Collecting a few things we’ve done with Jim Chapin’s Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer over the years, to make practicing those one-measure patterns a little more musically productive. Yes, it takes more time to do them, but you should do them for longer than it takes just to learn the dumb pattern. And there aren’t that many of them.
End with an accent
Play an accent on the last note of the pattern, tied through the 1 of the next measure.
Usually I would just do this on the & of 4, but you can do it on the last drum note of any any pattern:
Partial measures
You can also do part of the notes in the measure— eliminating notes from the beginning or end of the comping part.
You can see if we take away any more notes we’d have a duplicate of one of the other patterns, obviously there’s no need to do that.
Snare drum and bass drum
It is normal to play the comping part on both the snare drum and bass drum, you can make a more musical phrase out of it by not changing on the 1— you can run the pattern a number of times, changing on every note of the pattern.
In addition to (or alternatively to) playing it continuously as I’ve written there, you could do a single measure of the pattern, with the drum change, with a measure of time in between.
Play in 3 or in 5
To play the patterns in 3/4, just cut off beat 4, and play the hihat on beat 2, or beats 2 and 3.
To play in 5 add beat 1 at the end, or repeat beat 4. Play hihat on beats 2 and 4, or 2, 4, and 5.
That gives us a 2+3 phrasing; if you want to do 3+2, you’ll have to figure something out.
Mixing note values
This will be harder to do just by looking at the book, but you can play the last beat of a pattern as a similar rhythm on a different subdivision— triplets to 16th notes or vice versa.
Usually I would want to do this at the end of a phrase, with an accent, followed by time, maybe not as a repeating pattern.
Beyond these possibilities, we generally want to be playing continuous time, thinking in four bar phrases, or eight bars, maybe a Blues form. And balancing the drums with the cymbal, so the cymbal remains the dominant voice, and memorizing the patterns in a form that you can use them when actually playing.