During my college days, learning to drum was simple. My only job at the time was to get better at my instrument, and this single focus made it much easier to grow skills quickly. I had hours of free time dedicated to practicing, I was surrounded by music, and there were world class instructors and musicians all around me.

At the time, my life revolved around drums and I had the time and exposure to practice and grow as a musician. These days, that is no longer the case. I now teach drums full time, and between building this website and a busy gigging schedule, I’m left with little time to practice drums.

As I’ve explained many times, your drum skill is directly related to the amount of practice time you put in. But for the majority, if you aren’t going to school for drums, the amount of time you have available for practice is small.

Most of you are not attending college for drumset, however, many of you still wish to be a better drummer. Balancing practice time between work, family, friends, and the thousands of other commitments we have can be difficult.

So how can a drummer squeeze the most value out of their precious little practice time? There are many different ways to approach a short practice session, but two of the most effective methods are by using compound and isolation drumming exercises.

Do You Even Lift, Bro?

Maybe it’s because I like to exercise, or maybe it’s because I think fitness is a language many of us understand, but I like to compare practicing music to working out. The similarities between exercise and practice are many. Destroying yourself in order to build new strengths, showing up even if you don’t want to be there, and building neurological pathways are a few of the many ways that the two activities are mutual.

Just like there are many different ways to work out, there are different styles to practicing drums. Some may seem better than others, but I prefer to look at it as some methods are more appropriate than others. For example, if you were training for a weight lifting competition, you may not want to focus your exercise time on long distance running. This same approach applies to practicing drums.

Know Your Goals

If you need to learn 100 songs for an upcoming coverband gig, practicing your double strokes may not be the best use of your time. Or if you have an upcoming gig with a fusion band, you may want to practice building chops and odd time playing instead of trying to memorize the drums to Boston’s More Than a Feeling.

Knowing your practice goals is a key factor in determining how you are going to approach each session. Even if you’re not working towards something, it’s important to at least put that in your mind. Think, “I don’t have anything specific to learn, so today’s practice session is going to be a general, all around maintenance session.”

Make a Plan

It doesn’t have to be very detailed, but making a rough plan of how your practice session is going to go will keep you on track. When I am on my way to the practice room, I will make a mental note of what I’m trying to accomplish, how much time I have, and how I’m going to spend that time.

The more detailed you can plan a session, the more you’ll get out of it. Going in without any plan will only waste your precious time, and keep you off-track. If time is of the essence, careful planning is going to help your practice sessions be more fruitful.

Compound Vs. Isolation Exercises

If you have spent some time in the gym, you probably already understand the concept of compound and isolation exercises. Each exercise has their advantages and disadvantages, and it’s important to know when and where you’d want to do each one.

Consider a bench press vs an arm curl. The bench press is considered a compound exercise. It is focused around the chest, but has the advantage of hitting the shoulders, arms, and abs all at the same time. On the other hand, the arm curl is an exercise that only focuses on the biceps. Each exercise has their place, but it’s important to know when to do them.

Overall, since compound exercises hit many different muscle groups at once, I would consider those exercises a better “bang for your buck”. On the other hand, isolation exercises are a great way to pinpoint weaknesses and specific areas. Depending on your goals, you can now figure out which exercise is best for what you want to accomplish.

But that’s enough about working out. We’re here to discuss drumming and not lifting weights. So let’s get to the topic at hand and discuss the difference between compound and isolation drumming exercises.

Isolation Drumming Exercises

If you’ve followed the advice above, hopefully you have already made a mental note of how long your practice session is going to be, and what specifically you need to work on. If there is an immediate task at hand that requires something specific, this would be a perfect time for isolation drumming exercises. An isolation exercise would be something that is geared to a very specific aspect of your drumming.

These days, when I step in the practice room, more often than not I have something specific I need to work on. It could be memorizing songs for a gig, learning a chart, or practicing a style of drumming. In most cases, I usually have a singular goal in mind.

