The intention with the patterns in this lesson is to help improve your ability to switch between grooves and full bar fills that contain simple mixed rhythms. We have covered similar structural ideas in other lessons so the main intention here is to get comfortable applying this type of mixed rhythm fill in a practical context. The structure of all exercises here will be 'AAAB' where A will be a bar of groove and B will be a bar of fill. As the title suggests, the fill will be a three quarter bar fill that is built from a combination of eighth and quarter notes. These fills will be nice and slow and are a great introduction to more complicated versions of this idea.
Using different rhythms within a fill can help create a more musically interesting part. As such, this style of fill is well worth becoming familiar with. The intetion of this lesson is to show you how to apply fills using this construction method within a longer musical phrase. As before, the important thing here is to repeat the four bar phrases over and over, preferably with a metronome, until you can play the part several times without any breaks in timing. I have provided various lengths of fill to mix things up.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
TASK
- Using the 2 minute rule, get all phrases up to a tempo of at least 135bpm.
- Create your own versions of these patterns by varying the orchestration of the fills.
Up Next
I recommend trying our A A A B Exercises Using Sixteenth Note Fills next.
