I suppose I'm a "pro" because I make my living from drumming. It's funny, because I still don't think of myself that way. There's still so much to learn. My practicing is very goal-oriented. I record myself playing and practicing and set out goals for areas I'd like to improve and find/employ exercises aimed at targetting these areas.
Lately, my practice regimen consists of something like this:
Between 15 and 30 mins of warm-up exercises. First the hands, then the feet, then both together. These are as simple as playing all four limbs in unison or various cross-body combinations just to get my muscles limbered up and all (most
) of the right neurons firing in my brain.
Then it depends on what I've set out to do for the day and how much time I have. Essentially, however, my routine almost always includes work in the following areas:
Technique - control and facility. The building blocks. At the moment, I'm immersed in/flabbergasted by Jim Blackley's
Syncopated Rolls. The book is absolutely killer and I wish I'd found it earlier in my career. You start with basic syncopated rhythms and then fill the space between using various subdivisions and stickings. This way, your "technical" work is in the context of creating musical, melodic phrases around the drums and not just paradiddles for paradiddles' sake. Great, great book.
Time/Groove - With a metronome/click/backing track, or without. Accuracy, control, exploring feels from straight to swung. Learning new grooves and patterns for application later or to projects I'm working with at the moment. Time playing forms the bulk of my routine. I also put "fills" under this catagory as fills ARE time and groove - or at least they ought to be IMO. While I will work fills in isolation to get the movements down, I move almost immediately to applying them within the structure of groove and form - I.e. 4-bar phrases of AABA using the fill at every 4th bar. It's all about creating fluidity. Any technical problems I encounter then spur on technical studies to pinpoint the specific moves I'm having problems with.
Reading/Sight-reading/Transcribing/Theory - A lot of my work over the years has involved chart reading and I try to keep this skill polished, just in case.
Playing with music - In the end, my goal is to be able to apply all the other things I practice with other musicians in musical time. Playing along with pre-recorded music is the closest experience possible in the practice room.
Free improvisation/Jamming on known material/Experimentation - for instance, on another drum forum there's been some talk recently about metric permutation/modulation, and I've toyed around with some ideas. Granted, as someone quipped over there, this could also be called "how to get fired" but it's something that fuels the conceptual part of my brains - keeping it occupied with maths, essentially. I might also just sing a jazz standard in my head and play along with it, comping, trading 4's etc. Or sing a funky bassline (sometimes even out loud) and play along with it. (I'm a real proponent of singing EVERYTHING you're learning to play, or to play with, but that's another story).
I try to get my students to follow a program that includes most of these elements as well.
