The other day I was talking with another drummer about playing fills. He told me (as if he somehow knew that I did this) to make sure that I didn’t stop playing my bass drum when I played fills. I got the feeling that some beginning drummers forget about the bass drum altogether when playing fills and only play fills with their hands. Or maybe they don’t even consider adding the bass drum (or the high hat pedal) as part of the fill at all. This seemed pretty logical to me, so the next time I sat down to practice I decided to work on it. I started with a basic fill and then added the bass drum to all the quarter notes. Simple enough…
     Well one thing led to another and what I ended up with was a really cool syncopated pattern shown below. The pattern alternates between the toms (or snare if you don’t have a 3^rd tom) and adds a single splash or crash at the end of the rotation to shift the entire beat over one eighth note. This adds a couple of measures to the length before the pattern starts back over.

     What I have found the most difficult about this is not actually playing the pattern; it was stopping when everything got back to the start. I usually count in my head, but found that when I got back around to the high tom, the tone seemed so much like a good place to start the measure that it kept resetting my count. This forced me to count out loud and pay less attention to how the rhythm sounded and more where I was in my count. Then I found that, because of the added eighth note, the hand that starts the new tom alternated each time around. So every other time around, I was crossing hands to start the next voice.

     Anyhow I found it a really cool pattern. I hope you do too.