5 Ways to Effective Drum Practice

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Practice, possibly one of my favourite topics! Over the years, I’ve spent what must be thousands of hours sat at either a practice pador drum kit, working on grooves, rudiments, hand technique, finger technique, bassdrum, double bass drum, fills, you name it, I’ve sat there working on it all. Sometimes with great progress, often with some progress, and occasionally with none!

‍Spoiler alert! I don’t give you the 5 tips in this article. You need to download my FREE e-Book. The link is towards the bottom of the article. (Feel free to jump down there if you want to just get stuck in!)

When I was studying as a pupil of Drumtech percussion Schoolin London, (now Tech Schools) it wasn’t uncommon for me to spend up to six hours a day practicing the drums – six hours! That’s nuts. It’s nuts for more than one reason.

Firstly, you should not, and do not need to practice for that long if you know what you’re doing. With a bit of guidance, you can streamline your practice to be super productive, fun, exciting and never boring, cutting out all the wasted hours practicing things the wrong way, and that are completely useless in the real world of a working, employable drummer.

Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not saying that there’s anything wrong with sitting at a drumkit for six hours a day if you wish, of course your playing can only sky rocket with this level of dedication and practice, but why spend six hours if you can do it in three, or more realistically, 1-2?

Patience

I recall a particular time many years ago when I was working on developing my finger technique to develop speed. I was working through exercises from a particular book that recommended practicing by working each finger individually. Sounds sensible. Or so I thought. I spent hours working on these exercises from slow to fast, day after day after day, with little or no improvement, but because the book said this was the way to get fast hands, I just carried on for what must have been weeks.

I remember thinking – What’s going on here? Why am I not getting any faster, literally no improvement. I dedicated weeks of practice to this, waiting for the breakthrough that never came. Was I doing it wrong, perhaps it was just me? I must be doing something wrong!

One day, at the end of my tether, I looked down at my hands, and thought - What’s up here? My little finger kind of didn’t want to do what the others were doing, so I thought – hang on, let me try something different.

I began playing through the exercises with the little finger off the stick, just using the two middle fingers, and boom, everything just fell into place. It felt natural and easy, I didn’t get tense, and I could tell that with practice this was going to get faster much quicker than the previous method. Once I was comfortable like this, I added the little finger back in,and bit by bit the technique locked in.

I never looked back, and from this point on, I started tolook at my playing, specifically my practice time, and how I was dividing it up. Hours were wasted on exercises that were giving me little or no progress, and this had to stop. There had to be a better way, and there was!

I started looking closely at my practice time. What was I working on? What were my goals? What was I looking to achieve? What area of my drumming did I need to improve the most? Which skill did I want to acquire? And so on and so forth. It quickly became apparent that my practice time was chaotic, undisciplined, and unstructured, with no clear goal, other than the fact that I wanted to be a better drummer.

Nothing wrong with my goal, I mean, surely that’s why we practice in the first place? But I was going all round the houses to progress, instead of following a clear path, dedicated to subjects and areas of my playing that I wanted to get much better at the most.

I began focusing on each area, and dividing up my time, with each section dedicated to a different topic or area of my playing that I really wanted to improve in, and then structuring each practice session around that,making sure that I kept things varied interesting and challenging.

Over time, I distilled the practice ideas down, threw out the ones that weren’t bringing progress, and gradually formed a practice plan that I stick to to this day, that brings me steady, incremental progress, at apace that I’m more than happy with.

Persistance

The most common reason that many drummers experience stagnation in their growth in playing and practicing, is a lack of structure in practice time. We’re not talking about a a military operation, or getting up at 5AM, your practice just needs to have purpose. Clear, structured purpose, with a goal at the end.

As you can imagine this blog article would be pretty long if I go into the full details here, so I’ve written down everything for you in an eBook called “5 Ways to Effective Drum Practice” that has that you can download completely FREE.

In the book I’ll break down what I consider to be the five most important things that you can apply to your drum practice to turbo charge your practice and progress on the drums like never before.

The techniques that I break down are simple, and easy to follow, and cost nothing to implement, just a bit of hard work with a pinch of discipline. For anyone looking to skyrocket their progress on the drums, this e-Book will be priceless for your progress, and continued development on the drums.

So, say good riddance to old habits, and hello to a productive, progressive, fun and structured practice routine, with my brand-newe-Book “5 ways to Effective DrumPractice”.

If you decide to give it a read and imply my techniques for effective drum practice, I’d love to know how it helped your practice time, and what improvements you’ve seen.

Enjoy!

Jules

You can download your FREE copy of the eBook here.