Because other commitments tend to take up my time during the day, I no longer have the luxury of limitless practice time to work on everything. I now need to be choosy with what I practice. My practice time is precious, and if something specific needs to be worked on, I will use isolation exercises.

Some examples of isolation exercises include:

• memorizing songs
• learning a specific drum groove
• practicing a singular style of music
• working on a specific technique
• working on rudiments
• learning a chart
• patterns and fills

For many practice sessions, isolation exercises are a necessity and are the best way to spend your time. I prefer isolation exercises if I have something very specific I need to work on. Maintaining all of my focus on a single task provides me with the greatest results.

However, there are also times when there is nothing specific that needs to be worked on. In this case, I prefer to go with the more general approach and focus on compound drumming exercises.

Compound Drumming Exercises

If we’re assuming that we have a short amount of practice time available, it’s important to get the most out of the little time we have. If our session has no immediate tasks that need to be worked on, compound practice exercises are the way to go. Compounding an exercise is when we take any normal exercise and simultaneously add something else to it. This is a great way to double the effectiveness of any given exercise.

For example, practicing your double stroke roll would be considered an isolation exercise. This is because our focus is only on double strokes and nothing else. However, if we were to open up a snare method book (How about Pratt’s 14 Modern Contest Solos) and read through one of the passages, we would be tackling double stroke rolls along with many other rudiments. This turns your double stroke practice into a compound exercise. The idea is that we can cover a lot more ground and improve on multiple weaknesses with less time.

Compound drumming exercises are easier said than done. For many of us, we’ll need to build up the skills to even begin to tackle some of these exercises. However, there are plenty of ways to add compound practices into our every day routines and it’s worth taking the time to learn how to do it.

Use a Metronome

Adding a metronome to whatever you practice is one of the easiest ways to get more out of your time. If you don’t already use a metronome for the majority of your practice sessions, now is the time to start. Not only will it help you keep time, but it is a great way to turn any regular exercise into a compound exercise.

By adding a metronome to your already existing practice routines, you get the benefit of adding strict time skills to whatever you are playing. Using a metronome helps keep you in time, but it also aids with spacing notes properly, and gives you benchmarks for your technical limits.

If you can get into the habit of taking notes, using a metronome is a great way to add some structure to your practice sessions. I like to take notes of the tempos I was practicing at. This way, when I come back the next day, I already know what tempo I peaked at last time and have something to aim for.

Don’t forget that practicing things slower is also important. It’s not always about speed. I also like to take notes on how slow I can play things as well. This way I can identify what tempos feel awkward, and where things start to feel uncomfortable.

Add Foot Ostinatos

If you’re working on exercises for your hands, one of the best ways to get more out of your time is to add a foot ostinato underneath. In drumming, an ostinato is a repetitive pattern that continues to play unchanged. Ostinatos can be played with any voice on the drums, however they are commonly played by the feet.

An example of a simple foot ostinato is the Bossa Nova foot pattern:

By using repetitive foot ostinatos like the bossa nova, we can turn any exercise played in the hands into a compound exercise. Personally, I rarely do any type of hand warmup without playing some type of foot ostinato underneath. When in a time crunch, this is hands down the best way to cover a lot of ground quickly.

As an example, we could play the first two exercises of stick control on the snare while playing the bossa foot pattern underneath:

Compounding foot patterns with hand exercises helps build timing between the hands and feet, coordination, and is important for limb independence. I will admit, to get to the point where you can comfortably add foot patterns to whatever you are doing with your hands will take some time, but it is worth the extra effort.

Depending on your skill level, there are many different patterns that can be tried with the feet. I start most students with just quarter notes on the bass drum. Once that is easy enough, you can add the hi hat on 2&4. Eventually, you can move to more elaborate patterns such as left foot clave over a tumbao kick pattern.

Add Ostinatos to Reading Exercises

If you are working on your reading, a great way to add a little more difficulty to the practice is by adding ostinatos over top. This gives you the added benefit of not only working on your reading, but also practicing your independence and coordination as well. Add a metronome, and you’ve got yourself a winning combination.

