Do practice pads need special stands? Sometimes.

My Drumslinger pad is heavy, perhaps the heaviest pad in my collection. It easily weighs close to five pounds. That’s not a highly portable pad. Indeed, it’s better suited to studio use where you can park it semi-permanently and leave it set up.

A couple of other pads in my collection weigh a little less, and also work best in a stationary stand.

The drum industry has responded to the needs of drummers by offering ready-made, pad-specific designs. 

1. Remo’s practice pad stand has been around since the 1960s, and is designed exclusively for Remo pads with a threaded tip that the pad screws onto. For these lighter weight pads it works just fine, though anyone chopping really hard on a Remo pad would do well to find something heavier-duty and purpose-driven, from any number of companies: Evans, Rudimental Drummers, Rudimental Control and Drumslinger are  few examples of sturdier pads that I use. Cheap copies of this design abound. Make sure you get one whose thread size matches your pad.

2. Ahead offers a specific practice pad stand, with a miniature basket. These are designed for smaller pads in the 8” to 10” size. They hold a smaller pad more securely than the Remo version. 

3. Drumeo has come up with a pad-specific stand that accommodates larger pads up to 12” diameter. Its only pad-specific feature is that the grips at top are shorter in height to accommodate flatter, thinner pads without fuss. The concert height option is also nice. Otherwise, it’s just a stand with blue trim.

4. Tama offers an overbuilt version of the Ahead stand, much heavier duty but without the concert height option.

A number of off-brand copies of these models are available at lower prices. The quality may vary wildly and can be a little lower than the branded stands. Finding them used can be hard, as the concept of a pad-specific stand is less than a decade old and people tend to hang onto them when they find the right one.

6. Another option is to simply fashion your own pad stand, using a concert-height snare stand with a heavier-duty tripod and a snare basket. Be advised that a standard snare basket may not accommodate any pad smaller than 10” diameter, and some snare baskets may not work for anything smaller than 12”.

A variation on this idea offers slightly more stability. N stead of using a standard concert snare stand, simply find a heavy-duty cymbal stand, whose tripod usually expands farther out than a snare stand does, remove the threaded top section (s) and replace with a snare basket section from a shorter stand. This gives greater stability to hold the heaviest purpose-driven practice pads, and usually costs far less when you assemble it from used parts.

I did this many years ago and it’s still the best practice pad stand I’ve ever used.

Happy drumming!