Sacred Space, Sacred Time – How I Learned To Love Practicing

The Pain Of Practicing

Every musician wants to become better, and every musician knows that the best way to become better is by practicing.  Still, sitting down to practice can be the most difficult thing for a musician to do.

When I was a kid, practice was drudgery, a chore I avoided at all costs.  I remember like it was yesterday – George Stone’s classic rudiment book, Stick Control For The Snare Drummer, glaring at me from the music stand, my teacher’s detailed directions scrawled in the margin.  Classic or not, I detested that book, and I know others did, too.

To get us to practice, our parents bribed us, or they punished us, or both.  It’s not that our parents didn’t understand what we were feeling, they did: their parents had to force them to practice, too.  That’s the one thing we all agreed on – practicing bites.  And unfortunately, our childhood resistance to practicing often doesn’t fade when we become adults.

But why, if we love drumming so much, should we dislike spending hours behind the kit trying to get better?  The most common reason we give is that “practicing is boring.”  Repeating rudiments ad nauseam may sometimes be boring, but boredom can’t account for our serious resistance to practicing. No, the real reason we don’t like to practice is that every time we sit down with our exercise book we come face to face with our technical limitations, and that’s a really hard thing to do.

The essence of practicing is confronting weaknesses in our playing in order to overcome them through repetition.  But this confrontation often makes us very uncomfortable.  With every pass at an unfamiliar pattern we’re reminded, “this is something I can’t do.”  Afraid to acknowledge a limitation, we rebel in the form of denial.  We adjust the metronome to a more comfortable tempo.  Or we lead only with our dominant hand (because in the real world we never lead with our weak hand, right?).  Or we simply move on to an easier exercise – such as watching reruns of the Simpsons.

Other times our fear leads us to self-loathing.  We convince ourselves that we’ll never master a new technique.  Worse, in a single practice our fear can grow to be so acute and so irrational that we generalize our insecurity, convincing ourselves that we’re “a horrible drummer.”  Depressed and angry, we close our exercise book more resistant to return to it the next day, if we return to it at all.

Fear isn’t the only thing that discourages us from practicing.  Another is the frustration we feel when we don’t see our practice paying off in a predictable way.  Even with the best practice regimen, mastery happens on it’s own clock.  Sometimes we acquire new skills easily, other times only after years of work.  Plateaus – those annoying periods when it seems we can do nothing to improve our playing – can last months or years, then be overcome in a single practice.

Progress is also maddeningly mysterious. I’ve spent months trying and failing to master, say, a hi-hat technique, only to find my left foot performing it perfectly during a show a year later.

With so much to discourage us from practicing, it’s easy to understand why we shirk it.  Yet when our commitment to drumming is serious, and when we want to improve in marked ways, a dedication to disciplined practicing is unavoidable.

I myself realized this when, finally, after college, I decided to make music my full time job. For me, this meant establishing an entirely new relationship with practicing, one that required me to be honest about my limitations, and one that encouraged me to sustain a practice schedule for a long time.

Letting Ego Go

I never consciously tried to create a new mindset toward practicing.  Rather, my new perspective toward practicing was the natural result of a new perspective toward my own playing.

My first teacher after college was a great jazz drummer named Phil Hey.  I knew that there was no use in studying with a teacher like Phil if I continued to fear my imperfection.  So, in my first lesson I asked him to assume that in spite of my twelve years of playing and performing, I knew nothing.  The request surprised Phil, but he agreed, and we started that day at page one: how to hold the sticks.

Phil deduced my actual skill level within our first few meetings, but that first lesson was a turning point in my relationship with practicing.  By inviting my teacher to assume nothing about my abilities, I was really inviting myself to do the same thing.  Suddenly I felt equally free to make mistakes and to play brilliantly, which is the foundation of any healthy approach to practicing.

Sacred Space, Sacred Time

My new ability to be egoless in my lessons quickly transferred to my practices and the effect was immediate and profound.  For the first time in my life, I was relishing my daily practice sessions, which soon grew to be five or six hours long (and because of my day-job, often didn’t start until nine at night).  I made a plan for every practice, and I kept journal of my progress – coordination exercises I’d grown comfortable with, patterns I’d learned, tempos I’d conquered.  I’m not particularly religious, but there was something undeniably sacred about my practices – the daily ceremony of throwing myself into the fire.  And soon enough, the windowless, rundown practice room I rented came to feel something like a sanctuary.

Practice For Life

My era of mad practicing lasted about three years before Spymob gigs started to take a serious bite out of my hallowed practice schedule.  Later, I got married and had children, both serious obstacles to unrestricted hours in the woodshed.  Today I still practice, even many times a week, but now it’s usually in the form of preparing for an upcoming session or performance.  Nevertheless, those years taught me lessons about practicing that I’ll use all my life.

I learned that words like forgiveness, ritual, and faith – a trio often reserved for religious contexts – are at the heart of every effective and enjoyable practicing regimen.

Technical growth requires the constancy of honest self-examination.  Honest self-examination in-turn requires a player not only to forgive himself for not being perfect, but also to embrace his limitations as opportunities for improvement.

Growth thrives on a ritual of regular, focused practices.  Five hours of paradiddles in front of the television isn’t half as effective as fifteen minutes of the same exercise, three times a week, with a metronome, in a quiet room.

And because your improvement happens in ways that are often difficult to see, growth takes faith.  There will practices when you feel like you’re flying, and practices when you feel like you can’t do a dang thing, but these impressions are unreliable indicators of your improvement.  Growth is a slow, mysterious process, and investing too much in your impressions of any one practice can cause you to disinvest in practicing long term.  Instead, a good practice is simply one you show up to, focused and happy to be there.