More Effective Practice

Last year I started working as a beginning drum instructor with a local drum corps.  It has been a great experience!  It made me start asking some questions to myself.

Why do some musicians practice hour after hour, only to achieve limited results, while others practice a minimum amount of time and advance rapidly?  We’ve all heard the expression, “Practice makes perfect.” But does it really?  What is the most efficient and effective way to learn your instrument and make consistent progress?

The answer lies in practice methods.  The quality of your practice is much more important than the quantity.  Some practice routines are conducive to improvement, while others can actually restrict it.  Improper practice often leads to poor results. Practicing just for the sake of practicing will not insure progress, and neither can poorly organized, occasional practice.

Here are some practice methods I have found to make your practice time much more productive, and help you progress consistently.

1. Establish a regular practice place.  Where it is located is not really important. (I have practiced in bedrooms, apartments, rehearsal halls, basements, and even a walk-in closet.) Find and area with good lighting and ventilation.  Check with everyone within earshot of your practice area. Make sure it is okay with them for you to practice, and agree on what hours of the day it will be happening.  Explain that you will be practicing drums nearby, and promise not to practice before or after agreed times.  Always keep your promise!  Ask them to call if the practicing becomes too loud.  You may be surprised how supportive friends and neighbors will be.

2. Set a regular schedule. Every teacher recommends a different practice schedule. Some require seven days a week, while others may only require two or three. I personally recommend practicing a minimum of five days a week, twice daily.  Short well-planned morning exercises combined with longer PM sessions can maximize results.  If you need to take a day off, that’s okay, but don’t skip the day just after your lesson.  Right after your lesson is when your memory retention and enthusiasm are at their peak – your best practice time!   You will find that the greatest progress will occur when you plan out an individual practice schedule and stick with it, week after week. It will become a routine-part of your life.

3. Plan practice sessions in advance. Planning is one of the most crucial elements of effective practice. An enormous amount of practice time is often wasted due to poor planning and organization. A person who boasts of practicing an hour a day may in fact be wasting up to 30 minutes sorting through materials and deciding what to work on, or playing over material that is already mastered. Know what you want to accomplish before each practice session. Simply going in to the drums thinking that you will become better just because you are practicing anything won’t do.

4. Set goals. Plan long-range as well as short-range goals. Long-range goals are self-set goals for six months or a year.  Short-range goals are for this week or today, like “I am going to master exercises 1 to 10 on page 30.” Map out beforehand realistic/obtainable long-range and short-range practice goals, and set out to achieve them.  One of the best tools for setting goals, and keeping a records of what you have learned is a weekly practice worksheet.  Write down just a few very specific techniques or new phrases at the top of a page.  Then write down your planned schedule for the week.  Every day mark the time that you spent, and note what you worked on.  Then write a quick one-line summary at the end of the week.  After a couple months, this becomes a journal of what you studied, and can help plan what new tunes and techniques to add to your goals.

5. Set up a specific practice order. If a specific practice order is followed from day-to-day, practice time will become more beneficial. The key is to make the best use of available time in order to produce the maximum results. Having a specific practice order that is regularly followed gives an organizational structure to practice and leaves less to chance. This is not to say that you may not want to vary your order from time to time, in order to give extra attention to a certain area. But planning a regular daily practice routine will be a step in the direction of more effective practice.

To learn a musical instrument you must learn to master many physical skills. Most musical skills are actually a compound skill-a physical skill built upon the foundation of other previously memorized skills.  Every step of the way you need to master techniques so that they operate automatically. You can’t turn a skill into a compound skill until the foundation skill is entirely memorized. Once learned, a skill operates automatically. No attention is required to drive it. This precisely what allows us to begin combining one skill with other memorized skills to make compound skills.  With attention free we can track and refine each new skill. We build one technique upon the next, so we must perfect each foundation skill before adding on, or the whole system becomes unstable. This requires careful observation and much repetition and review.

In my next post, I will outline a more specific practice sequence that I have found both as a player, and as a teacher that has produced the best results.

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