Practice LESS. (Wait....what?)

Like all music majors, I performed solo recitals at the end of my junior and senior years in college. The experience of prepping for a recital is excruciating, and it feels like every waking minute is devoted to learning, cleaning and rehearsing every aspect of the performance.

Just a few weeks prior to my senior recital, I was seriously struggling with a difficult snare drum solo, and the stress was really getting to me. I was practicing no less than an hour and a half per day on just this one piece (in addition to hours on marimba, vibraphone, timpani, rudimental snare drum and drum set), and I was making very little progress. I was frustrated, and getting very desperate.

At my weekly lesson, I presented the problem to my instructor, Dr. Dennis D. Griffin. He suggested something that sort of blew my mind. It went something like this:

Dr. G: How long are you practicing this piece every day?

K: About ninety minutes, give or take.

Dr. G: And how long do you spend warming up - doing exercises and rudiments and the like?

K: About fifteen minutes.

Dr. G: Ok. Here's what I want you to do. Practice the solo less. Spend at least half of your time on technique exercises, things like the Stick Control book. Make sure you're using exercises that apply to the challenging aspects of the solo.

At this point I sort of freaked out.

K: Practice....less? But, Dr. G, I only have a few weeks until my recital! I just CANNOT give up the practice time on the solo.

Dr. G: Try it for just one week. Give it as much focus and determination as you can, and if it doesn't help you in one week, you can go back to doing it your way.

Needless to say, I felt pretty hopeless. How could I possibly make progress on the hardest solo I'd ever played in my life by practicing less? And a lot less, at that?

But the good Dr. Griffin had never led me astray before, so I took his advice and went to work. Over the next week I took apart the solo, broke it down to its elements, and found exercises (mostly out of the Stick Control book, using the slow-fast method as my approach) that applied to each element.

To cut to the chase, it worked. In that week, by practicing my solo for half of my normal time, I made more progress than I had accumulated up to that point. I made my recital deadline, and played the toughest piece of concert snare drum literature of my life - and played it pretty well!

Candidly, it would have been good enough just to make it through my recital, but here's the amazing part: the skills I worked on during that period of time have stayed with me to this day. They have become part of my vocabulary and remained at the tip of my fingers for use not only in formal concert settings, but in my improvising and drum set playing, as well.

There are probably more lessons here than I'm thinking about, but here's the one: Being a great musician is much more about having the skills to construct a variety of musical phrases, sounds and components, rather than knowing a piece or a collection of pieces. You've got to have a repertoire, for sure, but to continue to be expressive and adaptable, you must constantly be building a collection of musical tools.

Musicians often call this their, "toolbox," or, "bag of tricks."

Let's think about it another way.

Did you ever play with Lego's? Imagine if you only had one kind, size or color of Lego block. What could you build? Not much. You would have a limit on what shapes and functions you could construct out of one block.

But what if you had two, or five or a hundred? With every added type, shape, size of block, you exponentially increase what you can build, how it can function, etc.

One more comparison: Basketball. If you only have one move, your defender will easily stop you from scoring, and you'll be an ineffective - not to mention boring - player.

The same is true with your musical skills. If you don't have very many rudiments, sticking patterns, independence skills - even ideas - to draw from, you'll be limited, ineffective, boring, etc. More than that, you'll be frustrated.

Lego's, basketball and music all have this one thing in common - they're more fun when you're better at them. And you're better at them if you have more tools, tricks and skills.

So, long blog post, but short message: Practice less. You'll get more done, and you'll keep it longer.

Happy drumming!

Beyond the Kit: Indoor Winter Drumline

Guest Blogger: John Mapes via Eric Nix. Thanks, gentlemen!


Why should music programs include winter drumline?


We wouldn't ask football players to train for four months playing soccer to then introduce them to the game of football for the remainder of the year... Would you expect your color guard program to be very good every year if they took eight months off in-between marching seasons? The indoor percussion activity was started on this philosophy with these principles in mind.


To run a successful, effective marching percussion program, you need/desire at least 20-30 percussionists in the fall. What do those 20-30 students do from December through June? You only need so many percussionist for wind ensemble, and percussion ensemble is great, but it is still hard to build the excitement that marching percussion inherently has to the masses. 


The two seasons fall hand in hand for the percussion side of things. It is very difficult to have a great fall marching percussion program without some sort of year round training. For wind players, the skill sets from the field to the chair are very similar and work together to give those students what they need  year round. For marching percussion it simply is different. Obviously there still needs to be some wind ensemble percussion training and experience happening in the class room, but what about after school?

Ignore the hard-hat-wearing construction shows and the "Zombies from outer-space" shows you may have seen. There are some incredible displays of musicianship that are possible in this activity, and it is our job as educators to make sure that is the goal. It is our responsibility to produce an experience that is founded in legitimate musical concepts to demonstrate to the rest of the community that this activity is valid. 


Every time I do a percussion circuit clinic someone always asks how they can promote growth in their circuit. The answer is simple - put out better products that entice other groups and band directors to want to participate! Maybe the electronic techno remix show with the volume level of "as loud as possible" or the artsy show where the deep meaning is so deep that even you don't know what the show is about aren't the best choices to promote local growth. (Was the the tribute to Britney Spears really the right choice?)

The argument I often hear is, "What about preparing students for college?" For myself, I never played much concert percussion in high school, but simply took what I learned from the marching activity and applied it when I went through the college percussion process. The importance of consistency, tempo control, simultaneous responsibility, team work, time management and - of course - the love for drumming are enough to prepare our students to achieve whatever they want. 


Most of my students will not continue in music for many reasons and I have no problem with that. Real life is scary and music is not the easiest path to pursue. I just want my students to get the best opportunity and experience they can have while they are involved in music.

Beyond the Kit: Visualization

This is a pretty wacky story, so buckle up.

My junior year of college I had the opportunity to go to Dallas, TX for PASIC. It was a fantastic experience - life changing, even. But it happened to fall two weeks before juries (and if you don't know what juries are, thank your lucky stars), and it meant no practice time for a week.

Those of us who went on the trip - five percussion majors and our percussion professor - were talking about ways to make up for the lost practice time, and one of my colleagues mentioned this foreign sounding word to me: visualization.


Visualization is basically this: seeing the instrument in your mind's eye, you rehearse the piece, section, or whatever it is without physically doing it. It took me some practice (no pun intended), but I was finally able to visualize a marimba keyboard and four mallets in my head. It started one note at a time, then a measure, then a phrase. The coolest thing about visualizing your practice is that there are no rules and no limits. You can sound perfect, play in an amazing venue, make no mistakes, etc.

Anyway, I tried it. On the flights, both ways. On the train. In the hotel room. At breakfast. And you know what? When we got back from Dallas, I had actually improved my playing without having touched a marimba or mallets for a solid week. 


It was nothing short of shocking.

If I had a little more discipline, I would have developed the habit of visualization and used it more frequently, but I have tried it over the years when I'm about to go on stage or start a take in the studio.

Now, I'm not advocating the abandonment of actual, real-life practicing, but try some visualization, especially when you're learning something new. This is a bit backwards, but I've always believed that if you can't think it, there's no way you're going to play it.

Happy drumming, and think happy thoughts!