In this lesson I will be showing a fill inspired by a section of the song If You Want Blood by the band AC/DC. The fill in question can first be heard at around 2:58 in the video linked. The fill is built around a simple eighth note 332 rhythm that is orchestrated in various ways. This fill is fairly similar in concept to a few other level 1 lessons that you can find linked at the bottom of the page, you may find it useful to look through these before getting started on this page. It is also important you are familiar with the '332' concept and you can find a useful lesson on this linked at the bottom of the page.
The intention of this lesson is to provide some more fill construction ideas for that '332' style syncopated rhtyhm. The movements and orchestrations in the fill are actually pretty straight forward, the important part here is understand the rhythm. I will start by giving the rhythm for the fill. It is just crotchets and quavers so shouldn't be too hard to follow but I have included counting and phrase markings underneath to highlight the '332' rhtyhm.
So as you can see, the '2' of the 332 is actually cut short to one crotchet. Make sure you understand what is happening with the rhythm and the groupings are comfortable. The next step is to orchestrate the part by adding in some toms. For the first '3' block the first note is played on a snare followed by two mid toms then for the second '3' you use floor toms rather than mids. That looks like this:
To complete this first fill some flams need to be added and these fall on the first note of each of the smaller blocks. Like this:
Be careful of your sticking around those flam notes, the movements can be quite quick. Start the part at a very low tempo and gradually build it up.
In that same section of the song there is a variation on that same '332' idea. In this second version you will keep a constant eighth note going on the floor tom then add in other notes around it. This is shown below:
TASK
- Using the 2 minute rule, get all examples up to a tempo of at least 140bpm which is the tempo of the original song.
- Add each example into a structured pattern.
- Create your own fill pattern using this concept.
