One of my students, age 12, accidentally invented a really good way of handling the right hand lead Reed system. You have to watch out for things like that. Sometimes mistakes point to a better way of doing something. Or a good other way. Things find their level.
The normal right hand lead system = play melody rhythm from Syncopation with your right hand, fill in the spaces with your left, to make a running 8th note rhythm. RH on a cymbal, with BD in unison, and the LH on the SD, to start.
This tweak changes one aspect of that: when there’s a quarter note (or dotted quarter) on a downbeat followed by a note on the &. Here you can put a cymbal on the second beat of that, or on the first beat:
A couple of more examples— you could do it when the starting melody note is on an & as well:
Starting on the & like that, the normal option 1 is a little strange. You’ll hit instances where any of this will be a little strange. One more example, the first line of Exercise 6, on p. 43 of Syncopation:
This is probably best for people who are well acquainted with the normal RH lead system— like, you can play through all the full page syncopation exercises in Reed without any mistakes. Play around with it, do it however it makes sense to you. It may be best to do it where it’s easy, and don’t try to force a consistent application of it all the way through. Consider it an opener, something to help break away from a pure formulaic way of playing it.