There are few things as exciting and fulfilling as getting together with other musicians and joining with them to create a tight, cohesive musical union. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: few things are more frustrating than rehearsing week after week and never improving. While there’s no single right way to rehearse, these steps will help make sure you’re on the right track.
Do Your Homework
It may seem counterintuitive, but a rehearsal is not where you learn a song! Rather, it’s a time to assemble everyone’s parts into a cohesive piece of music, fine-tune the details, and solidify the arrangements. Come to rehearsal with your parts fully learned and ready to perform. This requires discussing in advance who will play and sing what parts. This also means having the necessary tones dialed in and ready to go.
When Is the Downbeat?
If rehearsal is scheduled for 7PM, does that mean you start playing at 7, or is that when everyone arrives to set up? I prefer to say the same thing I say for recording sessions: “Downbeat at 7,” which means the gear is set up and the actual music starts at 7. The musicians should understand this means they need to arrive early enough to be ready to play at that time.
Come Prepared
If you don’t keep your equipment where you rehearse, be sure to have everything you need with you when you arrive for rehearsal — and that means double-checking that you have all your cables, power strips, and so on. But coming prepared also means that if you were supposed to learn a song, come up with some riffs, memorize lyrics, etc., that you’ve done it. Don’t get your rehearsal off to a rocky start by showing up unprepared!
Set Up Quickly
We all know what it’s like to believe you can set up in a few minutes, only to wonder where the hour went. Nothing can kill the momentum of a rehearsal faster than everyone taking half the allotted rehearsal time just getting set up. If you have a regular rehearsal space, leave your gear set up as much as possible. If you don’t have that luxury, get everything set up as quickly as humanly possible. Remember, in order to have a productive rehearsal, you need to have as much time as possible to actually rehearse.
Decide the Rehearsal Plan in Advance
The planning stage is crucial for determining if a rehearsal is going to be productive or if it will be just a group of musicians hanging around, noodling, and wondering what to do. Ideally, you already started planning at the last rehearsal, but if not, use this time to either change an existing plan or develop a plan — which songs to rehearse in which order, what set list to practice. Even if you’re going to just jam together, then decide how long that will take. And if you like to take breaks, plan for those too! You don’t need to micromanage every minute, and if you don’t get through your complete schedule/outline, that’s okay. But if everyone understands the plan for the rehearsal, you’ll be way more productive.
Focus!
If you’re lucky, all the musicians you are playing with get along. That’s ideal, and you should enjoy yourselves at rehearsal as much as you can. But rehearsal time isn’t catching up time or telling jokes or sharing cute pet video time. Everyone has YouTube and message apps on their phones these days, and you can always get to rehearsals early, stay late, go out to eat before or to the bar after rehearsal — you get the idea. If you need to share a video, then send an email with a link, and your buddies can watch it after the rehearsal. For a productive rehearsal, as excited as everyone might be to pal around, always remember that rehearsal time is for playing music.
It’s Not All About You
For a band to sound really tight, it needs to sound like a group of musicians playing as a single unit, not a bunch of soloists who happen to be in the same rehearsal room. If you play with enough musicians, you’re bound to play with someone who may be in the room with you, but only pays attention to what they’re doing. Don’t be that musician. For a really productive rehearsal, listen to what everyone else is doing so you can identify both the strengths and weaknesses that you have together as a unit, and so you can fit yourself in better. And if you notice another musician not paying attention to anyone but him or herself, gently try to get them to pay attention by asking them what they thought of everyone else’s playing and other questions to snap them out of focusing only on themselves.
Record Everything
Nothing will help you get better faster than being able to listen back to a rehearsal later and hear what you and everyone nailed perfectly, what needs work, how your tone interacts with everyone else’s tone, and so on. Luckily, it’s never been easier to record your rehearsals. There are so many great and affordable digital field recorders available today, not to mention inexpensive multitrack digital recorders, and of course the smartphones everyone carries. Rehearsal recordings don’t need to have perfect sound quality or to be expertly mixed or anything like that. The point is just to hear everyone’s parts. Don’t hesitate to just stick all your phones in the middle of the room if that’s all you have — it will work just fine for everyone to be able to hear things later.
Plan Your Next Rehearsal Before You Split
If you want to get a head start on making your next rehearsal productive, then set it up and plan it out before you leave. Not just when and where, but get a rough plan together for what you’re going to work on as well. This will of course change if a new gig comes up, if someone writes a killer new song they have to share, or the like, but knowing what, where, and when you’ll get together next will always boost your productivity and make your life easier.