I can truly say I did not know how to practice.
I thought I knew.
I would put lots of hours in
but with no visible results to show for the effort.
Also what I had learnt would fall apart at the gig.

This was down to three problems;

A; / I had no set goals,(I would aimlessly wander day to day
from one idea to another,
a bit of snare work one day then some paraddiles
then a bit of feet and so on.)

B ;/ I would practice the rudiments,fills,
what ever,to a click but not form a useable time feel(rhythm)
so when it came to play the phrase mid song
I had no idea how to set it up.

C; / I don't know how to store(mentally) what I was trying to learn.

A; /This is a personal one,but find at least one part of you playing to work on,
By setting a "goal" I don't mean by next month I will play as good as Vinne,Gadd or Buddy Rich.Something small that will make a small difference to how you play,maybe your Latin suck's(coff,coff,ill keep quiet here)work on that to make even a small improvement.

B / Play from a time feel;
It's useless to have all the Gadd triplet lick's in the world
if you haven't practiced them from a time feel(drum groove!...USA talk.)
so play four bars time then lick your self to death!!and back to time again,this will give you usable results.

C /And here we are;The interesting bit!
(at last yawn).

1 /Start with a positive attitude,with out this you are wasting your time.

2 /Have a clear understanding of the subject,e.g. Have books and any relevant information at hand.


3 /Learning segments;
It's your night out on the town and your drunk,
you sing a song like "and now the end is near and I must face the final curtain,doo de dum de dee,de,dum de,dee,dee.de,de,dum..so on........and did it my way."

Why can you always remember the fist and last bits???
The middle sections are always forgotten.
The mind has a tendency to work like this allot,
so if you take advantage of this it's a real learning
benefit,instead of a hindrance....How????

Instead of working no one problem for two hours and the next day only clearly remembering the first and last exercises played,
break the time up in to twenty minute sections with five minute rest sections,
or you could just move on to a different problem for five minutes,
this way you have more start and end sections for the mind to remember.

This also gives the mind chance to store information to long term memory instead of the short term memory used for learning work that is constantly changing.

Do remember to revise what you did the day before to re-enforce the long term memory.
After 24 hours 80% of the memory is still fresh but decreases rapidly after this period so this is why practicing on a regular basis is actually more important than the amount of time spent practicing now and again.

So there you have it.......now what was I doing before I wrote this???? hang on it will come to me.....hmmmmm..errrr.....had it then .....errrr...errr