Hi Rooibos,
SORRY for such a late reply. Can you send me a video of what you are talking about?
From what I can understand, you may well have to do some serious work with a metronome. Not just skanking and bubbling, but simply playing scales and arpeggios with it. Every musician must develop a rock solid internal metronome and that often only comes from practicing with a metronome.
It’s interesting that you say when you give up some control it can become more precise! Sometimes that is a problem; that you’re trying to be perfect in some way, only to realize that when you give up on this, things get better. (Some life lessons there!) Perhaps that’s all you need, just to give it up to the collective groove and vibe that’s going on with the band.
Sometimes with reggae, you can run into the problem of it feeling somewhere between a swing and straight 8th note feel and that can be confusing but here, you just gotta give into it and try to just feel the groove.
Lastly, if the drummer in your band has a shakey time feel…speeding up and slowing down a lot, that can throw everyone off.
Does that help?
Matt