Practice

A while back I had a practice timetable that fit into about 30-40 minutes including warm up and down time. I was told that I should try and do at least half an hour of drum practice every day, but without a drum kit set up at the moment, that's a little hard. Anyway, here's the practice sceduale:

Start - Warm Up - Do whatever to warm up your hands and legs to play
5 mins - 40 Bar Exercises - Choose a 40 bar exercise and play it
10 mins - Counting Practice - Triplets, eighth, sixteenth and thirty second
15 mins - Work on Song - Work on any song I'm having trouble with
20 mins - Work on Skills - Flams, rolls, accents, grooves, rhythmic summaries
25 mins - Counting Practice - Triplets, eighth, sixteenth, and thirty second
30 mins - 40 Bar Exercises - Choose another 40 bar exercise and play it
35 mins - Warm Down - Work on song and try and warm down a little

That was my old practice schedule, so I think I might make my new one a little longer, at least an hour, with more time to work on each song, but breaking up everything all the way through again. I shall work more on technique and also my songs, so I will incorporate less exercises and more song work.

I also had my first and second lesson with my new drum teacher Steve. He's a really good teacher and I've already learnt a lot. He's very lenient in the way he teaches and has taught me a lot on how to relax, how to sit behind a drum kit, how to tune a drum kit and how to improve my playing. This might seem like simple stuff, but I was never taught this before, so even going back to the basic stuff will help me a whole lot.

- Sami Lee