Here’s a sheet of exercises I wrote to develop the facility to play open hi hat splashes on the ee’s and ah’s using the left hand.
These exercises are based on the famous Bernard Purdie lick you can hear in Aretha Franklin’s Rocksteady and which is a staple of funk drumming. If you watch Purdie play the lick, you’ll notice he plays the open sounds with his right hand but I find that when you use the left hand it keeps your right hand on the beat helping to maintain a good flow (not that BP has any trouble in that area…). The trick here is to work on playing a really tight hi hat “shoop” that’s perfectly lined up with the bass. In these examples, the right hand doesn’t play on the 8ths after the open hat moves, I will post a couple of pages utilising the right in the near future. Meanwhile, hope you like these.
Donwload the PDF: Funky Offbeat Hi Hat Fills
