My Ideal Practice Session

My ideal practice session would last for 1-1 1/2 hours. This is so that I have enough time to warm up my muscles and get sufficient work and progress done which I can come out with something new.

The first 15-25 minutes would be all on my practise pad with a metronome. I will be practising my rudiments, usually I would do; singles, doubles, triplets, paradiddles, paraparadiddles, paraparaparadiddles and the 6 stroke roll. Depending on the rudiment I will start at a certain bpm and work up either by 5 or 10 bpm's after a couple minutes. I will do this with every rudiment until I feel comfortable with each rudiment at different speeds. This warm up really helps as it relaxes and loosens my arm muscles and also makes my wrists used to playing rudiments which means it'll be easier to play these when putting them into what I want to learn. Without a sufficient warm up you can become stiff and heavy with your playing, which makes it very uncomfortable as a drummer and you will make more simple mistakes which will also drop your confidence whilst being on the kit.

After I have done my warm up I will then get onto my drum kit. I will usually just play a few licks and grooves I had been working on recently to get comfortable with the drum kit. As confidence and comfort is key to performing at your very best. At the moment I am working mostly on getting my left hand better at off beats and my right hand better at carrying the beat whilst adding more complicated kick drum patterns. As a left handed drummer who plays open on a right handed drum kit I find it difficult to transfer a groove to the ride and snare/toms without crossing my arms over. This is something I need to try and improve on as there are a lot of limitations to how I am playing at the moment. Also I am in a funk band and there are certain times where I need to be confident in transferring my groove onto the ride without crossing over as certain fills are much harder and uncomfortable to do whilst crossed. So most of my practices have been on this. 

I try this by playing a simple groove how I usually would on the hi-hat, snare and kick at a very slow bpm, about 60-70 and every 4 bars transfer to the ride with my right hand, moving my left hand onto the snare, adding off beat snare hits whilst keeping solid 8 notes on the ride. Once I feel comfortable in this tempo I will increase the bpm by 10. Once I feel comfortable at around 150-160 for a basic off beat grove, I will then do the sae but adding a more difficult kick drum pattern underneath. This will help me to become more confident with playing open handed on the ride, whilst improving my skills in my funk band and more confident with different sections of the songs. I will spend roughly 45-50 minutes on this, if I feel comfortable. 

This leaves me with a bit of time to try and learn a rudiment based drum fill so that I can develop my skills from the practice pad onto the snare and then orchestrate it around the kit in multiple ways so that I don't only feel confident with one way of playing this fill but so that I am versatile and can play with in so many different ways to fit the purpose of the song or to create a certain sound and atmosphere. I usually split these fills into sections as they're usually very difficult to get first time. This is also a good technique as each part will improve after  my muscles memorise the pattern. So I try and play different sections at 3 or 4 different speeds and then once I have it nailed I will put it together on just the snare. Then branch out to playing it around the kit. This makes my drumming very unique but also more technical and less 'samey'. It adds a new layer to songs, providing the wow factor.

The start of my next practice session will start with the same rudiment warm up on my practise pad but then afterwards will start with the rudiment fill I was learning in the previous session to see if my muscles remember what to play, if I am still a bit stiff with certain things I will go over it for a few minutes, slowing it don and speeding it up until I make no mistakes and feel confident with it.