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Band directors: if your fundamentals block isn't landing, the problem isn't effort. It's how the adolescent brain actually stores motor patterns under stress.

Most band directors prep sight-reading backwards. Here's the cognitive load problem killing your contest scores — and how to fix it before contest week.

UIL judging criteria and long-term musicianship aren't always the same game. Here's how to run rehearsals that win both without sacrificing either.

Most band camp structures optimize for coverage, not skill acquisition. Here's the rehearsal design shift that actually develops your incoming freshmen.

Band directors: your low brass and battery aren't conditioned the same way. Here's how section-specific load affects rehearsal decisions and show design.

Stop drilling sight-reading perfection. Train error recovery instead — the rehearsal technique that actually moves your UIL sight-reading scores.

COVID learning gaps left your seniors without core sight-reading fundamentals. Here's what's actually missing and how to fix it before UIL sight reading season.

Struggling with band literature selection when your students aren't at grade level? Here's how to pick concert band repertoire that actually works for your room.

Indoor season ends and your staff disappears. Here's how to run an end-of-season debrief that actually preserves what your program learned this year.

The Class of 2030 were babies during COVID. Here's what the research actually says about their development—and how to adjust your band camp fundamentals.

Your UIL sightreading room decisions reveal what your band actually learned this year. Here's how to read those instincts and prepare better year-round.

Struggling with ensemble blend in your high school band? Here's what actually causes balance problems—and how to fix them in rehearsal.

Competitive standards matter, but marching band students are teenagers first. Here's how that tension shapes better rehearsals and stronger programs.

Teaching the band Rehearsal Etiquette is easily the most straightforward concept I glossed over as a young teacher. ​At your very first rehearsal, teach the concept of "standby" (and it's okay if you have a different word for it!). Explain to your band what this position is: feet are at "attention" (or "set" or whatever you want to call it). Instruments are at a relaxed and ready position that is NOT "carry" or "attention."

A very easy way to help every member of your band follow along in rehearsal is to create a common language to define starting and stopping points. One straightforward approach is to think of measure numbers. A typical high school band show will consist of approximately 250 to 300 measures. However, the significant, notable checkpoints for the winds vs. the battery vs. the front ensemble will change. And the color guard will have to learn what you're talking about when it comes to measure numbers.A commonground past that would be to assign rehearsal letters. If you know you're starting at a specific spot, you can call that "Letter A," Letter B," or what-have-you. Unfortunately, if you're having a problem with a phrase between "Letter F" and "Letter G," you need to expend rehearsal time helping your band get to that measure number. Imagine this situation:"Okay, we'll start at letter F, page 31. Go 3 pages, which is 8 plus 4 plus 8."The rep starts. 70% of the band misses the ending point."Okay, reset. Let's try that again."30% of the band still misses the stopping point.This everyday rehearsal challenge highlights the need to create a navigational vocabulary that helps all band members.A straightforward solution is to rehearse EVERYTHING by drill set number. On the one hand, this gives the color guard many checkpoints that are easy to follow (in their language). Typical guard work is written to align with count structures that follow musical phrases. By lining up your language with audio-visual phrasing, you will also speak in terms the guard can follow.Conversely, the front ensemble largely has no need for drill numbers. However, the front ensemble tends to be the smallest of the "big" subsections - AND - drill sets are a different terminology to create mid-phrase checkpoints. You COULD say "4 bars after letter C" -- OR -- you could say "page 17." By using drill sets, everybody gets clear and specific checkpoints.For the winds and battery, who learn the show by musical navigation and visual navigation, the idea of using drill set checkpoints helps create meaningful and logical mid-phrase and whole-phrase checkpoints. Add into the conversation the simplicity of adding details to sheet music; it is far too easy for a music arranger or band director to open up a notation file and add the drill sets to the music score to print off for the performers, drum majors, and instructional staff. At the end of the day, teaching your entire show by drill set numbers creates a system of vocabulary that gives your musicians meaningful checkpoints and gives your visual performers commonsense checkpoints. There is no reason not to use drill sets in your rehearsal vocabulary.

