Pad Book

If you can't practice regularly on a drum set, you may have already acquired a practice drum pad. However, practicing without a drum set is unique! For those who want to keep their hands agile and practice effectively on the pad, Anika Nilles' Pad Book is just the right choice! In her self-developed practice system, Anika presents a variety of options for what and how to best practice on the pad. The pad is particularly well-suited because it is essentially reduced to just one sound source. This keeps the focus on fundamental elements such as stickings and rudiments, phrasings, and rhythm concepts. In her Fundamental Workouts, Anika dedicates a total of 280 pages to the topics of accents, phrasings, and stickings in even and odd note values, mixed meters, hand independence, and polyrhythms. It results in a complete system with triplets, sixteenths, quintuplets, sextuplets, and septuplets, broken down into individual steps—from very simple to complex rhythms. The development of fundamentals, sensitivity to time and rhythm, and the numerous possibilities for expanding one's skills are at the center of this work. Collections of warm-ups give you an idea of how to develop your own exercises and rhythm patterns. The deeper purpose behind this is to make the practice process more creative, to work effectively on one’s strengths and weaknesses, to develop new topics for oneself, and to view familiar concepts from a different perspective. Back at the drum kit, you will find that you can focus on more specific, musically relevant topics such as sound, orchestration, and dynamics, as your hands, body, and mind have already internalized and automated the fundamentals practiced on the pad. Truly fundamental!.