How to Utilize things Around you to make yourself a Practice Pad

Drums and percussive instruments are the heartbeat of any song. It keeps the song alive and on time. Without it, the song might just fall apart. However, learning them come with a few challenges. The most common is that students learning drums don’t have a drum kit because of the money involved in buying the kit and also the space required to fit the whole set. So, in this blog post, we present you with some solutions to still practice your exercises even if you do not have a drum kit.

Before we proceed, as a student of drums, it is a must that you buy at least your drum sticks and a kick-drum pedal. Now, the most common solution is that you buy a practice pad and go through your exercises there, still, there are many instances where a student cannot afford the practice pads as well. We will tackle this by finding solutions to build your own practice pad with things you find around you. Let us discuss some of the ways that you can have your own practice pad.

·       Making a Practice Pads: If you are someone who likes to make their own things, then you can make  a practice pad out of plywood and gum rubber. There are many tutorials on how to build a practice pad out of these two. You can always take help of the internet and build your own practice pad which will cost you very less.

·       Using household Items as Practice Pads: If building a practice pad is not what you are looking for, you can use some of your household items as practice pads. What makes drums so accessible is that one of the fundamental techniques you have to learn as a beginner student is perfecting the art of stick control. So you can do your sticking exercise anywhere, like in a table or in a chair or in a pillow or a mouse pad.

·       Pillow for Stick Control Practice: As a beginning student, these are actually the perfect tools as you concentrate on polishing your technique rather than just making noise on the drum kit without any proper direction. Pillow is a great object to practice your stick control as it doesn’t offer you rebound. Thus you have to pick your stick up which strengthens your wrist movement which is a very important technique to have.

·       Experimentation: Second fundamental element you should improve is to understand different percussive sounds. Drum is not just about hitting your kit, it is about building rhythm with different percussive sounds. So experiment with the practice pads made out the household objects and experiment the different percussive sounds it produces. For eg; a table will make a different sound than the mouse pad or your chair. So experiment the sounds and practice it by starting with one object and once you are familiar with the sounds coming out of different object, practice your rudiments or sticking patterns over the set of different objects.

·       Practice Rhythm: Practice has to be done all the time if you are aspiring to be a professional drummer. Thus the best way to do that is to practice in your thighs which is ever present with you and you don’t have to drop a sweat over what should be your next practice pad.

·       Practice Kicks: The next thing to do is to practice your kicks. As it was mentioned before it is a must that you buy a kick-drum pedal if you are a sincere drum student. To practice your kicks, find a flat surface for the beater of your kick to hit. Make sure you don’t hit the wall directly as it will damage the wall, so use a rubber sheet on the wall.

Now that you know how to utilize things around you to practice your techniques, you should not have any excuses about not having a kit or a practice pad. Even though it doesn’t feel like a real drum kit, these exercises can teach you a lot of things from strengthening your technique and muscles to understanding different sounds and the ability to use them in different ways. Keep practicing and one day you can finally apply all that you have learnt on a drum-kit that is surely to come your way if you are interested about the instrument.

BlueTimbre is a unique Music Company that provides Music Education and  Recording Studio services. BlueTimbre also works with schools to provide end-to-end Music Education solutions for schools. 

The BlueTimbre team comes with decades of cumulative experience in running Structured Businesses, Music Curriculum Development, Music Education and Performance.