: right hand on the crash, with the kick underneath it at the same moment.

After the crash, your right hand goes straight back to the hi-hat for the "&" of 1 and the groove carries on.

Fill 2: snare to floor tom

Same rhythm, same sticking, two drums. The first two notes stay on the snare and the last two move to the floor tom.

Two-beat fills

A two-beat fill starts on beat 3, so you play only the first half of the groove bar, including the snare on 2, before you leave it.

Fill 3: one beat each

Fill 4: down the kit

Beat 3 stays on the snare. Beat 4 splits between the high tom and the floor tom, so the fill drops in pitch as it heads for the crash.

All four fills are the same hand motion. Only the drums change, which is why the alternating sixteenths are worth getting even on one surface before you move them around.

Getting back to beat one

A fill isn't finished on the "a" of 4. It's finished on the crash. Count straight through the barline, "4 e & a 1," and treat that 1 as the last note of the fill.

• Crash and kick land together. A crash on its own sounds thin. The kick under it is what makes beat 1 feel like an arrival.
• Don't speed up. Fills tend to rush because there are suddenly more notes to play. The sixteenths in the fill should be exactly twice as fast as the hi-hat eighths before it, and no faster.
• Keep the volume in line with the groove. If the fill is much louder or softer than the bars around it, it sounds like a different drummer walked in.
• When in doubt, play less. Two snare notes on "4 &" and a crash on 1 is a real fill. Leaving space is always allowed.

How to practice them

1. Loop the fill by itself. Play "4 e & a 1," stop on the crash, rest, and go again until the landing is reliable.
2. Put it in a four-bar phrase. Three bars of groove, then one bar that ends with the fill. Fills usually sit at the end of a four- or eight-bar phrase, so this is the shape you'll actually use.
3. Use a click. Start slow enough to count the sixteenths out loud, somewhere around 60 to 70 BPM. If your metronome can click sixteenth notes, turn that on and line every note of the fill up with it.
4. Change the drums, not the rhythm. Once Fill 4 is steady, pick your own order of drums and keep the sticking exactly as it is.

If you use Lazy Lopez: Drums, the Fills tool in the Practice Hub holds 30 fills in notation, starting with plain ones like Quarter-Note Toms and Beat-Four Snare Fill. Each one opens on the same practice screen as a groove, so you can slow it down and loop it.

Once these four feel comfortable, the next fills you learn will mostly be new stickings on the same counts. That's where the rudiments start to pay off, since a paradiddle or a flam moved around the kit is a fill. And if the landing still wobbles, the fix is usually time rather than technique, which is metronome work.