As an example, let’s assume you are reading a passage of 8th notes:

One way to compound the exercise would be to move the reading to the bass drum and add a hand ostinato over top. If we turn it into a rock pattern, we also get the added benefit of having something a bit more fun to play.

Here is a simple rock hand ostinato that we could try:

When played over top of the previous 8th note reading passage, it would look something like this:

Adding different ostinatos over your reading should become standard practice. This concept becomes especially important when you want to take the plunge into jazz drumming. So go ahead and give it a try.

Click here for a list of some ostinatos that you can try on your own.

Putting it All Together

When short on practice time, our goal should be to accomplish as much as we can with the time we have. Firstly, being prepared before you begin is extremely important. Know how much time you have and what needs to be worked on.

If there is something immediate that needs to be learned, then focus on isolation exercises to accomplish the task at hand.

However, if there is nothing pressing to work on, using compound exercises is a great way to maximize your time. By adding different patterns over top of whatever we are practicing, we can compound our exercises and get more value out of our time.

Remember that you should always be using a metronome no matter what you are doing.

How do you practice if you are short on time? What are some of your go to exercises? Comment below and let me know!

It’s a common pain for every drummer. You’ve practiced the same drum lick over a thousand times at all tempos. You swear you could do it in your sleep. But when it comes time to bust it out on stage at your sweet coverband gig, you completely blow it.

Considering the amount of time that went into practicing that damn lick, you are left wondering what went wrong. So what happened?

Archilochus put is best when he said, “we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”. And as I’ve already mentioned: drum skill = time spent in practice. But sometimes, no matter how many times we run through drum licks or patterns, they never show up in a live context.

Drumming Integration

In most cases, the missing link between practice and performance is what I call drumming integration – the act of absorbing the drum material you practice so deep into your muscle memory that it becomes a part of your everyday playing. Naturally, integrating what you practice is easier said than done.

At first glance, when asked how to integrate a drum pattern, our first reaction would be to practice. This is certainly correct, but it doesn’t give us a complete picture of HOW to do it. We know we need time and repetition to learn something, however if you don’t know what to aim for, you’ll end up wasting a lot of that time.

To help paint a better picture, let’s look at something everyone understands: language.

Si señor

Have you ever spent months learning a language on the computer only to find yourself panicked and stuttering when trying to converse with a native speaker in real life? As frustrating as this is, it happens to me all the time.

I have tried to learn Spanish a number of times. I’ll be flying through the questions on Duolingo and getting things near perfect. But when encountering a native Spanish speaker, I am embarrassingly bad.

There are a lot of reasons for this, lack of confidence, different accents, lack of practice, but all the reasons basically boil down to the fact that I have not completely integrated the basics of Spanish into my vocabulary.

“The Carrot is Purple”

If we go back to English, we can learn how to integrate language a little better by taking a word we all know very well and dissecting it. Let’s try the word “carrot”.

At first glance, carrot is a pretty simple word, but let’s do a little analysis and find out what we really know about the word:

A carrot is a root vegetable. It has a number of vitamins and minerals that make it healthy. It grows from the ground and contains a leafy top. It is usually orange in color, crunchy in texture, and ranges in taste from sweet to bitter.

The word “carrot” contains six letters and two syllables. It has a harsh K sound at the beginning and ends with a quick T sound. It kind of sounds like two separate words, “care” and “rot”, put together.

Soon you find out that carrots also come in vary colors like red and purple, and that they range hugely in size and flavors. Not to mention the amount of varying species, types, and foods that would be considered cousins or relatives.

How about all the ways you can cook a carrot? How about all the ways you can say carrot?

You probably have never really thought about a carrot this way, but that’s because the word has been built into us since childhood. Internally, we already know all of these things about carrots because they were integrated into our being at an early age. But hopefully this has painted a picture of what it takes to integrate NEW things into our bodies.

