11 Tips for Creating Quality Practice Routines

It would be great to have the time, and the energy, to be able to practice for hours a day.

You could just keep chipping away at that massive block of stuff to learn until you’ve ground it into a fine powder.

Maybe your time and energy isn’t the issue, but you still end up wasting both when you practice and don’t really get anything done. There is such thing as practicing too much if you’re not seeing progress.

If you’re a new student, or a parent of one, you’re challenged with finding time to practice and learning the habits for making it productive. If you’re an old pro, you need to balance practice with the responsibilities of your life and every second comes with a premium price tag.

In the end, I’ve learned that it’s not always the amount of time you're practicing, but the quality of the practice you're doing. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Whether you have 4 hours or 10 minutes, use these 11 tips to create quality practice routines that help you get the most out of your sessions.

1. Set up a practice-conducive environment

Find a place where you can keep your practice materials set up and ready to go.

Keep sticks ready, music stand in the right spot, and all of your books within reach. Make practicing easy for yourself, and eliminate the excuse that it’s “not convenient”.

Keep your space clean and organized. Don’t use your drums as a hamper for dirty clothes; it’s less likely that you’ll practice if you need to clean your area before every session.

When you have a space that’s ready to go at a moment’s notice, you can take advantage of those flashes of inspiration to put in a few minutes behind the drums.

2. Ditch the distractions

Once you have your spot set, you need to eliminate as many distractions as possible. No TV, No Phone, No Interruptions.

No TV during practice is pretty straightforward. Practice first and use some binge time as a reward for doing it.

No Phone use is a little tougher. There are so many useful music-related apps for your phone (and computer) that it’s been transformed into an integral part of playing and learning music.

That also means that your device ends up in your hands more often than ever before. It’s a double-edged sword - so helpful, yet so dangerous.

You ever notice how your friends start blowing up your What’sApp the second you start to practice? Mute any non-necessary notifications, go to airplane mode, and use app-blockers to take a time-out from the screen.

Get a real metronome and physical copies of books instead of using apps and digital copies that force you to use your device.

If you post your playing progress to social media, be sure to separate your practice time from filming time. My practice suffers severely if I’m trying to get a perfect take for YouTube instead of focusing on my work. How about you?

Make sure the people around you know not to interrupt your practice time.

This one’s for the parents. If you’ve signed your kids up for lessons, let them practice! Practice is music homework. If you wouldn’t interrupt Math, don’t interrupt drums.

Having uninterrupted practice time means that you’ll be totally immersed in your playing for however long you need to be.

You’ll feel great from taking a break from emails, social media and all other distractions. You’ll be in touch with your creativity and you’ll finish your session knowing you’ve put in your best work.

Mos Eisley Snare Port
Having a distraction-free place to practice is so important that it’s among the reasons one of my students stopped playing drums.
Luke was in 5th grade and showed a lot of musical potential at school.
The challenge at home was that Luke’s drums were in a playroom with video games and his younger siblings’ toys.
Every single lesson started with a 20 minute search and rescue mission to find his drum set.
Some parts would go missing for a few weeks before they miraculously reappeared. (What do you mean you lost your snare drum!?)
Luke and his siblings used his drums for all sorts of things. They’d have improv jam sessions or build drum forts with sheets and pillows. The snare drum became a space port for Lego Star Wars.
His parents, not wanting to stifle their son’s creativity, did nothing about it. Unfortunately, the lessons had to stop because Luke never practiced. He never had his drums set up long enough to be able to.

3. Set a goal for the day

It’s helpful to have an overall plan for your practice routine. You and your teacher should have an idea of what your goals are and why you’re sitting down to practice in the first place.

With this in mind, pick a few things to get through in your next practice session and practice deliberately!

Knowing exactly what your goal is - for example, getting your drum rolls nice and smooth - takes away the mindlessness of repetition and gives you a specific goal for the session.

You know you can stop practicing or move on to the next thing once you’ve achieved your goal - whether that takes 5 minutes or 5 weeks.

4. Budget Your Time

Speaking of time, as I mentioned above, practicing isn’t necessarily about how long you work, but the quality of that work. With that in mind, it’s helpful to plan for how long you’ll work on something; it’ll keep you on track to finish everything on your to-do list.

If you only have an hour, budget your time accordingly. Give yourself a time limit so you move on to the next thing or set minimum time limits if you’ve been skimping on something that needs more attention.

It’s also helpful to know how long your ideal routine would take if you practiced everything thoroughly.

For example, if you play Stick Control exercises for 1 minute an exercise, it’ll take 24 minutes to get through a page. Add that to an hour in a method book and you’re almost at 1½ hours of practice. That’s if you work straight, no breaks, no interruptions.

Knowing something like this gives you immense power in carving out time for your practice. You’ll feel great knowing that you’ve made progress, even if you only have a few minutes available.

5. Warm-up and Stretch

You’ll be at your best when you’re physically ready to play. It’s crucial for avoiding injury, just like professional athletes.

Start slow with your warm-up and build in intensity until you can feel the blood flowing. Don’t overdo it and make sure it ramps up steadily.

Once you’re warm, don’t forget to stretch your arms, legs, back, shoulders, neck, etc. Drums are physical instruments, and you’ll want to avoid injury not just in your wrists and hands, but in other parts of your body as well.

If you’re strapped for time, consider creating a warm up routine that covers a few areas of your playing, like dynamics or dexterity. Or you could try one of mine… hint, hint.

