Practicing musically, approaching the task like a musician and not an athlete, working on music, not performance statistics.
I’m struggling to write an introduction, so here are some things to think about, scattergun style:
Dynamics, sound and touch
Add dynamics, or play a flat dynamic as musically as you can. Create some kind of dynamic movement through the phrase. However you play something, be aware of the musical effect of it— playing page 1 of Stone or anything else. Be aware of how your touch will be reflected on a gig— know how loud this would be in real life. Pay attention to your sound, and always be getting a sound you like.
Musical framework
Play in two, four, or eight measure phrases. With jazz materials, sing or think of a tune. Play with a track or loop.
Time
Always pay attention to time, even when playing out of time. When you’re playing in time you should be practicing constructing a groove framework— that’s the primary purpose of most of what you ever play. Don’t always play your own personal “natural” tempo, that you play by habit every time you do anything— think about it before you start.
No baby stage
There is no baby way of playing while you’re learning, and a real way of playing that you do after you’re good. If you have to play something very slowly to learn it, treat it like a professional tempo and play it well. You have to play slow tempos and slow rates of rhythm in real life too.
Select musical materials
What you practice should be like playing music— as an art and as a job. That’s why I do so much with Syncopation, or Syncopation-type materials, because they’re more like real playing, and real reading, and they encourage a playing sort of approach to practicing. Making technical patterns or one measure grooves or licks into musical exercises takes some imagination.
What’s not on the page
Practice what’s on the page, and what occurred to you to play while you played the page. A lot of mistakes (for a lot of people that’s playing any note that is not in the ink) are actually real legal variations on the idea on the page— if you played them in time, didn’t stop, and didn’t get lost. That’s free music offering itself for you to claim it, if you recognize it as such. If you have to stop, make it a musical stop, keep track of the time, and come back in in time, knowing where you are in the measure.
Forget “muscle memory”
People approach this instrument with an automation mentality, like they’re programming their hands to do their thinking for them. Stop thinking that way. We don’t want our hands to fight us, and we don’t want to have to plan every detail of everything we play, but the goal is some measure of creative control with our instrument. That requires some form of awareness— and part of the process is to learn what form of awareness is most constructive for you. And you can’t be improving that if you approach it like you’re training a robot.
I have done some practicing from mainly a pure hand movement perspective— a couple of hours a day for about five years. Just to see what happened. It didn’t do a lot for my real playing. I gained some chops, but they never came out in my playing. We are always at the mercy of our musical ear, which doesn’t get any better just because you reached X speed goal with your paradiddles.
When practicing musically is impossible or unhelpful
A lot of the above suggestions are for when you can physically execute something correctly in time at some moderate tempo— which is most things, once you can read and physically hold the sticks correctly. At times, with some very hard materials, you’re just struggling to get the notes, and you have to focus on just moving your limbs in the correct timing. Or you’re correcting some technique problem— either your physical technique or your mental technique. Or something else— giving some aspect of your playing extraordinary scrutiny. Just be smart and recognize when there’s some gross problem or demand that requires that you focus on it alone.
A lot to think about
It seems like a lot, but it’s simply an orientation. I don’t apply any of this in the verbal instruction form we see here. You have this as your frame, and as you get accustomed to thinking this way, the frame expands to cover everything you do. Once you start hearing every note you hit as part of a professional musical statement, and artistic statement, and part of a musical continuity, that’s just the way you think, and all of the other things you do follow easily from it, and there’s no such thing as non-music.
