Displacement is the simplest, most powerful trick in modern groove playing. You take an established pattern — a backbeat, a kick figure, a hi-hat shape — and shift it by an 8th or a 16th. Everything else stays the same. The result sounds wildly different even though only one parameter has changed.
The most useful kind of displacement is backbeat displacement: instead of the snare on beats 2 and 4, the snare lands on the &-of-1 and &-of-3 (an 8th-note displacement) or on the e-of-1 and e-of-3 (a 16th-note displacement). The bar still feels like it has a backbeat — the groove still has weight on the second and fourth quarter — but the snare is no longer where you expect it.
Chris "Daddy" Dave, Mark Guiliana, and the entire generation of drummers descended from drum-and-bass production live in this language. Used sparingly, it adds spice. Used heavily, it's an entire style.
Why It's Hard
Your body wants the snare on 2 and 4 because every other groove you've ever played has reinforced that habit. Displacement requires you to defeat the muscle memory at the same time as you maintain the rest of the groove. Practise slowly, and don't move on until the displaced bar feels as steady as the standard one.
Exercises
The reference bar. Snare on 2 and 4, kick on 1 and 3, 16th-note hi-hat. Loop this until your body knows where every accent lives — you need the standard bar in your bones before you start moving things around.
The snare has moved back by an 8th — it now lands on the &-of-1 and the &-of-3. Kicks stay on 1 and 3 (so kick and snare are now consecutive 8ths instead of separated by a beat). This sounds like a Chris Dave / D'Angelo groove — strange and lurching, but locked. Don't let the snare drift back to 2 and 4 under pressure.
Now displaced by just a 16th — snare on the e-of-1 and the e-of-3. The displacement is so small that the groove still feels backbeat-shaped, but every snare hit is now a hair early. To anyone listening it sounds like the snare is rushing — but it's actually locked to the e of every odd beat. This is the most disorienting of the three displacements; slow it down.
A bar that has both: standard backbeat (snare on 2 and 4, accented), plus a ghosted-but-clearly-audible displaced snare on the &-of-3. Think of it as the standard groove with a pickup snare landing into beat 4. In practice, alternate this bar with the standard bar (Exercise 1) every other measure. The brain learns displacement fastest by contrast — bar of standard, bar of displaced, repeat. Once you can do that without thinking, you have displacement under control.