Last year, after a drumline rehearsal, one of the students was sitting on the floor practicing a piece of music. She wanted to audition for a snare spot pretty badly and her chances were incredibly slim. My friend, the caption head of this particular drumline, told her she basically had one chance to show him that she was worth giving a spot.

She’d asked me if I could help her after rehearsal sometime, so there I sat, watching her, knowing that I would soon interject with my brand of help.

She played through the piece, blundering rhythms and phrases here, there, and almost everywhere, got to the end, looked at the music, and before she could start again, I pounced.

I said something to the effect of, “I’m willing to bet that you’re going to start the piece over, right?”

She affirmed my suspicions.

I then asked, “I’m also willing to bet that that’s how you practice at home, too, right? You play through something and then, instead of working on the things you had trouble with, you play through the piece again, right?”

Another affirmation.

Not everyone practices this way, but I know that not all students have good practice habits. I very often tell drumlines that I work with to ask me or one of the other instructors if they have any questions about how to practice, and very rarely do I get asked. And then, when I see them at the next rehearsal without any sign of significant improvement, I have to wonder how these people are practicing.

Expanding on my last post, 5-Minute Hands, I figured it’d be a good idea to break down how someone might want to go about practicing so that those precious five minutes don’t go to waste.

First off, if you’re playing something and you don’t like it, take a mental note. If you want to finish what you’re playing, fine. If you want to stop and work on the thing you just took mental note of, fine. As long as you come back to your mental note, you’ve accomplished the first step:

1. Go back and fix the thing you don’t like!

If you’ve got a 16-bar passage that you’re trying to learn and you’re having trouble with bars 7 and 8, playing the entire piece over and over and over won’t help you iron out the difficulties with efficiency. Sure, with enough repetition, you may smooth out some of the kinks and be able to get through those difficult bars, but it will take a lot longer and your hands and head probably won’t understand them or play them as well as if you took the time to break them down. Figure out what it is you need to fix; Is your coordination wrong or off? Are you having trouble with the rhythms? Having trouble playing it up to tempo? Can’t play the rudiments required to play the phrase? Sound quality bad? If you have a problem to focus on, then you can attack it. This leads up to the second step:

2. Break it down!

After going back to your trouble spot, don’t just ram through the pattern. Once identifying what it is within the pattern or phrase you’re having trouble with, start by playing the passage slowly until you’re comfortable playing it, concentrating on fixing the problem(s) you’ve pinpointed. Once you’re comfortable, speed up the tempo.

3. Push it!

When speeding up the tempo of the pattern you’re breaking down, make sure to go past your comfort zone. Make sure when you speed it up, you utilize the correct techniques! Faster doesn’t mean get lazy. During faster tempos you will still want to use the same basic techniques as at the slower tempos, but perhaps with some adaptations (another article). In any case, everyone has a comfortable tempo they can play things at and pushing the tempo past that comfort zone makes you practice applying the things you’ve just worked on at a tempo you can’t play. If you’re working on a piece that needs to be played at a specified tempo, you will also want to speed up past that tempo. In either case, this will help you to eventually be able to play the pattern at faster tempos, which will benefit you in the long run. It also lets your body know what it’s like to play the pattern at this faster tempo with your current skills and what you might have to do to get the pattern playable at this speed – loosen up, put more or less pressure on the fulcrum, figure out how to make the basic techniques more comfortable to use when playing faster, etc. Plus, when you…

4. Slow it back down!

…to your comfort zone (or to the tempo at which the pattern or phrase is supposed to be played, depending on what you’re working on), you should notice how much easier it feels to play compared to the faster tempo. This is a great psychological and physical psyche-out. By comparison, things that are difficult suddenly don’t seem as hard, right? This also gives you a chance to relax your hands again after “stressing out” during the faster tempo (though you should have been attempting to relax as you increased the speed!).

5. It’s all about context!

Once you’ve become comfortable with the pattern or phrase you’ve just worked on, then you have to put it back into context. Take the measure or phrase before it to make sure you can make the transition. After a few reps, take the phrase before, the pattern or phrase you’ve just practiced, and the phrase after, making sure you can transition out of it. Not being able to make the transition means that you can play the pattern or phrase but only by itself, which is only half the battle as it is part of a larger whole. Do a few reps of this before going on to the next problem.

You might find that you have multiple problems with a single pattern or phrase, and that’s fine. You can choose to tackle all of the problems at once, if you’re experienced enough and can focus on several things at the same time, or you can tackle one at a time. The choice is yours, of course, as long as you find a way to actually focus on the problems and figure out a way to solve them. The method outlined here is a simple offering, and applies to most everything you learn how to play. If you find that taking extra steps or less steps works better for you, then great. Whatever will make you efficient. And yes, this method can be done in five minutes if you just pick one problem area to focus on.

The great thing about this method is that it’s applicable to anything you need to practice, whether it’s a four-bar phrase, two counts, or just a simple two-note coordination problem. For example, if you’re having trouble with single measure and, while breaking it down, find that you’re having trouble with a specific part of that measure, you can start the process over to work out the specifics of the problem within the larger passage. Have a paradiddle into two left one-handed flam accents into a flammed tap-seven? Is it the flam accents that are giving you trouble? Break down the left one-handed flam accents first, making sure you can play them comfortable, before taking the whole measure.

The method can be applied to matter how small or how great the problem. It can apply to a simple rudiment, an exercise, or a piece of music. It can apply to technique or musicality. It’s a universal method. And sticking to the method will help increase the efficiency in your practicing. As you get better and better as a drummer, you may find that each step takes less and less time because your experience and skill are lending a hand to your learning and working out new things.

Coming full circle, I remember trying to impress upon her the importance of good practicing. Since she was learning the music to audition for my friend, I thought it important to ask her: “Do you think he would rather see that you can get through the whole piece, mistakes and all, or do you think he wants to see that you’ve worked on the piece by playing what you can play well?”