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"How to turn your double stroke roll into a powerful fill!"

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this particular “lick”. It’s a fun idea to play for sure. It sounds really dense and powerful, but it’s actually not that hard to play. It’s not linear and there’s not a lot of speed involved. If you have a strong double stroke roll you can play this.

This idea is based off of something that I’ve seen my friends Adam Deitch and Nikki Glaspie play. I’ve seen and heard them play something similar to this where the right hand plays on the down beats and eighth notes. I started messing around with it myself. With everything that I learn, I try to experiment with it and vary it in a way that will make it slightly different and a little bit more of my own way of playing it. So with this, I moved the right hand to the e’s and ah’s. That allows me to then re-inforce those e’s and ah’s with the bass drum.

Playing the e’s and ah’s on the bass drum under a fill is sometimes refered to as the “Bonham Engine” as John Bonham would sometimes do this under his fills.Let’s look at this idea first in it’s simplest form. I often play it as a series of two 11 stroke rolls and a 7 stroke roll all off the left hand. Playing this idea this way spells out a slow 3 side of the clave. This way, a lot of musicians and people in general can recognize and relate to the accent structure so they can still understand what is happening rhythmically in the music.