Snow Day!!! How to Practice without Instruments

Snowpocalypse 2026!

Welcome to the other side of snowpocalypse 2026! We got roughly 12-14 inches here in Cincinnati (some areas even more) and are getting ready for snow day number 2 tomorrow. Since temperatures will be below freezing (and the feels like in the negative) the rest of week, we may end up with a few more snow days. While it is important to go play in the snow, build a snowman, drink hot chocolate, doomscroll, and everything this we do now-a-days, it is also important to practice on these days. Sometimes it is even easier because we have few things we HAVE to do. But what do we do if, like most students, we don't have instruments at home.

The easiest thing to do is to pad it up on these snow days. You may have some indoor music to work on. You could also have that snare drum part for your concert band march that has been tripping you up. Either way, dig out the practice and play a little bit. Start with your fundamentals. I love working on music, and it is better than not practicing, but take this time to invest in your skills/hands. Chopping out to 8 on a hand, double beat, accents and taps, short-short-long rolls are all good skill investments. I HIGHLY recommend playing a 4-2-1 Grid, either 16th note or triplet based. Grids not only invest in your hands, but they are a GREAT investment in your internal sense of time. Play them while tapping your toe for a little extra fun! You can make pad time more interesting by turning on your favorite playlist and playing to music instead a metronome.

What if I left my pad and/or sticks at school Ryan? Play with your hands! You sticks are an extension of what your hands are doing anyways. Are you struggling to play good even double strokes? Playing the with your hands will give a more honest picture of where you are because you have no rebound to help you out. If you make your hands sound even, getting your sticks to sound even will be easier. At the start of every season, we do some hand drumming (on pads) to take inventory of our skills without sticks/mallets. This is a great time to do that!

Do you have 4 mallets at home? This is a great time to working on new sticking patterns or stroke types. You don't need a keyboard to play great double lateral, or triple lateral, strokes. I learned how to do a one-handed roll on the bed of my dorm room at Kent State. If you know how to play a grid on a pad, play it over a 4 mallet sticking pattern. This is a great way to work on making sure you have control over each individual mallet and can manipulate each individual mallet in musical passages.

If you are just starting your 4 mallet journey, just holding mallets is great practice to get your hands use to the grip. If you don't have mallets at home, this can be achieved by holding pencils/pens in your hands where the mallets would be. Then you can work on your wrist turn, focusing on each "implement" coming up to the same height.

You could play drumset (electonic or acoustic), work on lifting your timpani strokes back up, note naming on any number of music theory websites or apps. There are a million things we can do on days when we don't have access to instruments. Sometimes these end up being the best practice days because we invest more in our skills/hands and less in a piece of music. Either way, hopefully you are staying safe and warm as well getting some work done.