how do you put quality into practice time?

[NUTHA JASON]

Practice makes perfect. But my dad always said perfect practice makes perfect. When you sit down, are you sure you are ready to learn?

Think of yourself - when practicing - as a river. What can hinder the quality of your flow?

Pollution

Carrying the cares and worries of the outside world and your life into the practice time is a mistake. Up-and-coming exams, girlfriend (or lack of) issues, divorce, debt…the list is endless. We all have them but they need to be put on hold. Imagine trying to do your taxes while playing golf or getting fit while painting a portrait. Possible but not altogether productive. Before practicing, clear your mind. Some advocate meditation. I recommend it too. Even just a minute to calm down and focus will pay off. Really clear out anything non drum related and just breathe. Check also that during a drill you don't let your mind wander into your list of things to do tomorrow or what you are going to say to your mom about that nasty test result.

Weeds

Some things might belong in a river but still hinder it. Not all drumming belongs in your drum practice. Like pollution, you need to take care not to get side-tracked. Focus on a skill or goal and try not to wander too far from it particularly if your practice time is limited. If in the execution of a practice drill you find an interesting beat built out of it then, yes, develop it, even write it or record it if you can but come back to the original exercise and consciously decide to go back to the new thing in a later practice. Try to strike a constant balance between fun and creativity and focussed skill building.

Stones and debris

Things can get in the way while you are practicing. If you are not conscious of them and their effects then you may find you want to end the practice session prematurely. Things like temperature are important. In winter wear lots of thin layers. Strip them off as your body heats up from the practicing. Adjust the thermostat. keep warm but cool as much as you must keep tight but loose in your groove. And speaking of tight, make sure you are wearing something comfortable.
Your seat is another one. Do you stop practicing because you are sore in the bottom? If so, your very next drum purchase MUST be a top of the line drum throne NOT another cymbal. Throw a terry towel over the throne to stop sweat-itches as well.
Does your back hurt? Get a teacher ASAP so that you can correct your posture and not let a debilitating habit rule your stamina. It is possible to have such good discipline that you are able to ignore the uncomfortable but then some of your mental effort is on the ignoring part ... see pollution.
Do you have enough water? Get this ready before the session. Toilet? Time it so that it is a useful micro break that sees you straight behind the kit fresh in less than 2 minutes.
Hungry or too full. Eat reasonably sometime before a practice. Don’t let hunger creep up on you after 20 minutes to begin distracting you.
Drugs and drink … before and during a practice? Or ever? Are you kidding? You may as well throw cement into your river.

Dam

Something breaks on you kit or you are unable to use it or part of it. Design a practice around the problem. No bass drum pedal? Work on hand patterns. Right arm broken and in a sling? A perfect time to focus on your left hand. On holiday and no drums? Time to brush up on reading and listening skills perhaps or pad work.

Drought

Too little material. Boredom. Imagine only practicing one thing every day for weeks. You may get really good at it but your over-all skill accumulation will be stunted plus you will get bored and are more likely to make excuses to finish early or just not practice. Imagine learning to play tennis but for the first year only working on the backhand. Many drumming skills feed into eachother too. So working on a balanced selection of material will optimise each ... the sum of the parts will be greater than the whole ...so to speak.

Flood

Too much to get through. Too many goals. Lots of stuff covered thinly. A master of nothing but a collection of half worked stuff. A recap practice is good every now and then but over-views must only be performed at the end of a set of focussed learning – a celebration and assessment of material covered. If you have a lot to learn, ascertain priority and share the skills out in a two day schedule so you have an A-day and a B-day. Be clever with this so that muscles that you might strain on day A are given time to heal and grow on day B by working a different set of skills on day B.



In summary, learn to listen to your body and mind. Take care of needs so they do not distract. Be pre-emptive and strategic. Be clear, focussed and relaxed. The drums aren’t your enemy…you are. Intelligently overcome what hinders you from maximum results.

j

[rendezvous_drummer]

Very well put Nutha. That's a great philosophy on how to focus on your practicing. Did you come up with that yourself?

[NUTHA JASON]

yep ... er ... while practicing. so i was kind of polluting my own river but awareness of a problem is the first step to solving it. its really cold today and i got fustrated because i was too cold and then too hot while i was practicing and so i went upstairs and found a different top and it occoured to me that i had cut my practice for a stupid reason. then while working on a GLS exercise i started thinking.

j

[rendezvous_drummer]

Indeed. I am always finding distractions and pollution whenever I go practice whether it be people coming in my room and interrupting me, or phone rings or even a comfort issue as you said. I haven't had a productive practice session in months!! It's difficult for me to be able to just forget about other things that are happening in my life while practicing because I am always constantly reminded from people around me, especially my mum haha. As you can see, my home isn't the best place for a drummer.

