What to practice for the most gains?

Jonathan Curtis

Silver Member
I'm in the very fortunate position at the moment to be able to practice all day every day. It won't last forever, but if I wanted to put in 12-hour day, every day practices I could.

The problem is, structuring it so that it's useful. I won't have this luxury forever, so I'm looking for advice on what to practice to get the most out of this time.

Currently, I've focused a lot on jazz, but I don't want to neglect other areas either. I've found that Kim Plainfield's Advanced Concepts offers exercises which are at once technically difficult and musically diverse.

If you wanted to be the absolute best you could be, and had the luxury of infinite practice time, what would you "shed" to get the absolute most out of it?

For instance, would you just pick on killer lick and shed it to perfection, or work on co-ordination exercises so that all such licks would be easier? These, and similar questions mean that I'm currently not getting the most out of this time.

Thoughts?

Thanks
 
Practice all your rudiments on a pillow. My tutor put me onto this and it really is providing quick gains.
 
Stick Control (the book)

Get to the point where you can play anything in that and you will be somewhere.
 
If I had to pick only one thing, that's easy. The single stroke roll and the double stroke roll.
 
I would (and do) practice a bit of everything. But to find out what suits _your_ needs most you first have to set _your_ goals. That would be an excellent starting point. Then break this goal up into short, medium and long term in-between results on your way to the final goal. As mentioned, keep in mind that anything you practice/learn which will never be utilised in 'real' music is rather a waste of time. (I've been there, in the electric guitar department.)

Being a beginner, there's not that much I can recommend you. But here's a few suggestions:
I practice on various pads incl. Moongel (less rebound, more workout) - a pillow will do also. It's just more fun to vary practice. I have several pairs of sticks (different length, thickness, weight, feel) and switch between them every 5-10-20 minutes. It makes my hands constantly readjust and I feel this improves my perception of finding the fulcrum point more easily and letting the hands find the best way to execute motions by themselves. Also, practice anything left-hand/foot/side lead also (depending on the patterns, developing left side lead can be very work intense). I'm constantly switching between trad and modern grip, I think it would be very boring to just play matched. Another thought: cross-handed vs. open handed. What about reworking your drum setup with a center hihat? I would go for 'technical roundness'. [Beginner mode off]
 
For instance, would you just pick on killer lick and shed it to perfection, or work on co-ordination exercises so that all such licks would be easier?

Good question! With your time - definitely both!!

I'd work on fundamental concepts on one hand (time, groove, speed, technique,
coordination, you name it), and

on specific patterns and styles on the other hand (licks in whatever style or in
no style, swing, afro-cuban, samba, rock, pop, funk, fusion, etc).
 
I guess I would be looking for ways of developing multiple skills at once. Using interpretive practice methods, like those applied to Reed, would be good for that. Doing those along with recorded music in a variety of styles will help you learn tunes, and develop your reading and your flexibility and musicality with your solo ideas/comping/timekeeping. I would assign a phrase length and a real-world style, dynamic level, and function to everything you practice.

It would probably be smart to avoid going too far into real esoteric stuff, unless you think someone's really going to ask it of you, or if you feel it's going to be critical to your identity as a player.

For instance, would you just pick on killer lick and shed it to perfection, or work on co-ordination exercises so that all such licks would be easier?

I would do neither (ha, I wrote that before I saw Mathias' answer- I'm not just being a contradictory a-hole!)- licks can never be anything but what they are, and are an artistically questionable way of doing music. And I think just working on general coordination, Dahlgren & Fine-style, with the idea that the limb sequences are going to lead directly to a bunch of happening musical ideas is also not right. I would instead be looking for ways to make your ideas ("licks", favorite patterns, whatever) as universal as possible; develop a Syncopation method based on them, and run them through a variety of rhythms, drum set orchestrations, and styles.
 
I would do neither (ha, I wrote that before I saw Mathias' answer- I'm not just being a contradictory a-hole!)- licks can never be anything but what they are, and are an artistically questionable way of doing music.

I remember reading a series of articles on a (now-defunct) website that went into great depth over exactly this. To give the brief synopsis, licks are a redundant musical implementation that are antithetical to spontaneity and expression. This is because of their inherently de-contextualised composition (i.e. outside of a genuine musical environment) and because they do not require anything other than a mechanised set of pre-learned routines. By all means, learn vocabularly e.g. rudiments because they can inform improvisation and spontaneous composition and mean that you are playing music but licks actually serve the opposite function and are just a lazy way out of improvising or learning to compose appropriately and instead approximate musical function rather than providing it.
 
