Drum Fills for Beginners: How to Play Fills That Actually Sound Good
Updated: Aug 15
By Rob Bishop | robbishopdrums.com
Quick Answer
Drum fills for beginners work best when they are kept simple, played in time, and land back on beat one, the downbeat. It helps to think of a fill as a piece of punctuation in music, a little signal that something is about to change or is changing, so you only really need one or two of them and they can be built from simple stickings you already know.
A great one to start with is a group of four single strokes on beat four, leading you back into beat one.
The most common beginner mistake is cramming in too many notes and losing the time, or speeding up and panicking to hit that downbeat, so once a simple fill feels good and solid you can start adding more beats and joining rudiments together to make more interesting fills, as long as you keep counting along with both the groove and the fill.
Ask most beginners what they most want to play and it is rarely the groove, it is the fills, because the fills are the flashy bit, the moment the drummer takes over and does something exciting, and they are almost certainly the reason you picked up a pair of sticks in the first place. Fills are the chocolate on the cake, and I completely get it, because they are fun and they feel good to play.
But here is something that takes a little while to sink in when you are starting out, which is that a fill that loses the time actually sounds worse than no fill at all. A simple fill played dead in time will always beat a busy one that trips over itself and lands in the wrong place, and that is not me being a killjoy, it is genuinely the difference between a fill that lifts a song and one that derails it.
The good news is that a good beginner fill is far simpler than it sounds, because most of the fills you have heard on records are built from a handful of stickings you can already play, or can pick up in an afternoon. Let me show you.
What is a drum fill?
A drum fill is a short break from the main groove that you use to move from one part of a song into another, and the simplest way to think about it is as a piece of punctuation in music. In the same way that a comma or a full stop tells you something in a sentence is shifting, a fill tells the listener that a section is ending and something new is on its way.
You will hear one at the end of a verse just before the chorus kicks in, or every four or eight bars to keep things moving along, and then it lands back on beat one and the groove carries on as before.
That last part is the bit that really matters, because a fill is not a solo and it is not your moment to empty everything you know onto the kit, it is a small piece of connective tissue between two parts of a song, and its main job is to hand you back to beat one cleanly. Everything else is decoration.
The one rule that makes any fill work
If you take one thing from this article, take this, which is that a fill can be as simple as you like as long as it puts you back on beat one, in time. The number of notes, where you play them, how fast the hands move, none of it counts for much if you lose the one.
This holds true even in a professional setting, because the musicians around you will quietly love you for bringing them back onto the downbeat cleanly, every time. There are plenty of musical situations where the music does not actually want the fill to land on beat one, and you will meet those in time and learn to read them, but for eighty to ninety per cent of everything you will ever play, landing on that downbeat smoothly, in time and feeling good is the job, and being able to do it reliably is exactly the kind of thing that bags you more work over the years.
So when you practise a fill, do not think about the fill itself first, think about the beat one that comes after it, and make landing on that next downbeat the target every single time.
Why do beginner drum fills go wrong?
Nearly always for the same reason, which is too many notes and the time falling apart underneath them.
When a beginner plays a fill the instinct is to cram in as much as possible, because surely more notes means a better fill, and so the fill speeds up, the hands start to scramble, and by the time it is over the drummer has no real idea where beat one is, the band comes back in, and everyone is in a slightly different place. The other version of the same problem is panic, where you feel yourself running out of room and rush to get to the downbeat, which throws the time out just as badly.
I have watched both happen more times than I can count, and I have played plenty of gigs where the simplest possible fill, played rock solid, was exactly the right call, because on a big stage in front of a real crowd nobody is sitting there wishing the drummer had played more notes. People feel it when the time is good, and they feel it just as much when it is not. So the fix is never a busier fill, it is a simpler one played in time, and learning to play less but better puts you ahead of most beginners straight away. This is the same idea behind making your fills sound musical once you have the basics under your hands.
How do you practise a drum fill as a beginner?
When you are practising a fill for the first time, walk yourself through it as slowly and simply as you possibly can, taking each beat one at a time and counting it through out loud as you go. Get clear on where the fill starts and where it should finish, and notice whether the notes are all the same, say all eighth notes, or a mixture of eighth notes and sixteenth notes, because that changes how you count it and how it should feel.