When you think of ensemble versus sectionals, stop to think about the efficacy of your time. In full ensemble, your attention should be focused on the musical clarity of winds compared to percussion and the visual clarity of the color guard compared to what the band proper is playing. There are times when the paramount ensemble focus is on timing between two or three musical sections. And there are also times when you must be worried about how the saxophones and trombones play together. That should not monopolize the time when you have your entire student roster on the field. All your kids are making sacrifices to be a part of your program: how can you make the most efficient use of their donated time? In the DCI arena, the instructional staff takes the time to break down rehearsal times to allow for subsectionals vs. sectionals vs. ensemble. While this seems like an excessive "waste of time" for educational arenas, remember that the DCI staff function solely to help their groups be as competitively successful as possible. While high school groups may focus on teaching and education, DCI is about competition. And that competitive mindset is limited by the time the touring schedule allows.Using the model set by DCI groups, high school bands can find new growth opportunities.Giving your band notable time for "subsections" in a week will allow more time spent on minutiae with the students to whom it applies. The color guard may need time to define where their left hands connect to the pole. Your tenor line has some timing challenges on the 16th notes in the middle of a phrase. And your clarinets are facing some tone challenges on a feature. By allowing for subsections, you can fix those three problems within the same 5-minute chunk of time, along with several other errors. You save every student many hours of collective time by breaking into sub-groups to fix many problems at once. In the end, you get more done in less time. Yes, you, as a band director, want to micromanage every second of time of every student. Trust that the professionals you've hired will do what you need, and give them the time to do what you need.While considering full ensemble vs. sectionals (e.g., all winds/all percussion/all guard) vs. subsections (clarinets and snares and rifles), trust that your instructors will make use of that time and don't be afraid to give all (or most) of an entire rehearsal block to those subs. While you might feel that you are relinquishing a lot of control as a "band director," your hired professionals will be given the breathing room necessary to deliver the expectations you already have of them. If those professionals can't deliver the desired results, you might need to make a difficult personnel decision. Otherwise, be sure that you give your staff clear instructions in your pre-rehearsal planning meetings.If you end up with 45 minutes of ensemble leading into a 15-minute block for a run-through at the end of a rehearsal, you're doing okay. An hour of ensemble is plenty in a 2.5- to 3-hour rehearsal. Ensemble should be time to ensure that your three sections (winds, percussion, guard) are functioning together. Take an assessment of the words used by your staff: are they talking about the full ensemble, or are you having "concurrent sectionals" happening? Be sure that ensemble is ensemble. If you find your staff focused on section-specific details, you need more time preparing in those sections and subsections before you get to a full-ensemble rehearsal.

When it comes to marching band rehearsals, the biggest shortcoming I've seen time and again is band directors "letting loose" of the constraints of full-time teacher life and just "winging it" for marching band practice. This couldn't be further from the "best practices" approach.

In another post, I discussed the importance of creating a schedule for your marching rehearsal, reflecting on how rehearsals that are very loose and "shooting from the hip" aren't an effective use of your students' or staff's time. A second common issue I've seen going to rehearsals is an ill-structured rehearsal process. Like many things, there are many right ways to do it, but there are also a bunch of incorrect ways.

My life has given me an interesting opportunity to interact with a LOT of band kids from all over the place and in a variety of ways. As a marching arranger, I often get to visit with the programs for which I write. As a drum corps instructor, our audition process brings us many more players that we have spots for. As a composer, I get the chance to Zoom into a band room to talk with students. And over this past year, editing virtual ensembles, I've been really into the weeds with individuals' performances. I really can't stress enough how important it is for bands kids - from the very beginning - to know how to count.  Imagine, if you will, your first foray into triangles in geometry class and your math teacher teaching you all about right triangles, makes you memorize all the common sizes (3-4-5, 6-8-10, 5-12-13) - but never teaches you the Pythagorean theorem to be able to figure it out on your own.Imagine being in middle school English class - I think we can all remember the stress and agony over all those spelling words. But after learning all those big and fanciful words, you don't know the definitions of them to use them in a sentence. This is band without rhythm. I've heard a LOT of band students, even at the middle school level, who have a pretty good sound (even if just for their age). But past that beautiful sound, sight-reading is a mystery due to their not being able to decode the rhythms on the page.One of my greatest successes as a teacher - I worked for a year in a challenging school. My band was very small: 14 students in the class. I had 5 winds, 2 mallet players, and 7 drummers. They ranged from beginner to "could be a music major" in ability. Trying to play ensemble literature on day 1 was folly. I spent quite a bit of time through the year teaching them music theory. Not even theory - just "Literacy." On the A/B Schedule (I saw them alternating days), we would sometimes have a 3-day band week where we'd spend 2 days on "theory." They learned how to read the notes on both Treble and Bass clefs, including ledger lines. They learned enharmonic spellings. They learned how to build Major and minor scales. And they learned to COUNT. Everything down to 16th notes. All the dots in the world. Sometimes a double-dot, just for fun (since they knew exactly what a dot meant, double and triple dots didn't faze them). We did meters with 2, 4, 8, and 16 on the bottom. Symmetric and asymmetric. By the end of the school year, kids who couldn't play a Bb scale knew how to sight-read at a good Grade 3 level. Because of the efforts that went into teaching Literacy - rather than shouting rhythms at them by rote - the students could put together a respectable concert program over a matter of a few weeks, rather than few months.Teach your kids to read. It makes all the difference in the world.

