In this lesson you will be learning a groove inspired by the song Living On The Edge by Aerosmith. You can hear the fill at around the 1:48 mark in the video linked which is the transition from the chorus to middle 8. The fill in question is a half bar pattern that uses a simple '1 e a' rhythm in combination with an orchestrated run of straight sixteenths. The fill is fairly common within the rock genre and can be re-orchestrated to create many different fills that will work at a variety of tempos.
The rhythm for this fill is shown below with counting.
The orchestration used in the song is just the last '+ a' count after beat 4 moved to the high tom. Like this:
Learn the example above making sure the sticking around beat 3 is correct. When you can play the fill at a comfortable tempo try playing a four bar pattern using a simple rock groove with this fill applied in the last bar. The full song is nice and slow so to match that you'll be looking at around 84bpm. Listed below are a couple of variations of the orchestration. Use these as a starting point to create your own fills based on this idea.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
TASK
- Learn all given examples up to a tempo of at least 90bpm.
- Experiment with creating your own fills using a similar rhythm to that in this lesson.
- Try playing a long to the full song, a lot of the parts are actually quite simple.
