This drum lesson is going to look at a really popular and great drum fill from the song “Blinded By Chains” by Avenged Sevenfold. The drummer is the now sadly missed Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan.
The Rev’s drumming was particularly exciting to a lot of drummers and was heavily influenced by another great drummer on the list, Mike Portnoy. You can really hear Portnoy’s style in the The Rev’s drumming.
Here is the drum fill/break that occurs at 2:52 into the song…
“Blinded By Chains” – Great Drum Fill (2:52 Album Version)
As in most metal/rock music, the drummer tends to be pretty fluent and handy with the double bass drum. The Rev was no exception as he demonstrates in this blazing example of foot work!
The first bar notated above is the triplet based figures that the Rev and the rest of the band play together. The second bar however is where the rest of the band drops out just leaving the Rev to pound our ears with his bass.
The second bar starts with a single beats worth of single stroke sixteenth note triplets on the snare drum. The roll takes us up to beat 2 where, just after, the feet engage in a four note pattern commonly known as a “Herta”. A Herta consists of two fast notes followed by two slower notes, in this case, two thirty second note triplets followed by two sixteenth note triplets.
The last group of three sixteenth note triplets are played normally, without the Herta thrown in, and the bar then ends on beat 4 with two snare drum strokes on beat 4 itself and the ‘+’ of beat 4. A thirty second note flurry is played on the ‘e’ of beat 4 in between each snare drum. Simple…*ahem* 😉
More great drum fills and famous drum licks from this list to come very soon!
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