Maintenance

Remember that the schedule table includes the main categories of practice I try to do every day. That means that maintenance has a reserved allotment of time. The table isn’t meant to be restrictive, but rather, inclusive.

Maintenance is making sure that nothing is lost. Think of it as backing up your hard drive. Let’s say you’re getting your recital together and some of the pieces on the program are things you learned some time ago. While you might be spending the most of your time learning newer pieces, you can’t just take it for granted that the older ones are going to somehow take care of themselves. The longer ago you learned them, the more you might have forgotten. That is, unless you work on them on a regular basis.

Other things fit into this category as well. If you are preparing several etudes for a lesson, you probably found that some of them were easily learned and put aside. Of course, those are the ones your teacher wants to hear first. Every now and again, I like to play pieces that are not part of my current program. They’re just fun to play. If you’re working on a large piece, you might find that some of the passages or earlier movements of the work don’t really need the daily drill. Just about every difficult piece I’ve played has one if not several wicked hard licks. From time to time, I pull out those scores, look for those wicked licks and drill the ____ out of them.

The important thing to remember when playing things you’re already familiar with is to do it with your ears on, and with the intention of playing them as though you could perform them tonight if you had to. Since that is a scenario I’ve encountered often enough, I play the pieces slowly, particularly if I encounter memory gaps or make too many mistakes. Sure, my hands and my brain want to just slip into automatic mode and play them as well as I did a few years ago, but my success rate in that endeavor is pretty low. I also want to pay attention to how the piece is affecting me right now. There isn’t pressure to get it ready on time, there aren’t any new techniques to trip me up, (I hope I have more chops than the last time), and I’m a different person than I was when I first learned it. If you are just reworking an etude that you didn’t get to in your last lesson, have you learned anything in the meantime that you could apply to the way you play it now? The same goes for a piece you learned years ago. Not only should you be paying attention to how the music is affecting you, your intervening life experience is affecting the music. I even do this with music I didn’t like much when I first learned it. Sometimes I really appreciate it more, other times I just put it into the “glad I don’t ever have to play this again” pile.

Often, I play those old familiar pieces with the score. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to work on reading. But I also don’t want mistakes to creep into my memory of how things go. This is even more crucial with things I have only recently memorized.

I know of university percussion programs that treat jury exams as final cumulative tests where anything prepared for lessons during the semester is fair game for the instructor to ask for. Well, if you are planning to audition for an orchestra, this would make a lot of sense. That’s a lot of material to keep maintained, so it has to be a regular part of the practice schedule.

What else fits into the maintenance category? Rudiments, scales, pedaling, rolling on timpani or snare, tambourine fun… How about drum set review? Conga patterns? Those all overlap with the technique portion of practice. Seems hard to believe that some people just can’t keep themselves occupied in the practice room for any more than just a few minutes.