This flam fills drum lesson is here to help get you out of a drumming rut when you keep playing the same old drum fills. It’s primarily based on rock drum fills but really these can be used in any genre. It’s just that the flam is a powerful rudiment and using them in the way we use them here is very powerful.

We are using combinations of flams and bass drums so it is super simple in concept and creates a sound that we’ve enjoyed hearing from the likes of Dave Grohl on Nirvana tracks such as ‘Smells like teen spirit’ (drum intro), ‘In bloom’ (during each chorus) and ‘Come as you are’ (fill into middle 8). But these are not exclusive to Dave Grohl or Nirvana or the Foo Fighters. These have been employed effectively by just about every rock drummer at one point or another.

It falls into the category that I call ‘caveman drumming’ where we just strip it back to simple level, hit hard and keep it solid. We’re not talking polyrhythms, limb independence, oddtime or anything else that takes a lot of cerebral power. This is good ol’ fashioned smacking the c%@p out of our drums and it’s a lot of fun!

So rather than teaching you one flam fill this lesson teaches a system to create many flam fills to open your creativity on the drumkit. With a simple system that involves three rhythmic blocks you can reorganise them to make up lots of fills yourself. Once you have created several rhythmic patterns you can then orchestrate them differently around the kit and multiply the number of fills you can play again.

But after a while you won’t even need to plan these and you can just improvise using this idea without much thought being needed. That is the end goal and it is demonstrated in the video lesson.

So let’s stop reading words and start watching the video lesson so you can learn a ton of new flam fills on your drums. Just scroll down and click the link to get instant free access to the video drum lesson and sheet music below.