Friday, May 11, 2012

New Regimen

I spent a few hours yesterday, on my only day off, coming up with a do-able practice routine and exercise plan that I will commit to each day.

*Note: the exercise and practice routines will be split up during the day since I usually don't have 4 hours, nor the energy, to commit to both consecutively. So practice early in the day and work out in the afternoon or night depending on my work schedule.

So here it goes:

First off my exercise routine will just be an hour: 15 min. jogging and 45 min. weight training.

The exercise is supposed to help my circulation and breathing as well as stamina in my playing. So for those of you who are saying, "You need to run more or lift more" just know I don't care about becoming a Tri-athlete or an MMA fighter.

Now, my practice drumset practice routine.... This is going to be pretty detailed, so if you don't play music or drum set for that matter, you may want to skip to "THE END."

BTW I'm giving a breakdown of my routine for those musician friends of mine in hopes that they may be inspired to work harder on their craft AND hold me accountable to my program.
Here’s a pic of my routine schedule:


The time slots at the bottom indicate what I’m working on and how long to do it. The entire routine should take around 2 hours to complete it. However, I know that transitions from page to page from exercise to exercise as well as cool down time will add more or less than 15 minutes. But I did plan a bit for that by not putting in so many exercises in the 15 min or 30 minute slots.

The List of Readings in the above section is for the “Readings” portion of my routine which I will discuss later.

Ok, now the Rudiment portion of the routine:


The rudiment exercise is pretty basic and straight forward. I know that there are several as well as dozens of rudiments to master. But I don’t want to over load myself. I want to MASTER the basic rudiments first, and then move on other rudiments.

Feet Exercises:


Now feet exercises can be pretty intense and can vary so much depending on what you’re wanting out of it (i.e. to be a fast double-bass player or to just be solid at playing with your four limbs). But I, however, want to be a better Double-bass (metal) player. So the goals of these exercises are too increase my speed and stamina at playing with my feet, but not make me burn out my muscles before I get to practice the four-way coordination and style portions of the routine.

*Note: As most people don’t understand, practicing the drums, mainly metal drumming, isn’t just playing an instrument like guitar or piano, where you can develop technique without actually breaking a sweat. Drumming is more of an exercise, like aerobics. You have to warm up and be mentally and physically ready for your body to learn new techniques. It’s also not wise to try to learn new material if you aren’t feeling up to par, because it’s just a waste of time. It’s like trying to study while you have a migraine or the flu….you won’t internalize the new material.
Now the Fill Exercises:

These are a set of exercises taken from an article written by Ed Brackenfeld in the May 2003 edition of Modern Drummer. In the article, there are 30 Patterns of fills, a bar in length. Each pattern is played over and over for a minute long, hence the name of the Article, “The 30-Minute Speed Workout (Around the Drums)”

The purpose of this exercise is to become more comfortable and fluid when playing a fill, whether you’re playing at 100bpm or 200bpm. This is one area that I lack in both speed and creativity. I find myself using the same fills for a lot songs….I’m starting to sound like Lars Ulrich LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!

If you want a copy of the article, I’d be happy to post a copy online or email it.
New Breed portion:

New Breed is a fantastic book by Gary Chester that every teacher in the country has used to teach four-way coordination. I’m using this book mainly to improve my left foot coordination and strength. Even though my skills at playing solid 16th notes on my bass drums are that bad, my stop and start playing is horrible. This book will help my sight reading skills as well.
Finally the Readings:

The readings are a list of pages in different books that I have listed in the first picture. These are books that a lot of teachers use. I’ve used half of them when I was in college, but I didn’t master them.

These readings will hopefully serve two purposes: one, to improve on my technique with different styles, and two, my sight reading. I can usually remember a page or two from the day before, so I’d be cheating just a bit by working on the same page two or three days in a row. So working a different book each day would eliminate that advantage.
Each week I will work on a new portion of each book. However, before I go to the next section of required reading, I will master the assigned section first.

THE END:

At the end of each week I’m going to post my practice and exercise log on this blog and possibly Facebook. The purpose is to not only have people keep me accountable, but to keep myself accountable. Plus it’ll show how much I’ve improved on my weight training, and hopefully inspire someone to improve on a talent or ability as well.

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