The remainder
Lesson time: (8min 24sec)
Alex Reeves wraps up Fills in Time with where to take your time-feel next - applying these ideas to your own playing, transcribing other drummers and listening widely.
Course preview
This lesson is part of the course Fills In Time: Drum Fills & Time-Feel in 15 Lessons
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
Final Fills in Time Lesson
Welcome to the final Fills in Time lesson.
Application of Concepts
It is very important that you apply the ideas and concepts covered in these lessons to your own music. You also need to listen to and absorb the many other types of music.
In lesson 15, I'm going to cover only a few styles. It is now up to you to decide what to listen to and what to learn. Good luck!
Let's Play
- "It's SA. Let's play some rock and roll."
1, 2, 3.
1, 2, 1.
Moving Forward
Once you feel like you've really accomplished what I've had to say in this DVD and in this book, I'd like you to really try and move on to:
- Scoring out other people's music
- Listening to different styles of music
These activities will influence what you presently do.
Key Takeaways
A really important point I'd like to make is:
- You will get teachers and people showing you what to do, presenting ideas.
- The most important thing is you: what you like, what you love.
If you don't like something, try not to do it so much. If you love something, follow that.
Suggestions
Things that I strongly suggest you do now are to:
- Look in depth at other people's music.
- Get yourself a good teacher who can help you with this.
If you were to take apart fills that the Meters played, you would learn a great deal about feel and time.
If you were to analyze Levon Helm's fills from the band The Band, you would learn a lot about groove, feel, sound, and time.
Steal other people's ideas, and you'll take the bits that you like most of all and make them your own.
About the instructor
Alex is a freelance musician who has performed live and in the studio with artists as diverse as Dizzee Rascal, Unkle, Bat for Lashes, Guy Garvey and Elbow. He has played headline slots at all the major UK festivals, including televised appearances on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, Oxygen Main Stage and T In The Park. International TV performances also include Live on MTV, the Jools Holland Hootenanny and The BBC Electric Proms with Dizzee Rascal. On stage Alex has played with artists who have scored number one singles and albums all over the world, including Boy George, The Jones Girls and Johnny Hates Jazz. Alex has also been Musical Director for Island Records' Cocknbullkid, produced an album for Lotte Mullan, and performed live with Mercury nominated rapper Ty, American Blues legend Earl Thomas and singer-songwriter Ezio. Alex has recorded in all the major studios in London, including Abbey Road, Angel, Air and Rak, and runs his own private drum studio from East London's Fortress complex. Recorded highlights at The Drum Fortress include the top 5 single Shine with the Lovefreekz, Wretch 32's Breathe, UNKLE's collaboration with Nick Cave and the beat for American rapper Nas's single Nasty. He has also played drums and percussion on major TV adverts for companies that include McDonalds, X-Box and Toyota, provided beats for computer games like Sega Rally 2 and Shellshock 2, and appeared on many TV and film soundtracks, including the major release of Brideshead Revisited. Alex writes a regular tuition column for Drummer magazine, has written a book with accompanying DVD, and recorded a 1960s funk breaks sample CD. In his MusicGurus course, Fills In Time, he distils all that studio and stage experience into 15 quick lessons that sharpen your time-feel and build a vocabulary of drum fills you can drop straight into your own playing. And yes - he still calls his mum every week. read more