I use this exercise with my intermediate students a lot but I’ve always wanted to sit down and work on it a bit more myself. I don’t play a whole ton of “funky” or “straight 8th” type music so I find that this sort of thing is constantly on the back burner so to speak. The idea is to take a book like Charles Dowd’s A Funky Primer and practice each groove with different hi-hat patterns; straight 16ths, and then three patterns that are produced by removing one 16th note (side note, there is one more possibility, “e-and-a”, I’ve just been teaching these four for so long that I didn’t think to include it while recording…)
I’ve worked out #2 from the first page of FP, and then #12 from page 22 for you below. Practice each individually, then try playing a bar of time and a bar of the new groove, or try playing down a column at a time. Enjoy.
What Should I Practice Today? 