Hi, i've been reading this forum for a while and i reckon you guys could help me out. See, I've been playing drums for eight years and i'm happy with all aspects of my drumming apart from one: Fills.
Whenever my band is writing a song and a suitable place for an awesome fill comes up i just get a mental block and I usually end up just playing the same old fills, like 16ths or triplets round the toms, or the old Mike Portnoy trick of repeating righthand-lefthand-rightfoot-leftfoot round the kit.
I have quite a good drumming vocabulary but i get stuck trying to apply it to fills. It's really holding me back.
Any ideas on how i can sort this out? What approaches to writing fills do you guys use?
Cheers

Lately i've been working on putting tribal beats into fills. Try working on some tribal beats and just do some cool things with it. Sit down for like 5 minutes and dont use and cymbals at all, just snare toms and bass. Everyonce in a while, i'll get a cool rhythm that would work good for a short fill. Instead of just going down the toms in 16th notes, go up and down them, hit the snare a few times, add in a double stroke or two.

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Pull up some of your favorite drummers and hardcore study their fills and styles, then play around with the sounds. I'm sure you'll figure out some badass shit

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POLYRHYTHMS!!!

Try doing triplets with your feet while doing a 16th pattern with your hands, then throw in a few of the mike portnoy splits, and end with some rudiments on cymbals.

think creativley, mix it up, like do a 16th run then add a SLOW triplet in it, then back up the speed so like:

DADADADAD Da Da Da DADADAA....

Double strokes and rudiments are great for fills, and also Mix it up between your hands and feet, like the mike portnoy stuff is great when you throw in some heeltoe stuff with it, like double stroking the right foot and left foot, so you are going DA DA rlrl DA DA rlrl this is cool at slower temps and when you can get it fast (I can't do it that well slow, so) it sounds sick!!!

Also use other tuplets. like Quintuplets, Sextuplets etc. in the right place, these can sound mind blowing, and then you can mix them up between your hands and feet.

also Try a fill where you hit one thing only once, these are REALLY fun at high tempos like this on a 5 cpeice kit :

Snare, tom 1, tom 2, floor tom, Right foot left foot, or even just a heel toe with the right, and then you can play with these like throwing in a hi hat, or a cymbal crash etc.

Fills are all about applying everything you have learned about drums and mixing it up and playing with it, adding other components to it, and remember the most important rule about fills:

As long as you are in time as you go into it and in time as you come out of it, it is just a really fucked up feel this means that you can do ANYTHING, ANYWHERE as long as you are in time coming in and out of the fill, no matter how complex a tuplet or whatever it may be.

and finally, don't be limited to just your toms, and cymbals etc, try hitting the hi hat stand, or deliberate rim hits etc.

When I did a breif stint as a drum teacher, (have been playing for around 6-7 years now) that was the hardest thing to teach, creativity.

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Thanks for your help guys. They were some really helpful ideas. I'm now finding it alot easier to come up with parts using your suggestions.
cheers

I'd agree with everything everyone else said, and something I've started adding to my fills lately are stabs (hitting the kick drum and crash together while grabbing the crash to stop the sound dead) in the middle of fast fills. It's hard to get right, but gives fills that "wtf did he do there?" factor we all like to slip in.

yeah those are cool, Dave lombardo used those quite a bit on Seasons in the abyss.

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im into doing real simple fills but doing more complex beats. hand/foot rolls are cool, i utilize this alot because i play single and do basic double bass patterns.

i like this thread and i thought i may add.

rudiments in the place of blasts, like a paradidle,not necessarily a fill but somewhere imbetween

right hand on cymbal with the paradidle, variation back and forth, stuff like that

Yeah, definitely. I was doing it earlier today and it sounds cool as beans.

I don't like blasts myself, I think they sound silly and have got no place in the stuff I play (just common or garden Thrash). But there are some places when I know certain drummers would put a blast in my stuff, so I was experimenting with putting paradiddles there in exactly the way you described them. Sounds much better, if you ask me.

Which nobody will, because you all love blasts. I know this. I just can't stop moaning about them.

don't knock any form or style of drumming, I used to, and now wish I hadn't, you should practice blasts, even if you don't intend to use them, because you might end up wanting to use something similar but can't cause you didn't pratice it!

Plus blasts are fun and you can have some fun with them, like breaking them up sounds sick!

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I'm on the fence about blasts. As a guitarist who uses Drumkit From Hell, I mainly employ a blast for anchoring a Beneath The Massacre/Dillinger Escape Plan sweep picking frenzy, as a straight blast beat keeps the music going in some kind of direction. In my opinion, blast beats used in conjunction with standard riffing can often sound one-dimensional and uninteresting. I've experimented with blasts that involve straight sixteenths on the kick drum, and triplets on the snare out of phase with the kicks, ( I'm not a drummer so I'm probably not explaining myself well ) interchanging snare triplets with delayed eigth note patterns ... I'm experimenting with having the kick, snare and ride bell all playing in three different time sigs. There's lots of ways to make a blast beat interesting.

yeah, triplet blasts are interesting, thats basically the same time sig as a paradidlle, another pattern i do with the paradiddle is rlrrlrrlrlrrlrrlrlrrlrrlr, real simple i know, but do it as fast as you can as a blast l-snare r-cymbal, correspond with single bass to right hits<thats what i do>. the snare hits a kinda odd with an neat cymbal pattern...........this is why im learning double bass to do cool foot stuff with rudiments like this