I had a question come in on this lesson, and it's a problem I had when I was coming up and learning basic subdivisions. Thought the discussion might benefit some of you guys as well.
"Hi stephen, hows it going bro? got a question on this fill. cant seem to catch or feel the fill when i try to input the fill in over the beat. it confuses the heck outta me! how is counted? im thinking cuz its triplet fill in a eigth note feel it's counted like this (1 e ah 2 e ah 3 e ah 4 e ah) but i could be wrong. is there something i can do to get this corrected. really cool fill and i'd love to get it down! thanks for your time Stephen!"
What's up John!
Great to hear from ya man! To your question...
Yes, this is a triplet fill over a duple time signature. It's naturally gonna feel "weird"...or naturally have a push and pull to it. You can count triplets "1 e ah, 2 e ah, 3 e ah, etc" but that gets confusing to me (since you also count 16ths "1 e & ah, 2 e & ah, etc). I prefer to count them "1 la lee, 2 la lee, 3 la lee, 4 la lee". That way there are different sounds for different subdivisions. The easiest thing to do to get this to feel right is to play 3 bars of groove and then play a simple alternating triplet fill between the hands for a measure and back into the groove. It's natural to have a hard time "feeling" triplets in 4/4 time. I had trouble with it for the longest when I was coming up. Once you get that to feel natural, then I would advance to an alternating triplet fill between the right hand and right foot (R-F-R-F-R-F etc). Finally, once you've mastered that, I would then move on to the actual linear pattern that I break down in the lesson.
Don't know if any of that will help you get it under your belt, but hopefully it will! Go Practice!!!
-ST
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