The Importance Of Practicing

Practice Pad by Tony Vieira is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The image above shows a practice pad and a pair of drum sticks. These are two, or technically three, of the most important items a percussionist could ever own, because just like any other activity in the entire world, you cannot become good at something unless you practice. 

When I started playing percussion in sixth grade, I didn't think practicing was very important. I would slack off and managed to get by on natural talent and the fact that I had taken piano lessons for a few years before I actually started playing my instrument at school. In middle school, practicing became more important because we had "pass-offs." Pass-offs were little etudes or lines out of a book that we had to play for a band director at a certain speed in order to keep an A average in band class. These benchmarks challenged me enough to practice, but not enough to keep me from waiting until the last minute. But, when I went from middle school to high school, everything changed.

With high school came the advent of marching band, and the pass-offs, now known as benchmarks, were more difficult than before. If I waited until the last minute, I wasn’t always able to finish everything I was supposed to do, and I could very well get in trouble for it, but after four years of having to do benchmarks every three weeks, I developed a practice schedule that served me very well. Now, I am in college and there are no benchmarks, there are no requirements, no one telling you that you have to learn a certain piece by a certain time. You determine your own benchmarks. You are responsible for setting goals for yourself and reaching those goals for the good of the ensemble. And although I admit I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this new system yet, you will certainly find me practicing in the band room before rehearsals. Because although I might not want to practice sometimes, I know practicing is important, and I treat it that way.