With the back-to-school season in full swing, I wanted to reflect on my time in marching band with another open-ended question: did marching in a drumline make me a better drum set player?

It was just about ten years I started what would be my final year in a drumline (IYDK I marched alto sax in college; more on that later). That photo above is from late October 2011 — my freshman year of high school, a couple of months into the football season. 

As the start of high school approached, I was pretty sure I wanted to join my high school marching band. I mainly did it because I had a vague expectation that I would become a better drummer. Well, that, and I wanted to meet new people. 

I’ll admit it: when I showed up to band camp that year, I hardly knew the first thing about marching percussion. To that end, most of what I did know came from my crude familiarity with the rudiments. I do mean crude — my doubles were a train wreck, I remember in middle school being confused as to what grace notes were drags, and which ones were flams. 

Embarrassing stuff to admit out loud. In fact, it makes me wonder to what extent I could even read at all before high school. Suffice it to say I learned a lot that year. 

My reading ability is one of the biggest things I got out of my high school drumline. Again, it’s hard to even remember how I processed sheet music when I was young; another rookie mistake I made prior was confusing 2/4 with 2/2. I also didn’t know what quarter note triplets were, nor was I familiar at all with quintuplets and septuplets.

While the drumline parts that come with those mass-produced arrangements aren’t too wild, they nevertheless provided a lot of variety and challenge for me. I’ve brought up the “Maximum Strength Warmup” piece that my band played, and I do sincerely believe it is a gnarly piece of music to play when you’re a teenager with a cursory knowledge of marching tenors. 

Tenors/quads are what I mainly played in high school, up until my senior year, when I had to double up on snare in certain moments since our membership really started to dwindle during my junior and senior years. 

My high school music program wasn’t super serious, especially compared to the high schools that compete in WGI (you could’ve probably gleaned that from the feet in the photo above). While my school’s concert band competed,* my marching band did not and was mainly there for the football team (which, on the other hand, is storied enough to have had a movie made about it).†

While the program wasn’t very intense, it did get me to take music more seriously. I think part of it was that it was a new, exciting thing, not to mention I was around more drummers than I ever had in my life before. I felt a responsibility to the band, which really helped motivate me to practice; I had to be able to play the sheet music that was being thrown in front of me. 

Lastly, my chops came a long way too, especially the fundamentals like doubles and singles, not to mention executing articulations and dynamics. And of course, there is the inherent improvement in stick control marching percussion provides, as well as the timekeeping needed to play cleanly with other drummers. 

So then, marching in a drumline without a doubt made me a better drummer, and I am glad that I had a chance to spend time with the marching percussion discipline. That being said, there is a limit to how far the improvements go, and I think there comes a point where a drumline can actually make you a worse drum set player. 

For the first few weeks of my freshman year, all I practiced was drumline stuff. When I finally sat back down on the kit, it felt… weird. My feet were out of whack, and I had a difficult time getting the 5Bs to cooperate after spending so much time with very large marching sticks. 

Here’s the thing: it makes total sense — I wasn’t practicing on my drum set. The problem is that when you consider different percussion disciplines at high and higher levels, they start to have less and less in common. 

I never seriously considered marching drum corps. Part of it was that I didn’t even know DCI was a thing until I met a fellow freshman who was a snare drummer with the Blue Devils. But as I learned about it, I quickly realized that I was not cut out for DCI, unless I wanted to give up the drum set for most of high school.

Joining a drum corps is very difficult; it’s not necessarily cheap, there’s an age limit of 21, the standards are constantly rising while the opportunities are only shrinking; there used to be drum crops all over the country, but many of them have folded (which is drum corps parlance for a program going defunct, at least for competing).

In the Great Hands for a Lifetime ebook, Tommy Igoe has this interesting note to share when talking about marching bass with the Bayonne Bridgemen in the early 80s:

It’s sad that this piece of true Americana, this wonderful youth activity that introduced so many kids to music and structure, is now a fraction of what it once was in terms of available participation.

Sure enough, his own corps shuttered in 1988. And this was an observation Tommy made almost 15 years ago. 

It’s difficult to succinctly explain the skillset needed to march in one of these ensembles. There’s visual uniformity of your playing, strong rolls at some very demanding tempos, near the same level of faculty with triple strokes and even quadruple and quintuple strokes (and beyond), and every torturous thing you can imagine doing with flams.

And then there’s complete knowledge with any and all rhythms, including all manner of tuplets, tuplets on offbeats, tuplets that stretch over the barline, and tuplets on dotted notes instead of traditional half notes, quarters, and 8ths (that is to say, 5:3 rhythms in 4/4 and the like).

You’d need to be familiar with all of this at a relatively young age, and this is really a starting point. It’s not an easy ask.

College provides more possibilities for marching at a higher level, but much like DCI, I didn’t march in CU’s drumline because I wasn’t cut out for it… unless I shelved my drum set development. It was easy to strike the balance in high school since the stakes were lower, but not so much at a college level. At least, not for me and my situation — if I were a more serious marcher in high school, it may have worked out differently. But who knows what would have happened to my drum set playing back then?

Ultimately, I am a drum set player, and getting better at playing the kit is what I need to worry about. As such… alto sax it was! (A topic for another day perhaps; I did do basketball band on the drum kit, which was great for me. Again, maybe we’ll discuss that more later.)

So, yes, drumline helps you on the kit, but to a point. Joining a drum corps to get better on a drum set is not a good idea. You will lose a lot of time to spend practicing on a drum kit and get a skill set that, while powerful, ultimately won’t translate to the kit well in its entirety. 

If you have access to a marching program that’s enough to take seriously without completely consuming your life, I would do it. Otherwise, maybe just watch from the sidelines. Or YouTube. There’s plenty of drum corps sheet music out there for you to play at your leisure anyway. Still, though, if joining a serious drumline is a big personal goal for you, have at it. Just understand the compromises… but you should be damn proud of yourself if you make it.

* ^ By the time I was a junior in high school, I was mainly playing timpani in concert band, but I’m not sure I could write about that experience at length since it didn’t leave the same impression on me as marching quads did.

† ^ In case you were wondering, part of my school’s marching band did play at the premiere of this thing, which was a fun experience to be sure. If only the movie itself were as fun. Truth be told, I often forget it even exists.