I’ve been trying to be more organised with my practice of late by setting more precise goals/deadlines, and here are the results of the first goal.

The aim with this exercise was to get more comfortable playing different right foot patterns whilst my left foot kept playing the “es”and the “as”. All the right foot patterns were me playing down the first page of the melodies from the New Breed by Gary Chester.

I played the pattern in 7 too as that kept things interesting, but also meant I had to chop the last 8th note of every bar out as the Melody systems are all in 4/4. This was a bit a more of a reading challenge initially, but helped keep the grooves interesting.

All in all this was a really effective way to practice, and I will be aiming to expand on this method of efficient practice. The next two weeks are all about preparing for an album recording session at the end of the month, so I’ll be employing the same practice techniques for that.

I also forgot to mention that I kept a diary throughout this process to help me stay on track, and that helped so much. Many of the practice ideas I used were taken from a DrumeGab podcast with Benny Greb, which I would highly recommend checking out.

Cheers!

Tom