Integration of Drumming Material

At this point it should be getting more clear that the reason the material we practice doesn’t show up when we perform live is because we don’t know the material as well as we thought. Repeating a pattern 10,000 times is the same as saying the word “carrot” 10,000 times – After a while, it loses all meaning.

I’ve developed a three stage method that I personally use to help me take what I practice straight to performance. This method will help you to know what you’re practicing on a deeper level and engrain it inside your muscle memory. It also has the added benefit of being a fun way to practice.

In order to work on each stage, we’ll need something to practice. As an example, let’s take a rudiment everyone knows and loves and give it the ol’ 1-2-3: The Single Paradiddle.

Let’s begin.

Stage 1: Technically Correct

The first stage to drumming integration is playing things technically correct. It is the stage that most would consider “practicing”, since it’s literally just repeating what’s on the page. Unfortunately, this is also the stage that most drummer’s stop at. Considering that playing things technically correct is only 1/3 of integration, it makes sense that there would be trouble performing down the road if we stopped here.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s begin with stage one and learn how to correctly play a paradiddle:

We know that a paradiddle is a rudiment, which are traditionally played on the snare drum. So practicing on the snare is a good starting point.

From the looks of it, we can also see that the paradiddle is a sticking pattern (Series of rights and lefts). There are eight notes in total that are all played equidistantly as 16th notes. The last thing to notice is that there are two accents evenly placed at the beginning and in the middle after 4 notes.

Now that we’ve looked it over, let’s play it. Overall, the single paradiddle is a simple rudiment to play. As long as the notes are evenly spaced apart, it’s just a matter of wrapping your head around the sticking pattern. Once the pattern is down, the next challenge is adding the accents and getting them to pop.

After some time, you should feel pretty confident about the paradiddle. Next, you’ll want to attempt it at varying tempos to know your technical limits when playing it.

Once you’ve practiced the paradiddle to the point of being able to play it at both slow and fast tempos while maintaining a strong accent, you will have completed stage one. Basically, all you needed to do was get the rudiment under your fingers. This applies to everything you are trying to practice, be it grooves, patterns, licks, or entire songs.

If you were to stop at this point, your memory of the paradiddle would eventually fade and you would have trouble pulling it out in a live pressure situation. Oddly enough, this is when most people will move onto the next exercise. But, there is a lot more to go before the single paradiddle becomes a part of you, so let’s move onto stage 2.

Stage 2: Exhaust the Possibilities

Now that we’ve learned how to play the single paradiddle technically correct, it’s time to move onto stage two and explore every way we can apply the rudiment. Stage two is the mat of integration practice and is the most time consuming. It’s only limits are your imagination and technical capabilities.

In short, in stage two you want to take whatever you are working on and put it through as many different scenarios as you can think of.

To avoid fatigue and overwhelm, it’s important to set the rules of how you are going to practice the scenario beforehand and stick with them. I find most drummers will come up with some common ways of applying patterns and rudiments that work for them and repeat them for most things they practice.

Let’s see how we can mess around with the single paradiddle.

Move it Around the Kit

A good starting point and one of the simplest approaches to learning a new pattern is to move it around the kit. If we were playing a drum beat, you could start moving between the hi hat and ride cymbal, or replacing the snare drum with a rack tom. But what can we do with the paradiddle?

First off, we could move the paradiddle from the snare drum and try it on different drums and cymbals. After that, we could split up the hands and place them on different drums. For example, we can assign any R’s to the floor tom, and any L’s to the rack tom. As you can see, these two steps are already pretty exhaustive, but we’re just getting started.

Don’t forget that you can use your feet as well, so be sure to try out a paradiddle between your kick and hi hat, or on a double pedal.

Add Accents and Articulations

If you are more than comfortable moving the paradiddle around the drums, you can start to mess with the accents. Try adding or subtracting different accent patterns to the paradiddle. Have you ever played a paradiddle with the accents on the “e”, or the “a”? It’s quite challenging and yields some cool results.

