Book excerpt: To keep your hands agile and dive deeper into effective methods that really improve your pad technique, Anika Nilles' Pad Book is just the thing! Anika gives plenty of advice on what and how to practice on a pad. Her fundamental workouts deal with accents, phrasings, and stickings in regular and odd note values, mixed meters, hand independence, and polyrhythms. Anika also puts together a collection of warm-ups that suggest how to create your own rhythm patterns out of the technical features in this book. Anika's focus through it all---to show you how you can always be creative when you play.