Welcome to the first ever Drumeo Live free drum lesson. In this video, Jared Falk teaches five beginner to advanced linear drum fills that you can use in various styles of music. This free drum lesson comes with downloadable PDF sheet music and play-along MP3s of the exercises played at three different tempos.
If you take a look at the sheet music Jared Falk wrote for this lesson, you can see that the hand patterns stay on the snare drum. You can play them like so, but you’ll eventually want to move them around the drums and cymbals. It’s a good idea to stick with a single surface like a snare drum at first because it lets you focus on limb independence and consistency with greater ease. Take these drum fills as written, start out slowly and speed them up before you start messing around with orchestration.
Each drum fill can actually be played as a drum beat. To do so you just have to move one hand to the hi-hat or ride cymbal and the other one to the snare drum. For some ideas on how to mess around with your linear drum fills and drum beats, check Jay Deachman’s Construct.
Once you’re done with the linear drum fills taught in this free drum lesson and would like to learn some new ones, watch “Hand To Feet Combination Fills” and “Intermediate 16th Note Linear Drum Fills.” The linear drum fills you’ll learn from those free drum lessons are very cool sounding; you’ll have a ton of fun working on them!