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The drum fill in this new episode is based on Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer by Ted Reed, commonly known as Syncopation. This book remains one of the most versatile and widely used resources in drum education. The keyword to master this lesson is interpretation! Instead of reading the exercise in a literal way, we reinterpret the written rhythms and orchestrate them around the kit to create dynamic, musical drum fills. We start with Exercise One—the same concept can be applied to the other exercises, giving you a ton of possibilities.
This approach helps you move beyond mechanical reading and turn a simple syncopation line into expressive vocabulary you can actually use in real musical situations. Let’s start!
- Select two bars
- Choose two measures based on your preference—in this case, bars 27 and 28 from Exercise One.
- Interpretation
- The exercises in Syncopation are written in quarter notes and eighth notes. Interpret the two measures in cut time or 2/2, so you have two quarter notes in the space of one.
- Read the written rhythms as 16th notes.
- For the purpose of this lesson, ignore the bass drum part.
- Reduce to 4/4
- Condense the overall idea into a 4/4 measure, accenting the notes that represent the melody, and filling in 16th notes (sticking is alternated).
- Add foot patterns
- Incorporate the bass drum or left-foot hi-hat in quarter notes to internalize the phrase.
Here’s how it appears: the original two bars and the 4/4 bar. If you understand the concept of this interpretation, you can read the whole page without stopping.
The next step involves the concept of long and short notes; those who are familiar with Syncopation already know what I’m talking about. Taking as a reference the original two bars, we consider long notes every quarter note and short notes every eighth. Long notes will be orchestrated on toms, usually floor tom for the right hand and rack toms for the left hand (but this also depends on the phrase and could be at your discretion), and short notes on the snare. Here is how the phrase appears, incorporating this concept.
In this way, we create a very musical 16th-note drum fill. If you look closely, the phrasing is based on an idea of six 16th notes or three 8th notes (alternating accents on the floor tom, tom, and snare) repeated twice with a variation on the last beat to close the measure.
The same concept can be adapted to every bar of the exercises of Syncopation—you have a potentially endless resource of drum fills on your hands. For instance, here are the very first two bars of Exercise One with the 16th-note long-short note interpretation. Try experimenting with your ideas, creating your own fills. Elevate your drumming!