For changing accents I created a very simple grid that I follow. It’s one of my most common practice tools, and you can check it out here.

If you’ve been moving the accents around on the snare drum only, next is your chance to try these accent patterns around the kit as well. Don’t forget your feet!

You can also try other articulations, but for some patterns like the paradiddle, it might not make sense. For example, unless you are an advanced player, thinking about the difference between staccato and legato notes while playing a paradiddle on a snare may only turn into a massive headache. However, for some of you, this can open up a lot of new creative avenues.

Alter the Rhythm and Phrasing

By this point, we’re already getting to know the paradiddle quite well. You might have already discovered plenty of new use cases that you’re trying as we speak. But there is always more to experiment with, and one of my favorites is changing the rhythm and phrasing.

At the moment, we’ve been playing the paradiddle as steady, equally spaced 16th notes. But what happens if we try the same pattern as triplets? quintuplets? A combination of both?

Some of the examples might start getting weird, but that’s alright. Practice is supposed to be messy.

As another example, you could try playing a paradiddle in ascending and descending rhythms of the note tree, or move it into different time signatures to see how things line up. There is no limit to how rhythms can be worked with, so I would suggest picking a few ideas that sound cool and sticking with those. You can always try more later.

Once you’ve explored a few different rhythms, you can now layer them on top of some accent patterns and can move it around the kit. Don’t forget your feet!

Add Dynamics

Similar to accents and articulation is adding dynamics. This is the icing on your practice cake and is what separates the amateurs from the professionals. Being able to take all of the concepts above and apply control in the form of volume is going to be a challenge.

Dynamics also cover their own broad range from super soft all the way to ear splittingly loud. You can try each method at it’s own dynamic, or you can combine them by adding crescendo’s and decrescendo’s. Again, the only limit here is what you can come up with.

Stage 3: Improvisation

By now, you’ve taken the single paradiddle farther than most drummers ever have or ever will. You have also earned a familiarity with the rudiment that will start to pay dividends in all your future playing. Considering it’s versatility, working this hard on the paradiddle is time well spent.

But we aren’t done yet.

In order to fully assimilate the paradiddle into a your vocabulary, we need to get to the final stage of drumming integration, which is improvisation. Step one was all about playing the rudiment correctly, then step two was exploring every which way that rudiment can be played. Now stage three is all about thinking ahead of yourself and learning how to organically manifest what you’ve been practicing in a live context.

For those of you that have never practiced improv, it’s easier than you think. Just make up stuff as you go. The challenge lies in thinking ahead and drawing from what you’ve already been working on. When you run into a wall, take a moment to step back and think about the different things you’ve been practicing, then try again.

Improv and creativity can be practiced in a few ways. One is free form. Without rhythm or time, try freely playing paradiddles around the kit with different accents as fast or slow as you like. Or bring back the time and phrasing, but try increasing and decreasing your volume at will. There are few rules to free form improv, just as long as you’re still playing a paradiddle (In some form of another).

A second way to practice creativity is with a more rigid approach. Try the paradiddle as fills between beats, or trade with yourself between a grooves. For example, I frequently practice trading 4’s between myself. I will play 4 bars of a beat in any given style and then practice improvising whatever exercise I’ve been working on for the next 4 bars.

This sort of trading is perfect if you have another drumming friend to work with. Nothing is more inspiring that trying to steal licks and ideas from one another.

After some time, you will start to see what appears to be sticking and what you’re forgetting about. If you happened to be working on something that you thought was really cool that you want to start showing up in your playing, go back and try to add it into your improv sessions.

Practicing creativity has no definite end, but the more time you dedicate to it, the easier being creative becomes in the moment. Ideas will flow better and you’ll find accessing previous practice material easier and more immediate.

Putting it all Together

Hopefully you agree that the only reason we have issues with manifesting our practice material in live situations is because our methods need changing. Spending time in the practice room is extremely important, but it’s just as important to have a clearer picture of how we are going to spend that time.

This three stage practice approach should answer a lot of questions and open up plenty of new ideas for how you can approach your material.

