- Exercise 1 – the first seven beats
- Exercise 2 – the next seven beats
- Exercise 3 – Piece them together
- Exercise 4 – Final section
- Exercise 5 – The whole fill
- Exercise 6 – Play it all!
Lesson progress
This is the big one guys, the most difficult fill I’ve had to learn (at least up to this point) for TesseracT. For the longest time, I would play a variation of this fill, simply because the original idea that Acle (guitarist and main writer for TesseracT) had programmed was super difficult for me to learn. So I decided I needed a new tactic: to break the fill into smaller, digestible chunks. I’m going to go through those chunks with you now, and teach you the sticking along the way.
Exercise 1 – the first seven beats
I’ve highlighted the first chunk of the fill above. We start on the kick, then move to a tom, followed by a snare, kick, tom, floor tom, floor tom:
K R L K R L R
We’re going to practice this to a metronome (get an app for your phone if you don’t have a metronome handy!). Nocturne is 130bpm but I recommend slowing this exercise down to 100bpm or slower if needed, and building up to 130bpm gradually.
Loop exercise
Exercise 2 – the next seven beats
K L R K R L K
The sticking for this section is very nearly identical to the first section – one of the reasons I’ve chosen to break it up like this. The difference with this small section is that we do L R after the first kick drum hit instead of R L, and we end on a kick rather than our right hand. So a good practice would be to learn to comfortably play the sticking above. Let me break it down for you in this video.
Loop exercise
Exercise 3 – Piece them together
Now, we’re going to practice playing these two sections together. Set up a metronome at a comfortable speed for you – I tend to start around 90-100bpm, but absolutely take it slower if you need to – and loop this section until it flows nicely. Please pause the video as you need, so that you can spend time getting this section to flow. In my experience, learning a section like this can take a decent amount of time.
Loop exercise
Exercise 4 – Final section
There’s two small patterns to put together in this final section:
I almost feel as though the first pattern is an introduction to the end of the fill, so for the purpose of learning it, we’re going to break it down like this. The tricky part to get used to is the kick pattern, which leads into beat 1 of bar 28 – I play it as single strokes on the kick (with a double kick pedal obviously).
R L R L
This means that we’re entering bar 28 with a left kick drum and left-hand cymbal crash on beat 1 – which can be tricky or feel unnatural if you’ve not practiced it. So, take it slow and follow the video:
Loop exercise
Exercise 5 – The whole fill
Take a moment if you need to – because this is the tough part. we’re going to combine all of the sections we’ve learned in this lesson, to play the whole drum fill.
In the video I practice this pattern at two speeds: 100bpm and 130bpm – please feel free to start out as slow as you need to.
Loop exercise
Exercise 6 – Play it all!
This is what we’ve spent the last three lessons building towards – we’re now going to play all three sections of the intro to Nocturne. Again, if any of these sections haven’t quite settled with you yet, take your time and slow everything down. That’s always the number 1 rule.
Loop exercise
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