20/8/16 - Practice Plans/Knights of the Round Table

Nice work knuckling down through some tricky sections of the Jazz Swing this week mate. Would have been good to see a little more progress on it over the past two weeks, but you did well in your lesson.

I know it can be hard juggling all the different things you have going on, as well as trying to find a balance between the things you want to do, vs the things you have to do. A really important step is to look at building in a regular practice session to your day. I'm sure you have heaps on each day with different rehearsals, sport trainings etc., but find 20min each day where you know you have time set aside for a little bit of work.

Mine looks something like this:

*Note that these practice sessions are in addition to my regular rehearsals and random jams which pop up throughout my teaching day.

You will see that I spend 15min on a Monday planning out my practice for the week. What are my goals, what am I going to practice to achieve them, and what will I do if I manage to achieve them before the week is out? These need to be very specific. For example:

• Paradiddle workout at 140bpm
• Samba independence workout at 100bpm
• Bar 1-14 of "The One" from First Date concentrating on transitions form fills to syncopated groove

I personally find having dot point lists of my goals for the week is good so that I can tick off each one as I get it done. This gives me a great sense of achievement, lets me see my progress day to day, and helps me stay focused and on track.

Try and find some time to sit down and write out your own practice plan that works with your timetable, with your own specific goals. It doesn't only have to be stuff that I have given you, but your own things as well. Bring it along next lesson and we'll have a look over it together.

If you are finding you are not inspired by the stuff you are practicing and thus find it hard to motivate yourself to practice, let me know and we can work on some strategies for this as well as look at other material to help get you fired up to play!

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Drum Kit:

Knights of the Round Table - Work through the big jazz section from bar 83-93. Make sure you can count and feel the rhythms as they are written on the page, but then find your own way to orchestrate these and interpret the music around the drum kit. A few key points to keep in mind when working through this:

• Do you want long or short sounds (mainly on crashes)?
• Do you want a heavy sound with lots of low end (floor tom, kick etc), or a thinner punchier sound with a strong attack (snare, HH, tom 1)?
• Are you trying to create tension through playing up beats (the "+" or even the "e" and the "a") or do you want groove where it resolves to the downbeat?
• As a general rule, crashes by themselves sound very thin without some low end support, so think about using kick drum or snare with the crashes.

- Try to get the crash on beat 2 of bar 98 in the big Latin Groove.

- Try to add the kicks on the "and" of beat 4 from in 69-71.

- LISTEN TO AND PLAY ALONG WITH THE TRACK! 🙂

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Enjoy your practice this week!

Remember - "if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong!"

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