Rock beats with fill phrases

Using this framework a lot with my students in recent months, marking up Funky Primer with a Sharpie, putting accents over the bass drum notes to indicate a crash, marking over the remaining notes with a slash mark, indicating some kind of fill, which we can handle a number of ways.

It’s proving to be a really solid way of teaching fills— I’ve never had, or seen, a good method for that before this. Hopefully it will end up in a new book sometime this year.

Play the written notes as written. Accents indicate a crash— there is only one cymbal line, but use as many or as few cymbals as you want. To start, play the slash notes as flams on the snare drum, or as double stops on two drums. See my other recent posts about fills for other ways of handling them.

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