Do you agree with my approach? Are there other methods of practice or exploration of an exercise that I forgot to mention? Let me know down below!

“The only difference between you and myself is that I’ve had more time to practice.”

This was said to me by one of my drum professors when I was complaining about my progress with learning the drums. At the time, his words didn’t speak to me as much. But that was a while ago, and younger musicians are known to be impatient. We want to be good, and we want it now.

Many years later, things are starting to make more sense. It seems like everyday now that another one of my peers lands an amazing gig, makes more TV appearances, and continue to crush it. This wasn’t happening back when we were in college, or even after graduation. So what could be the cause?

The answer is simple. More time has passed.

The Simple Equation for Success

In all my years of drum education, I’ve seen one constant factor in determining how successful a student will be at learning the instrument: Practice. Young or old, experienced or not, the students that learn the fastest are the ones that practice the most.

After observing this, I came up with this simple formula to determine how quickly someone will learn:

Drum Skill = Time Spent in Practice

I see the majority of my students every week, and it’s the ones that put in the most practice time that end up learning the quickest.

The Myth of the Prodigy

When people learn that I’m a drummer, I often hear, “I always wanted to play the drums, but I’m not musically inclined”. At some point, they bought into the myth that learning to play an instrument is only for those that were born with natural talent. This bums me out, as it couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In all the students I have taught, I would estimate that only about 1% of them appear to have a natural talent for the instrument. Truth be told, everyone learns at their own pace. Some faster than others. But very rarely do I get someone that can play everything as I show it to them.

The idea that all musicians started out at prodigies is a myth.

There are a lot of musicians out there, and there is certainly no way that all of them were born child prodigies at the instrument. Every amazing drummer once started out knowing nothing. The only reason anyone is good now is because they put in the time and practiced.

Why Some Students are Better Than Others

If you were to bring me two young students of the same age, neither of them having played drums before, but one of them had two years of piano lessons prior, I would bet my life on the kid with the piano training to learn faster from the start. This is because that student has already put in more practice time than the other.

At the same time, if the student with no previous musical training practices 20 minutes a day, while the other put in 30 minutes once a week, the seemingly disadvantaged student will quickly surpass the other. This is because that student is following the formula: Drum skill = time spent in practice.

Habits and How They Slow us Down

For those lucky enough to have spent some time in music lessons, the idea of practice is understood. Others might have a harder time adjusting. Practicing music is like failing over and over again until you get it. For many, the idea of failure is uncomfortable. So they give up.

In many ways, practicing music IS painful. This is why so few do it. They have built a habit of avoiding the uncomfortable. So when someone sits down to practice, they quit the second they make a mistake.

Bad habits can form very quickly. But, so can good ones. Forcing oneself to confront their lack of understanding over and over will lead to a habit and attitude of deliberate practice. You might even come to enjoy it.

Practice as an AntiFragile System

You might have heard the buzz word ‘antifragile’ before. This concept was developed by Nassim Taleb and describes something that increases in strength and capability as it experiences stress and failure.

Weight lifting is an anti-fragile system. You push hard and tear up your muscles making you sore the next day. But this destruction leads to new muscle growth and an overall healthier system.

Practicing music is very much an anti-fragile system as well. You sit in a room alone and play your instrument poorly over and over again seemingly getting no where. However, with time, your skills increase, and you become a better musician.

Follow the formula and success will follow.

Try it For Yourself

Hopefully you are no longer convinced that all of your favorite musicians were born with their instrument in their hands. However, for the skeptical, remember that I also started out as a terrible drummer. Everyone does. The only way to really test this theory is try it out yourself.

Practice is always the number one determining factor when it comes to how good someone can become.

It’s worth mentioning that the formula never changes, no matter your age or skill level. If you plateau, more practice will help you push through as well.

Or course, not all practice time is equal, and there is a large difference between deliberate and passive practice. But learning how to practice will be left for another discussion.

Let me know how it works for you.