After a couple of hours of practicing alone get out of the shed and GO JAM with OTHER PEOPLE!
I do believe technique and skill is important but it's just as important to learn to play with other people - all kinds of instruments and all kinds of people. Seek out good players, even better players.
 
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I remember reading a series of articles on a (now-defunct) website that went into great depth over exactly this. To give the brief synopsis, licks are a redundant musical implementation that are antithetical to spontaneity and expression. This is because of their inherently de-contextualised composition (i.e. outside of a genuine musical environment) and because they do not require anything other than a mechanised set of pre-learned routines. By all means, learn vocabularly e.g. rudiments because they can inform improvisation and spontaneous composition and mean that you are playing music but licks actually serve the opposite function and are just a lazy way out of improvising or learning to compose appropriately and instead approximate musical function rather than providing it.

While I understand the intellectual leanings of this theory I disagree with it fundamentally. Just because one learns the alphabet does not learn one how to read. Learning licks is like learning a dance or a form in karate.
Learning licks is learning history and facilitates the advancement of ones drumming. "Standing on the shoulders of giants".
 
While I understand the intellectual leanings of this theory I disagree with it fundamentally. Just because one learns the alphabet does not learn one how to read. Learning licks is like learning a dance or a form in karate.
Learning licks is learning history and facilitates the advancement of ones drumming. "Standing on the shoulders of giants".

+1, although it's easy to get caught up in learning the lick itself, and forget to go beyond that. You might overlook how the lick was created, or not venture to rearrange its parts, impose new spacing or values, and so on. The "lick" is attractive, and deconstructing it can take you in a direction you might not have gone otherwise. I shudder to think of where I'd be as a player if I hadn't spent years aping Bonham, Peart, Grohl, Colaiuta, Weckl, Steve Smith, and so on. I didn't just try to play "like" them, I tried (and continue to try) to play their best stuff! And it's rather obvious that "name" drummers are constantly doing this same thing (Carter Beauford, Dave Grohl, and Vinnie have all, at some point, ripped off the Billy Cobham 4-stroke lick!).

MJ, instead of worrying about "licks", why not worry about "rhythms"? As a musician, your ability to create tension by playing phrases of odd length against an even pulse (or vice-versa) can be very useful when it comes to interacting with soloists who are also creating tension and phrasing over the bar line. Accenting every 3rd, 5th, or 7th note with the right hand, over a 16th note groove in 4/4 or an Afro-Cuban 6/8 is a very useful exercise. Write it all out on paper, and become able to play these phrases over one, two, three, or four measures. Learn (and play) how many measures (or beats) it takes for these patterns to resolve. And then get musical! Practice playing these rhythms along to songs or play-along tracks, and don't lose that groove!

For my money, Gary Chaffee's Patterns series are the best drum books around (Rhythm and Meter Patterns is especially hairy!). They should definitely be in your practice "diet" if they're not already. These 4 texts can provide solutions to any drumming problem you might run into. For rudimental drumming, I'm a fan of Wilcoxon's All American Drummer, and for musical context, I like Steve Houghton's Studio and Big Band Drumming and The Drumset Soloist.
 
To give the brief synopsis, licks are a redundant musical implementation that are antithetical to spontaneity and expression. This is because of their inherently de-contextualised composition (i.e. outside of a genuine musical environment) and because they do not require anything other than a mechanised set of pre-learned routines.

Uhhhh...you are talking to drummers. You might want to dumb it down a tad. :)

I am also on kind of an accelerated learning program as I also have a few hours available every single day. I never really played rudiments or bounced my sticks before and I only played a single bass.

Now, everything I practice, I use both feet. I have some catching up to do. I find something that is easy for me (double stroke rolls) and combine it with something difficult (paradiddles). This keeps me from getting frustrated and keeps me encouraged.

I'd rather learn a few things really well than a lot of things halfway so I tend to keep hammering away at a particular item until it's second nature.
 
While I understand the intellectual leanings of this theory I disagree with it fundamentally. Just because one learns the alphabet does not learn one how to read. Learning licks is like learning a dance or a form in karate.
Learning licks is learning history and facilitates the advancement of ones drumming. "Standing on the shoulders of giants".

Can you spot the lick-based writing? There's standing on the shoulders of giants, and then there's just repeating them verbatim. It's a negative example of its own meaning...

I'm not as anti-lick as I used to be; in a lot of ways knowledge of clichés = knowledge of music, but they don't make a fully-realized creative player. That takes a different kind of work, as I described in my comment.
 
Just because one learns the alphabet does not learn one how to read.

I love this sentence - great work OYD! :)

I like licks. The trick from my lowbrow vantage point is to find a way to shoehorn your licks into the music :) ... in a way the band enjoys, of course. In my experience, it usually means changing the lick somewhat. The only crime IMO is playing a lick without listening as you do it. That stuff makes boys go blind.

