Stop Practicing Drums Like This (It's Ruining Your Groove)

If you've ever practiced a groove for hours… only to come back the next day and realise it still feels sloppy… you've experienced the difference between performance and learning.

The biggest lie told to the drumming community is that “just doing more” of something is going to get you to your goal.

Podcasts, YouTube lessons, interviews with drummers online and in magazines lead us down the wrong path time and time again about how to actually get better at drumming. Nearly every drummer discussing this doesn't even know they are wrong about this piece of advice.

And if you are tight on time because of your job, travel, a family, or just because you've got far too many gigs to play (this would be an awesome problem, by the way!), it's crucial that you do not follow this outdated, and often harmful, advice that purely putting in the reps and “shedding” will help you become the drummer you dream of becoming.

Time on the drums matters — but how that time is structured matters far more. With the ideas and methods we'll discuss below you will be able to make far more progress with the same time.

So let's get into the first huge blind spot drummers have.

How to know you are ACTUALLY making progress

Drummers do not understand the difference between learning and performance. And on a deeper level, most drummers do not understand what learning looks like in reality, or how to know when they are just performing and playing on the drums.

Imagine you are just about to set off on a journey to a new restaurant or hike that you want to try, and it's in a location you have never been to before. You would most likely get out your favourite maps app and plug in the destination, hit start and move towards your goal.

If you drive absent mindedly and take no notice of the landmarks, potential wrong turns, or that little short cut that would have got you there 10 minutes quicker, then you will still arrive at your destination, but next time you do the trip you will have to just use the tool again and won't be able to get there any quicker.

Doing this is performance.

You have achieved the goal, carried out the goal, but you haven't actually gained any new knowledge.

For learning to take place we need a change in long term memory (Kirschner, Sweller & Clark, 2006).

Performance is doing the thing correctly at that time (like when you're playing a gig), and learning is taking the steps to retain and use new information over the long term (without any extra materials).

So if you are playing along to YouTube tutorials and never applying the ideas to the kit without experimenting yourself, playing along to the same grooves with no variation, or always using sheet music when you play, you are not truly learning — you are continually performing.

So now we understand why just doing more of the same thing, and shedding the same ideas over and over again, does not make progress. Let's look at how we can learn better and get more out of our practice sessions on the kit.

How to practice less and LEARN MORE

Imagine you dream of growing your very own house plant, and you've just bought your seeds. When you get home you set everything up and get ready to water it so that it grows into something beautiful.

Now you know that you can't pour months or years of water into the soil and be done in one go, because it needs smaller amounts continually added over time. And that's exactly the same thing with practice. Smaller, consistent practice sessions over time give you much bigger and better results, because that's just how our brains need it.

You don't even need to practice every day. It's actually better to leave bigger and bigger spaces between sessions to have the best effects on your long term learning.

And just like going to the gym, you need time to recover in between time spent learning so that you can remember the information.

The most interesting fact is that you actually need to forget concepts a little bit in order to strengthen the learning.

How to know you've ACTUALLY learned something

If you ever spent time ‘revising’ a topic in school and used the classic methods of highlighting and re-reading your notes, only to get into the exam and realise that you can't remember most of it, you know how it feels to not learn properly.

To get at least twice the practice out of the same amount of time, here is what you need to know: testing yourself is not only a better check that you've actually learned something than going over it again — it also strengthens the learning itself.

One of the very best things you could do, rather than just playing the same ideas over and over again, would be to use flashcards.

Write out your favourite grooves, licks, latin patterns and fills on one side of a piece of card, and then just name it on the other side. Then randomly select these ideas to check you really know them, especially out of order.

This is even more useful to do straight after learning a new groove or fill (and then you can add it into the forgetting curve timings from above).

So now you know how to practice ideas and retain them forever. How do you actually make sure you're making progress?

Stopping the plateau

For learning to take place, we need to stretch ourselves. Like a runner who is pushing to beat their fastest 100m time, or a weightlifter adding on a few pounds to their biggest ever lift, growth comes from pushing yourself beyond the limits where you have been before.

In drumming this doesn't necessarily mean playing at tempos beyond where you can currently play (although this is an element needed for speed), it is more down to adding variations to grooves and fills that you haven't played before.

Making sure your practice is varied and has specific difficulties added to each pattern is a key way to stretch what you already know and make sure you are continually making progress in your playing.

Creating variations also allows you to test if your fundamentals are solid enough so that you truly have control when it comes time to perform.

Now this may all be a lot to take in and implement, so I've made that easy for you.

The solution

This was a solution I needed for my own drumming. I want to sit down at my drum kit and make progress, even when I do not have the headspace to plan practice.

When I hit those points where I have no idea what to practice, I also wanted a ready made solution.

So I built GrooveIQ and FillIQ, which give you the exact next step to practice based on your specific level and ability, and move you on once each one is solid.

Not sure where you are right now? Take the free Drum Fluency Diagnostic and find out exactly what to practice first.