How to Play Flams!

3 Awesome Flam Fills by Larnell Lewis, Vinnie Colaiuta, and Eric Moore

What is a Flam??

This is one of the drum rudiments - the building blocks of drumming. A Flam is a primary note, with the other hand playing a grace note just before. Let’s look at the Right Handed Flam first. Raise your RIGHT HAND higher than your LEFT HAND. Focus on your RIGHT HAND being the primary note and drop both sticks toward your snare drum or practice pad. You want your LEFT HAND to hit JUST BEFORE your RIGHT HAND. It should sound more like a longer note than two separate notes. If the sticks hit too far apart it will sound like 16th notes. But we also don’t want the sticks to hit in unison or at the same time.

Let’s look at three real world examples of drummers using flams.

Here’s an example from Larnell Lewis from his drum solo on “The City Lights”.

Larnell Lewis uses the flam in a really creative way. First notice that the FLAM is played using two different sounds - ride cymbal and snare drum. He is also using accents, doubles, and moving around the drum set. Practice slowly with a metronome!

The next example is from Vinnie Colaiuta off of Brian Eisenberg’s “Gift with Purchase”.

There is so much going on in the example and it is a great way to see how many possibilities there are for you to explore. He is using flams, other rudiments like Swiss Army triples, accents, poly rhythms, and moving around the drum set. I also love this example because it uses a lot of LEFT HAND lead.

The last example I have for you in this post is from Eric Moore.

Again, lots of creativity using the flam within other rudiments and moving around the drum set. We see use of the kick drum, flams on the toms, flam paradiddle, and flam paradiddle-diddle.

These are three real world examples from great drummers for you to study! Practice each one slowly with a metronome.

If you want more in depth study of this material, check out my full length video lesson on youtube here.