Playing as many gigs as possible with good players always helps, and it would definitely get you thinking about what you need to practice.
 
I know that hours can dissapear working through Rod Morgenstein's Drum Set Warmups book. It's only a recent thing for me so it will be interesting to see how it helps over the coming months. It certainly feels beneficial, even theraputic! :)
 
+1, although it's easy to get caught up in learning the lick itself, and forget to go beyond that.

That is the precise issue here. Licks are undertaken as a purely physical thing, it's all muscle-memory. Reciting a physical pattern that you've pre-learned (devoid of context) doesn't actually invoke any musical response unless it's used in a very specific circumstance, i.e. the same piece of music that it was originally composed for.

Let's take someone like Mike Portnoy with his RLFF RLFF fills. It worked fine in Dream Theater because that's what he was expected to do but the minute he leaves that very specific context or genre it becomes effortlessly redundant, especially given the kind of musical context he was using it for ins songs. If he went into another band and played that the whole time like he did in Dream Theater they'd have to be a remarkably similar band or one that was willing to sound purposely awkward and that is not moving forward as an artist.

It's the equivalent of learning a set of comping patterns and then just using those the whole time rather than actually listening and responding. Sure, it might sound ok and it might even occasionally give the impression that you really are comping but ultimately all it's doing is teaching you to be lazy and to not respond to the music in the same way.

That's where we come back to vocabulary. It's not like learning the alphabet at all but when we talk about learning rudiments for the sake of vocabulary, we're actually talking about learning syllables of words and learning how they can fit together. Imagine if I only spoke in sentences from flashcards that I tried to use whenever the context was roughly appropriate. Could I ever say anything of real value or contribute to the discussion? Absolutely not. I would fail the Turing Test. That's what 'licks' encourage - flashcard-style playing and there is no way to have a proper discussion (musical or otherwise) with somebody that's just reading from flashcards. You might be able to 'fake' a discussion for a while and fool a few people but sooner or later they'll notice.

EDIT: Learning a kata in Karate is not necessarily the equivalent of learning 'licks'. A kata is simply a measured way of combining disparate elements into a unified (and assessable) set of motions.

I used to study Ki-Aikido and a large part of that was weapon katas. The first Jo kata for instance had (If I remember correctly) eighteen separate strikes with a lot more footwork in-between. What you first do is study the disparate elements (e.g. the footwork) and then combine. This is just like musical function in that you learn the disparate elements (e.g. rudiments) and then combine. The difference is that you are not necessarily combining them in a specific order, although if it ever came down to it you would hope to be able to defend yourself using appropriate combinations of these disparate elements.

Learning a 'lick' is like learning a sequence of techniques in a specific order and then re-counting them without flexibility and - more importantly - without the capacity for flexibility. Learning a lick is a top-down approach that limits the player into only combining that sequence and not being able to use the disparate elements flexibly.
 
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Blackadder, I disagree. At the very highest levels that's probably the case but even then ... take someone like Steve Gadd. He has a stock set of licks that he adapts to a variety of musical situations. Brilliantly.

It really depends on the player's groove and the particular song IMO

Where licks are bad is when a song is making sense and then suddenly there's this weird abstract bit before returning to the story ... imagine if, during a regular conversation, the other person suddenly shouted "It's finger lickin' good!" every time you said the word "chicken" - that would be a badly applied lick :)
 
What a great discussion! I'm really enjoying reading all your replies everyone.

I'm on the fence at the moment. I've learned a lot of licks from the greats because we learn by mimicry. We learn to talk using flashcards, and then, with those flashcards mastered, have the ability to create our own sentences. I think that's the point of that analogy that was being missed. The problem arises when we don't advance beyond the flashcards, but we do.

Keep it coming!
 
Learning a 'lick' is like learning a sequence of techniques in a specific order and then re-counting them without flexibility and - more importantly - without the capacity for flexibility. Learning a lick is a top-down approach that limits the player into only combining that sequence and not being able to use the disparate elements flexibly.

Why? I think you're interpreting a lot more into it than it actually says. You can't know what
everybody means exactly by "learning a lick".
I agree with the first part of the first sentence, but the rest is your interpretation.

If I learn a lick I've heard say Philly Joe Jones do in a solo and incorporate it into my
playing, how is that automatically recounting without flexibility, and why should it make
me unable to use the disparate elements flexibly??

Edit: The discussion in this thread may need a clear definition of what people mean when
they talk about licks and learning licks. Judging from different posts there lacks consensus.
 
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