[Mapex589]

Very good read and good advice. I find the "weeds" to be my biggest problem when practicing. Maybe I am a bit ADD because I find I distract myself more than anything else. I really have to concentrate on sticking to my lesson plan and not allow myself to start soloing when I should be practicing. Great read Nutha....thanks.

[NUTHA JASON]

cool.

the funny thing is that when it comes to a live performance we drummers (mostly) are clean mountain rivers. um... we really concentrate on what we are doing and do what we set out to do. we also tend to make sure our kit is wellset up and audible through the monitors, we make sure we are fed and watered etc etc. the trick is to capture that spirit of the gig in the practice so that the practice gains can feed back into the gigs.

j

[GRUNTERSDAD]

You may want to peruse these also:

http://www.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/practice.html

http://www.dsokids.com/2001/dso.asp?PageID=208

[dea]

If your like me and have acquired AEIOU-DD from raising kids, there isn't a whole lot one can do aside from a intervenous injection of all the major brands of X-DD medicine and headphones that will selectively cancel out sounds like,

"I'm hungry"
"Alex is picking on me"
"The dog vomitted on the carpet"
"Where's Mom?"

Teehee...

[NUTHA JASON]

lol. try hauling them all away from their favourite tv shows and games etc and bring them into the room and tell them about paradiddles, 2nd line drumming, what makes buddy rich different from tony williams and why both are genius. show them your drums and ask them to help you clean them and then listen to you play every 8th note rock beat you know, ask them to clap along...

...then say, 'see how that feels? i love you guys but when daddy is drumming, do not disturb. if you bring your world into my drums i will bring my drums into your world m'kay?'

j

[ledzepjb]

This might sound a little stupid to say but while paying attention to ''pollution'' and ''weeds'', you also gotta enjoy playing and mainly focus on having fun!

[PostTense]

Good post. I use to always get distracted by things like TV, and Computer games to.

[gusty]

great post thanks for that

[Jesvin]

really excellent post. i always wanted to know more and more abt productive practice. and i found this
since i am a student i am not able to keep separate practice time. so i practice while watchin tv. but when i practice i am atleast half focussed.
i just cant stick to one rudiment for much long. i dont know y any help
jes

[franklinj]

As I was reading this, I noticed so many things I know that i do wrong haha. I know and have known that they are the wrong things to do during practice, but I never gave it any thought. ADD and other learning disabilities run in my family, and I think I inherited every single one of them.

[SickRick]

I was sitting in a train for a couple of hours today and the track was besides a river. In the beginning the river was full of weeds, obstacles, stones and it was taking a lot of sharp and unpredictable turns. Later on that same river was straightened and without any obstacles. A clean and straight running river on which you can travel nice and safe.

That second part of that river was boring as hell.

Just a thought.

[wy yung]

I don't have as much time to put in these days. Most of the time I am just playing. But if I may I'd like to say that this book has some good ideas.

http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-Musician/dp/156224003X

[lstardrums]

I was sitting in a train for a couple of hours today and the track was besides a river. In the beginning the river was full of weeds, obstacles, stones and it was taking a lot of sharp and unpredictable turns. Later on that same river was straightened and without any obstacles. A clean and straight running river on which you can travel nice and safe.

That second part of that river was boring as hell.

Just a thought.

thats a fantastic analogy, especially since the second part of the river is, as rick said, always boring. fortunately for me im one of those people who can stare into that pristine unaffected water and be lost in it for hours. when i first started playing, i would practice so much that my muscles hurt too much to practice the next day.

[Wegadrummer]

Another great thread by Nutha.. And another thing I can hang on my wall for reminder, thanks you nutha.. Where do you take this things?

[Tutin]

I was sitting in a train for a couple of hours today and the track was besides a river. In the beginning the river was full of weeds, obstacles, stones and it was taking a lot of sharp and unpredictable turns. Later on that same river was straightened and without any obstacles. A clean and straight running river on which you can travel nice and safe.

That second part of that river was boring as hell.

Just a thought.

HAHAHA! I laughed so much.

Good thread NJ, though it's something I've done for years heheh.

[SickRick]

HAHAHA! I laughed so much.

It wasn't meant as a joke. But glad it made you happy.

