David Garibaldi's work with Tower of Power redefined what funk could sound like in the early 1970s. Where James Brown's drummers had built grooves on layered 16ths — hi-hat and snare and kick stacking on the same notes — Garibaldi went the other way. Every 16th has exactly one voice. Hi-hat or snare or kick or hand, but only one. That's the definition of a linear groove: one note at a time, never two simultaneous.
The result is a groove that sounds intricate but breathes. Nothing is buried under anything else. Each note has its own seat in the bar.
Two Innovations
The open hat on the &. Garibaldi opens the hi-hat momentarily on the offbeats and snaps it closed on the downbeats. Each open-hat note is a tiny "tssss"; each closed hat is a tight "tsk". The pattern itself sings — like a rhythm guitarist's picking hand applied to the cymbal.
The rim-shot snare. The backbeat on 2 and 4 is a rim shot — stick striking the head and the rim simultaneously — for maximum cut. On the studio recordings the rim shot is so loud it sounds amplified by itself. That hard backbeat is what punches through the horn section.
Why It Works
Linear funk forces the drummer to hear every note independently. There's no leaning on stacked-up density to disguise weak placement. If the kick is late, you hear it; if the hat drops in volume, you hear it. The tradeoff for that exposure is that when it lands, every note feels precisely placed — like a sequenced beat played by a human.
A Word on Speed
Tower of Power tempos sit around ♩=100. Below that the linear logic feels too sparse; above that the ghost-note 16ths blur. Practise at 80, perform at 100.
Exercises
Read the bar 16th by 16th and check that only one voice plays per 16th. Hat-ghost-hat-ghost across beat 1, then accented snare on 2 (rim shot), then hat-ghost-hat-hat into beat 3, ghost-hat-ghost across the start of beat 3, then the same pattern resolving into the rim shot on 4. Kick fits into the gaps. If you find yourself doubling — say, hat + kick on the same 16th — the linear logic has broken. Slow down and rebuild.
The hat opens on every & (the offbeat 8ths) — small o marks above the staff. To play it: start with the hat closed (foot pressed down on the pedal); on each &, briefly lift the foot so the cymbals separate — you get a sustained tsss — then snap the foot down again on the next downbeat to choke the open sound back to a tight tsk. The hat itself is now a rhythmic pattern: closed-open-closed-open across the bar. Backbeats are rim shots — accented and cutting.
16th-note ghost carpet under a rim-shot backbeat. To play a rim shot: place the stick across the snare so the tip hits the centre of the head and the shoulder of the stick simultaneously hits the rim. The result is a sharp, woody crack with much more cut than a normal stroke. Garibaldi uses this on every accented backbeat — the rim shot is half the Tower-of-Power sound. Aim for a 6:1 or 8:1 ratio between the rim-shot accent and the ghost notes.
Two-bar phrase. Bar 1 is the home pattern (kick on 1, 3, &-of-4). Bar 2 displaces the kick — landing on 1, &-of-2, 3, &-of-4 — so the second bar leans further into the next downbeat. The two bars feel like a question and an answer. Don't let the second bar's extra kick add stacking — every 16th still has only one voice. Tower of Power records often phrase this way: a home bar followed by a moving bar, repeating across the chorus.