Improving Your Drum Practice Sessions
You practice to maintain and hopefully improve your drum playing skills. Unfortunately many drummers don't know how to get the greatest amount of benefit from their practice time. Frankly, no matter how much time you spend practicing you won't make a lot of progress if you don't use good practice habits. On the other hand, you can accomplish a great deal in a fairly short amount of time if you do use good practice methods.
Most drummers just sit down and run through their repertoire. That's great for keeping up the things that you know and even for polishing them up a bit but you are not going to make a lot of progress as a drummer. For a practice session to be truly productive you need to focus on perfecting your technique, advancing your skills and increasing your musicality.
You should concentrate on playing every technique as perfectly as you can play it every single time you play it. This means proper stick and hand positions, stick heights, wrist and body positions and feel. Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent and only perfect practice makes perfect, permanently. Practicing with bad technique will only make it harder to well.
You should work to advance your skills every single practice session. Learn to play something new or learn to play something you already know in a different way. Go back through your old books from time to time and relearn old exercises or try them with a new twist to keep things interesting.
No matter what you are doing remember to play musically. To get the most from your abilities you should be more of a musician than a drummer. A drummer hits drums, while a musician makes music. Stay focused on the musicality, whether you are playing a rudiment or a solo.
No matter how good you get or advanced your skills are, you will always need to practice to keep them up and keep advancing musically. You can work up to greater lengths of time and keep some variety in your program to keep things interesting. If you will focus on perfecting your technique, advancing your skills and increasing your musicality, you will improve by leaps and bounds rather than at a snail's pace which will make practicing more rewarding and enjoyable.
Most drummers just sit down and run through their repertoire. That's great for keeping up the things that you know and even for polishing them up a bit but you are not going to make a lot of progress as a drummer. For a practice session to be truly productive you need to focus on perfecting your technique, advancing your skills and increasing your musicality.
You should concentrate on playing every technique as perfectly as you can play it every single time you play it. This means proper stick and hand positions, stick heights, wrist and body positions and feel. Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent and only perfect practice makes perfect, permanently. Practicing with bad technique will only make it harder to well.
You should work to advance your skills every single practice session. Learn to play something new or learn to play something you already know in a different way. Go back through your old books from time to time and relearn old exercises or try them with a new twist to keep things interesting.
No matter what you are doing remember to play musically. To get the most from your abilities you should be more of a musician than a drummer. A drummer hits drums, while a musician makes music. Stay focused on the musicality, whether you are playing a rudiment or a solo.
No matter how good you get or advanced your skills are, you will always need to practice to keep them up and keep advancing musically. You can work up to greater lengths of time and keep some variety in your program to keep things interesting. If you will focus on perfecting your technique, advancing your skills and increasing your musicality, you will improve by leaps and bounds rather than at a snail's pace which will make practicing more rewarding and enjoyable.