[franklinj]

It wasn't meant as a joke. But glad it made you happy.

I never thought of it the way that you stated, but looking back at it, I completely agree. Everytime I hear of people who practice religiously for 8 hours a day, I always think of how boring it must get after a while. Not only would your practice get boring, but other aspects of your life would get boring as hell, too.

[NUTHA JASON]

and that is precisely the purpose of this thread... to talk about making practice more productive rather than long. quality to ensure there needs to be less quantity for the same gains.

in terms of rivers we want to keep our practice in the young and middle ages of rivers and not the meandering silt-laden old age stages.

to keep on topic we should be talking about how to improve our practice time not whether long practice time has negative effects...that belongs in a whole other thread.

j

[Tutin]

The trouble is that so many people have so many different recommendations of how and what to practice. The one I've found most effective is spaced repetition learning, because you don't even have to be playing the kit! Although it's only really good for independence and stuff.

[NUTHA JASON]

tell us more about 'spaced repetition learning' tutin please

j

[Jay.B.]

sound advice, very hard to put in to practice on the kit as it is about 15 miles away, maybe I should spend more time on the pad, or bring a snare home every week after rehearsal, need to do something to increase my skills as the rest of the band want to play zeps "rock n roll", and that aint easy in the slightest, especially the ending :-/

[zambizzi]

Lots of Weeds and Flooding here. I find that I'll intend to spend 30 min. of my practice doing rudiments and end up doing them for 1.5 hrs., for example.

I'm getting better at managing this but honestly, I still struggle to focus on 1, or 2, or 3 things in particular. However, I'll basically get the same lessons twice in a row if I don't learn it for the week and perform it well when I go see my drum teacher...so that helps motivate to focus on the week's primary lesson.

Insightful, thanks!

[Tutin]

tell us more about 'spaced repetition learning' tutin please

Well, I guess it would only be fair to say.

What spaced repetition learning will do, is take non-practice time, and turn it into effective practice time.

Now you see, back in the day there was this Japanese...erm..guy. What he did was take children (not literally steal one from the parents, but whatever's funnier) and then get them to listen to a piece of classical music repeatedly for about a month. Then he moved onto another, etc. until the child was about age two. At this point the man would start giving the kid short lessons on how to play the violin. They would start at ten minute lessons and as the child got older they would become longer.

By the time the child became old enough to know that the violin was supposed to be hard to play, he had already mastered it and was able to play beautiful pieces like Vivaldi etc.

Now, how it works with drumming:

Basically, (I'm going to assume you have a multi-track recorder) what you want to do is take one track and play a pattern in any timing you desire (For my first one I chose a 5/4 hi-hat pattern). You'll want to do this for about two minutes.

Following this, record on the second track another pattern with your foot (now if you want to just do a pattern incorporating both feet skip this and go to the third pattern). For this I did a generic samba pattern with the bass drum.

Then lastly record your hands soloing over the top (I put in a 3/4 count with my right hand while the left soloed).

Once you have completed your recording, burn it to cd, mp3, whatever and listen to it as much as humanly possible for the next 3 weeks.

Basically, what you are doing is making your subconscious think that you are physically capable of playing these intricate, difficult patterns. In the end, you will only need about four days of practising to get it down, and away you go.

There, just revealed my secret weapon to you... hope it is appreciated.

Tutin

[NUTHA JASON]

lol. i do a similar thing on my roland.

also i record something hard to play at a very slow tempo and then play it back at slightly faster speeds while recoding theseonto my computer and then i listen to them ... if they sound good then i am assured that practicing the idea worthwhile and also i have a subconscious idea of how it should sound when played at a good speed.

j

[Tutin]

Yeah I do the same thing. Roland E-drums all the way! (Except for normal acoustics)

But yeah, this technique is really effective and I would definitely advise you to use it.

Also the Mike Mangini learning approach does absolute magic.

[JCM]

Wow. Some good stuff there. But I do not have a multi-track recorder so there isn't a way I could implement this?

[Tutin]

I suppose so, you can record each individual track onto a tape through a boombox and then if you have an audio cable, plug it into your p.c.'s mic port.

Then go to this page (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and download audacity for free. You should then be able to play the tracks into the computer and sync them up. Audacity is pretty user-friendly so unless you have the mental capacity of a spanner, you'll be fine.

There we go.

[Tutin]

And also, you can probably get one real cheap off ebay. There's a non-digital (because we don't need digital) one going for $11:50 right now under "two track recorder".