Once you understand the shape of it, put a click on and play it slowly, really feeling how it flows against the time, and only start to build the speed once it is clean, because a fill that is solid at sixty beats per minute will still be solid when you speed it up, whereas a fill that is scrappy slow only gets scrappier fast. It also helps enormously to practise the fill in context rather than on its own, so play a few bars of a groove, drop the fill in, then come straight back into the groove, because that is how you will actually use it in a song.
If you want a full structure for your sessions, my guide to what to practise every day lays it out.
The first drum fill I teach every beginner
The very first fill I teach complete beginners always raises a smile, because it is so simple that people almost do not believe it counts as a fill at all.
If you are already playing an eighth-note groove, and you really should be comfortable with that before you start adding fills, then all you are going to do is take the very last eighth note of the hi-hat, the "and" of four, and instead of playing it on the hi-hat you lace it onto your top tom, or any tom you have.
That is the whole fill. It might even sound too simple, but here is the interesting part, because most beginners still stumble over it, and the reason is that the moment your hand moves across to the tom and you hear a different sound, your brain reads it as "I am doing something new and difficult," when in reality you are playing exactly the same information you were playing a second ago, the same eighth notes, you have just moved the last one onto a tom.
Really feel that, land back on beat one and carry on with the groove, then repeat it a few times until it feels natural, and once it does you can add a crash with the bass drum on beat one to properly mark the landing.
Two more easy drum fills to build on
Once that first fill feels comfortable, the next step is to fill a little more of the bar, and these two build on exactly what you have just done.
The first is a group of four single strokes on beat four, played as sixteenth notes, right and left alternating, leading you straight back into beat one. You keep your groove going for beats one, two and three, then those four quick notes on beat four act as the run-up into the downbeat, and because it drops so neatly out of a groove and back in, this is the fill you will end up using more than almost any other.
The second is the same idea, but moved around the kit, so instead of playing all four notes on the snare you might play snare, snare, high tom, floor tom, keeping the sticking and the timing exactly the same while the sound travels across the drums. You have not learned anything harder, you have simply moved your hands, and that is worth remembering, because a huge amount of fill playing is just familiar patterns moved to different drums.
How do you turn rudiments into a drum fill?
Once single strokes feel easy, the next step is joining a few stickings together, and this is where rudiments really earn their keep, because a rudiment is just a sticking pattern and a fill is just stickings arranged musically.
Here is one of my favourites, and it sounds far harder than it actually is, because it is built from three pieces you may already know, a paradiddle, two RLLs and a single stroke, which together make one full bar of sixteenth notes.
One Paradiddle Fill That Makes You Sound Like a Pro
If you can play a paradiddle, you can play this fill, so start slow, count all the way through, and only build the speed once it is clean, because what makes this sound like an intermediate fill is not really the pattern, it is the speed you play it at and where you choose to drop it into a song. That is the whole idea behind rudiments for beginners, that they are not dry exercises for their own sake but the actual building blocks of real fills and grooves.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the easiest drum fill for a beginner? The easiest fill is to take the last eighth note of your hi-hat groove, the "and" of four, and play it on a tom instead of the hi-hat. You are playing exactly the same rhythm you already play, just moving one note onto a tom, which makes it the simplest possible way to start filling without changing anything about your timing.
Why do my drum fills sound bad? Almost always because there are too many notes and the timing slips, or because you speed up and panic on the way to beat one. A fill with fewer notes played dead in time will sound far better than a busy one that loses the beat, so simplify the fill, count out loud, and make landing back on the downbeat your target.
How do I stop speeding up during a drum fill? Practise slowly to a click and count through the fill out loud every time, because rushing tends to happen the moment you stop counting and let the hands take over. Keep the count going, make landing on the next beat one the goal, and the rushing settles down as the fill becomes familiar.
Do I need to know rudiments to play drum fills? Not to start, because your first fills can be simple single strokes with no rudiment knowledge at all. Learning a few basic rudiments like the paradiddle does give you more building blocks to make longer and more interesting fills, so they are well worth picking up as you progress, but they are not a barrier to getting going.
How long should a beginner drum fill be? Most beginner fills are half a bar or a single bar long, and a half-bar fill over beat four is the most useful because it drops out of your groove and back in so cleanly. Keep them short to begin with, because longer fills are simply harder to keep in time.
When should I play a drum fill in a song? Usually at the end of a section, such as just before a chorus, or every four or eight bars to keep the song moving, because the fill is there to signal that a change is coming. Try not to overdo it though, because a fill in every bar quickly turns into noise and loses the effect.
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