Building a Practice Habit from Scratch
Becoming a solid drummer requires lots of regular practice prolonged over a period of years. It can’t happen overnight. Ideally, you’ll develop healthy practice routines and habits along the way and the ability to weave drumming into your life. But developing a good habit of any kind requires a lot of discipline and patience.
Bad habits are easy to fall into. They usually give you a little bump of dopamine that keeps you going back for more, like smoking cigarettes or playing slot machines. Thankfully, it’s possible for good habits to trigger the same response. We just have to wire up our brain to do so. But how?
Set a Goal
This first step is arguably the most important. You need to determine that you want to transform a specific behavior (or set of behaviors) into a habit. This goal behaves as a catalyst and should give you the motivation to start working toward it. Motivation often sets a person in motion on their goal-reaching journey, but discipline will see them through to the end.
For learning the drums, the goals can scale in their size. You may have a long-term goal to play a really difficult song, but many short-term goals that lead up to that end stage. A beginner’s goals should be focused on the fundamentals: developing good technique by holding the sticks properly, learning some basic sticking patterns and rudiments, holding down a basic groove, learning to read music, and playing with steady time. Having many small goals makes reaching toward the long-term goal much more manageable and much less intimidating.
Going into it, just know that progress isn’t linear and you’ll need to be patient with yourself. If you’re truly patient and persistent, you’ll surprise yourself with what you can accomplish!
The Big Myth
You may have heard that it takes 21 days to turn a behavior into a habit. Sadly, that’s just not true. Everyone learns at a different pace, and some people can more easily pick up habits compared to others. It also largely depends on the difficulty of the habit being formed. I enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning. At this point, the process of making the coffee has become a habit. It has a particular spot in my morning routine and I do it practically every day. It was an easy habit to get into, especially since it perks me up and makes me feel good. However, it would be much more challenging to get into the habit of waking up at 5 AM every day to go on a run before said cup of coffee.
In short, simple behaviors are more easily turned into habits. More complex actions require much more time and repetition. If it only took 21 days to get into any habit, everyone would be amazing at pretty much any task they set out to accomplish. What a world that’d be!
On a personal note, I started learning Spanish about a year and a half ago. Learning a language requires tons of frequent practice and study. I practice every day with Duolingo. While that’s not a substitute for living in a Spanish-speaking country and really getting submersed in the culture, it helps with learning vocabulary and grammar. At the time of writing this, I’m just a few days away from a 500-day streak. It’s safe to say I’m in the habit of practicing Spanish! My day doesn’t feel complete if I don’t work through a couple of lessons.
As for the difficulty of building a practice habit, it falls somewhere in between the morning cup of coffee and the 5 AM run. The hardest part is getting started.
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
The frequency of practice matters more for habit building than the duration of each practice session. That means it’s more beneficial to practice 10 minutes every single day instead of a full hour only once a week. You just have to do it every single day. But getting yourself to actually practice every day takes discipline.
Building practice time into your daily routine will drastically increase the likelihood you actually develop a habit. Maybe you make time for it just after waking up, or just before going to bed, or you take 15 minutes immediately after dinner. Whatever works! Practicing at roughly the same time each day will help the behavior feel more automatic more quickly. If you’re a total beginner drummer, practicing the basics between 10 and 20 minutes daily will establish both a solid technical foundation, as well as the foundation of a healthy practice habit. As your control increases and you get into more advanced material, you should be able to practice for gradually longer durations.
Ups and Downs
When you first start practicing regularly, you’ll make huge gains. Woo! And that’s great - feeling the work pay off always boosts morale and will probably make you want to practice more. It becomes a positive feedback loop.
But at a certain point, you’ll hit some roadblocks and your progress might stagnate a bit. When that happens, you have two options: throw your sticks down, cross your arms, audibly say “hmph,” and look like a dumb, pouting baby, OR you can buckle down and grind through whatever’s giving you trouble. Those that go with the second option go on to become way better drummers than anyone that went with the first. Remember, progress isn’t linear. You’ll have some good days, and you’ll have some bad days. But it comes down to being able to push through the bad days. It’s easy to come up with excuses to NOT practice, especially if the previous practice session was frustrating. We’re all guilty of it from time to time. And that’s okay! But if you get too lenient on yourself, you’ll lose your habit altogether. Getting back into the groove of things (pun absolutely intended) might prove even more difficult than getting into the habit initially.
Leave Time for Fun
Practicing can be quite mentally taxing, especially if you’re working on a new technique or some super difficult material. If you only grind all the time, practice can get pretty boring pretty quickly. If it gets too boring, you won’t want to do it. If you don’t do it, you don’t get better at the drums. So make sure you leave some time to have fun and mess around! I often find new things to practice through the act of noodling (playing without any particular purpose). Now you have to be careful; noodling itself isn’t inherently practicing. It’s like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Not all playing is necessarily practice. But you should leave some time to goof off whenever you play, perhaps at the end of a practice session as a sort of reward. On many occasions, I’ll be getting ready to head home from the practice room, only to stumble upon a fun new combination or groove. Before I know it, another hour goes by, but it’s time well-spent since it was used with the purpose of developing an idea. That’s all to say that some strategic noodling can ultimately help you increase the duration you can practice during each session.
Treat Yourself
If your steadily improving abilities aren’t gratifying enough, you can take a bit more of a Pavlovian approach. Maybe after each practice session, you treat yourself to a special snack, like your favorite candy or a piece of fancy cheese (or whatever you’re into. I love cheese...). Doing so is especially helpful for difficult practice sessions. That way, even if you didn’t accomplish what you set out to achieve in a given practice, you can still reward yourself for at least putting in the work.
You should also periodically record parts of practice sessions. This way, you’ll have a sort of diary of your progress over the days, weeks, months, and years. You might not always notice progress from day to day, but if you take a recording of yourself practicing something one day, and then another recording of yourself playing the same material a month later, you’ll definitely notice an improvement. You’ll gradually become more confident and push yourself to take on more and more challenging material.
Don’t Beat Yourself Up
Some days, real life might get in the way and make it so you can’t practice. When that happens (and it certainly will), don’t beat yourself up! Try to pick it up again the next day. Taking a short break every now and then is actually quite healthy for long-term development and will prevent the much dreaded burnout. Just like your muscles after an intense physical workout, your brain needs some time to recover after lots of practice, too. Just use breaks sparingly and only as needed, otherwise you’ll fall out of your habit!
Of course, not everyone has the time, space, or equipment to practice on a full drum set for 2 hours every single day. You just need to work with what you have. It’s possible to develop really solid control and advanced technique with just sticks and a practice pad. To really get the most out of your time, taking drum lessons from a professional drummer is the best way forward. A seasoned teacher can provide a clear path ahead to help you become as good a drummer as you can be as quickly as possible. But it all comes down to your commitment to building good practice habits and actually putting in the work!