You can get quality practice by playing your warm ups if they’re designed in a way that helps you get to your musical goals.

When you have a space that’s ready to go at a moment’s notice, you can take advantage of those flashes of inspiration to put in a few minutes behind the drums.

6. Practice slowly

You do yourself a disservice by playing your practice materials faster than you're ready to. You’re learning a new skill and it needs to be reinforced by slow, deliberate work.

Otherwise, you’ll be learning bad habits that you’ll have to unlearn in the future.

Going slowly gives you time to think before making a stroke or playing the next note. Instead of leaving it all up to chance, you make the decision and then you make the move.

You’re able to analyze what just happened and make the micro-adjustments necessary to get the next note right. You learn how to be fluid in your motion, naturally getting into the next position faster as you can internalize the mechanics of your practice materials.

It may sound boring, but 10 minutes of slow and accurate practice beats hours of too fast, sloppy work. You’ll be thrilled by the progress you make in a much shorter amount of time.

7. Create

Monotony in a practice session is one way to ensure that you’re not making any progress. Once you take your brain out of the practice, you’re really just wasting your time.

One way to break the monotony of a practice session is to be creative with the materials.

Have fun and play around with the concepts once you start to feel comfortable with them. Use them to make your own music.

Try combining ideas from previous lessons or try practicing the material in a totally different way than you did yesterday.

Being creative with your practice materials reinforces the ideas and concepts behind the practice, not just the notes on the page. Being creative with these ideas and concepts is the foundation to mastery of the instrument.

8. Journal and Record

I got the idea of journaling my practices from Benny Greb. I was already journalling avidly, and I was amazed when I heard I could apply it to my playing.

It’s another way to make your practice deliberate, which is the key to improvement regardless of how much time you have.

Listen while you play and take notes about what’s happening. Recognize what’s easy and what’s hard to play, what sounds good and what needs work.

If you have a fresh idea for how to practice this material tomorrow, write that down.

If the practice inspires you to try something completely new (for example, if a rhythm reminds you of a song you want to learn), take note of it.

Record yourself (careful with that cell phone!) and listen back to it. Does it sound like you want it to? Is it music? Take notes when you listen back and create goals for your next practice session - for example, expand the dynamics during a solo piece, or work on your timing during a drum fill.

Many of the exercises I come up with are born out of challenges I encounter when I practice. If I come across something I can’t play yet and I create an exercise to address that challenge, I write it in my notebook. That way, I’m able to dive right into my new exercise in my next practice session and I can share the ones that worked best with my students later on.

9. Ask For Help

One of the greatest things about going to school for music is access to the teachers and other students. You can easily get help if you have a playing question, a homework problem, or just wanted to talk about something that you were interested in.

I made a habit of visiting my music theory teacher outside of class to work on analyzing song structures of my favorite bands. I wanted to learn what made those songs work.

If I was practicing a tough piece of music, I’d ask a classmate for tips on how they’d do it.

Many private students don’t do this. At all. They feel like they’re on an island and they don’t reach out to ask questions when they hit a snag while practicing.

This seems to happen more when parents aren’t musicians themselves. With “no one” to go to, students practice something wrong - or ignore it - for a week and when they get to their lesson, they have to admit that they didn’t make any progress.

Don’t do this to yourself; it feels horrible! Contact your teacher if you have any questions and make your learning a conversation.

Get a real metronome and physical copies of books instead of using apps and digital copies that force you to use your device.

10. Cool-down and Stretch

This one goes hand-in-hand with warming up. Get in the habit of doing some cool-down exercises and stretches at the end of your practice.

This further helps prevent injury and soothes fatigue. Remember you can design these exercises to be beneficial in other areas as well.

For example, Tommy Igoe’s cool-down includes playing a tricky accented triplet pattern, but the tempo slows down as you go. It relaxes and relieves the tension of an intense practice routine while also helping to improve accent control and placement.

11. Take Breaks

It’s important to take breaks from your practice routine. Not only during the practice session, but in your life too.

Most practice is about changing bad habits and it can feel hard or frustrating, especially if it’s taking a while for the change to click. Give yourself a day or two off from practicing a week to recover and regroup.

During a practice session, get up, get some water, take a lap around the house or stretch. Clear your head and shake out your hands. Repeat often.

The other day, I did some laundry in between practice blocks. I would work for 45 minutes, then switch the laundry.

I don’t remember feeling that good about my practice in a long time and I owe it to not becoming mentally or physically fatigued by my work.

So, take breaks, and cut yourself some slack if you’re getting frustrated. Remember that the resistance you’re feeling means you’re getting stronger.

Put It Into Practice

While there are many theories and practice tips out there, these are some overlooked tips that can really help you get the most out of your practice.

Take any mix of these and apply them to some of the other tips you may have come across. Keep in mind that in the end, it’s always about creating a quality practice session.

The days of slaving over repetition for repetition's sake are over and it's possible to get a quality practice out of just a little time each day.

This idea comes with the acknowledgement that most pros put in this sort of quality work for hours a day, for years on end.

Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He didn’t build his physique with an 8-Minutes Abs video every other week. However, I’m willing to bet that if he had to miss the gym one day, he probably still did some push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups in his home.

Remember there’s always a way to get something done. You may not have the hours that the pros are able to put in, but you’ll still be able to put together a routine that works for you, keeps you motivated and keeps you seeing progress.

BlogChristian JohnsonNovember 15, 2019Practice, Practicing, Drum Set, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Practice PadComment