As I've traveled around to work with different bands - be it to pop in for a day of consulting or working long-term and in-depth - I've had many directors ask about what they need to do to improve. While there are many various ways we all can improve regularly, one of the simplest and easiest fixes to get your program achieving on a whole new level - points better; placements better - is having a structure to the rehearsal.Some of the programs where I've seen the biggest need for this are where I stop in and the director says "alright, we're going to start with a run-through." You're what?! "Well, I want to see what we need to work on."Often, I like setting an analogy to other disciplines. So - let's imagine a meeting between a math teacher and the principal."What's on your lesson plan for today?""Well, we're going to start off with the state test. Then I'll see what they need to learn after that.""You're doing what now?" Why don't you already know what they need to learn?" ​This is no different than the marching band. How did you performance at the football game last Friday go? What was bad there? Chances are it's still bad today. Another one that amuses me:"We need to work on endurance."Doing an extra run-through of your seven-minute show isn't going help endurance at all. It doesn't work that way. ​What DOES help endurance is over-training all the reps, so that muscle memory kicks in when the students start getting tired. As they get tired, their minds focus on being tired, not on performing. If the muscles already know what to do, it takes less mental energy to execute every little detail.  As the band director, it's your job to think about these things, to be thoughtful in planning out a rehearsal and, most importantly, use every second of time your instructors and your students are committing to your program in the best way possible. ​In our previous example of the math class, that teacher can probably figure out what they need to accomplish in their class that day and get through it just fine. Writing out a lesson plan lets the teacher put things into a logical order and to plan for a flow of events to teach as efficiently as possible.The marching band is no different. We often treat it differently because it's an extracurricular (usually) and thus also not subjected to the same kinds of professional standards and observations as curricular classes. But the principles of planning still apply and they have the same positive affect as in the classroom. Most bands (admittedly: not all) have a staff. You're paying these folks to be subject-matter-experts to make your students better. If they don't have an opinion about rehearsal goals then they aren't the right person for the job. At the very least, the morning before your rehearsal (if not even the day before your rehearsal), ask your staff what they need to work. Create your own hit list. Come up with all the things that need to get better. How long will each thing take to accomplish? Is it a 10-minute fix? Or is it a 45-minute fix? Do you guard staff and your percussion staff have concerns in the same part of the show? Look at the big picture of what your band needs to fix. Prioritize it. See what you can fit into your rehearsal schedule for the next day. Write out a schedule, including the times spent. Get detailed: we're band people, after all - excessive attention to detail is what we do.I looked back through my tour journal that covered the summers of 2016 to 2019. Every day, we would have a meeting and discuss the priorities for our brass line. I would leave that meeting with details - such as: 2:00 to 2:40 - Warm up. Focus on X, Y, Z... 2:40 to 2:55 - clean rhythms in measures 4 and 5 of Letter C 2:55 to 3:07 - work on intonation at Letter E 3:07 to 3:15 - Fix breathing holes at Letter H 3:15 - transition 3:30 - stadium This is the level of attention I would put in as a subsection tech. For you, as the band director, make a plan at least this detailed - if not more.  ​Allow for solid, adequate warm-up time. The warm-up should be more than just blowing some long tones; it should set the tone of the rehearsal block, get the students focused, and give each section's instructor a chance to address some fundamentals. Never short-change the warm-up. Include transition time in your schedule. If you're not thinking about travel time across campus and time to get water, you'll feel like you can never finish your plan. Don't over-plan. You have three months; you're not going to fix the whole show in three hours. Take the time to teach two or three things thoroughly with enough reps that it'll stick. If you gloss over it today, you're going to keep glossing over it every day until November. At the end of the day, as the professional music educator you are, you already know what your band needs. Starting your block with a run-through isn't going to make them better. It takes away 10 to 15 minutes of rehearsal time, which means that's 4 or 5 reps of something that needs work that isn't getting the attention. ​Every minute of rehearsal should carry an obligation to honor the time commitment of all the people on the field: yourself, the staff, the students, and their parents. We always preach to the kids "don't throw away any reps." We, as the teachers, should have the same commitment to planning for those reps.