I’ve been a musician for quite a while but finally bought myself a drum kit.
As a guitarist I know not all practice is good practice, or at least productive practice. For example, practicing scales up and down the neck will help learn those scales… but can make soloing sound super robotic.
Was hoping to get some advice for being productive while practicing rudiments, but any other practice advice is welcome too :)
I think that any practice you do on rudiments is good, but 2 things that night help:
- The building blocks of almost anything is single and double strokes, so make sure you have those down
- It’s important to practice with a metronome but sometimes it gets boring. On Spotify there are playlists by BPM and it’s more enjoyable to practice to music than to a metronome. The upside is that your never need to find or match the scale!
My routine is to take a page from Stick Control for the Snare Drummer, put on a metronome app which had a counter, and move to the next rudiment after 50 repeats. Starts boring but after a while you get to this point where your like “oh lol I’m already at 300 repeats?”.
Sometimes watching something if its slow and easy enough that you can keep a correct form without thinking. Keeping the form right is key here (“practise makes permanent, so practice perfectly”).
Honestly I like repetition like that, I’ve been treating it as a meditation session lol. What metronome app do you use? I’ve never seen one with a counter (not that I’ve tried all that many).