Have you ever seen or heard someone play something and wondered how they did it? A guitar lick, bass riff, or drum fill that sounded impossible to play or decipher? Towards the end of the 70′s, I started hearing a lot of drum fills that sounded like burps. Instead of the standard descending fill on the toms, these would go down and come back up – fast. Think Steve Gadd at the end of Aja.
Just listening to the record, I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was doing. So I gave up. For 25 years. When I returned to the drums after an extended hiatus, a lot had changed. No more records. Instead, there were CDs, instructional DVDs, YouTube Videos, transcriptions available on the internet, and so on.
But since this mystery had been eating at me for over two decades, I decided to solve it the old-fashioned way. I went to a drum teacher. After a few seconds of me explaining the burp concept, he said, “oh yeah”, and taught it to me in the next 15 seconds. So it took about 20 seconds to learn the fill that had eluded me for more than 20 years. Now you can learn it from Steve himself, but it will take a little longer. The secret is revealed at about 1:30 in to the following clip – rRLR. So simple.
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