As we get ready for band camps and marching band you might be stressed as a non-percussionist band director wondering what to teach. Or maybe you are a percussion instructor who has a young line and knows they need the basics, but doesn’t want to write out a bunch of stock exercises because who has the time? Well, I did. There are a variety of websites that have hosted exercises like these over the years, but I’m trying to make equipping your line easier than ever by offering the written exercises for basic drumline warm-ups plus notation files so you can change them to your specification. Do you have seven basses this year? Keep the snare and quad parts the same and change the splits. Marching flubs? Copy and paste the easy stuff and water down the hard stuff! As always, these are offered completely free and offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. The full product description is down below and you can download the file from the “All Products” page. Remember, you don’t have to put in credit card information. I hate that Squarespace makes it look necessary, but it isn’t. Your email is the only thing you need to download the packet.
Product Description:
“Why would one reinvent the wheel? These are exercises that have been used by various drumlines since the dawn of the activity. While one might find the time to trace these back to individual drumlines, the fact of the matter is as follows – these might be stock, but they work. This collection is not a definitive breakdown of every technique that one might ever use in playing in the marching activity, nor will it challenge more experienced players, but if you are a band director without a percussion instructor playing through these and teaching them to your kids will set them up for success on most stock marching band shows. Each exercise is written for a bass drum line of four students and tenors that include one spock drum. Since no drumline is uniform, every exercise includes both the Sibelius file as well as a MusicXML file for use in Finale, MuseScore, or Dorico so you can edit the parts as necessary to add basses, remove cymbal parts or add a flub line. If you want to use the exercises as written, a PDF file is included along with a recording rendered in Virtual Drumline 2.5 for realistic playback. All cymbal parts are basic and assume that the cymbal line needs to work on developing basic techniques and are tangentially related to the exercises that the drums are playing.
Includes full battery arrangements of:
-8 On a Hand + 8 Variations
-16th Note Timing
-Double Beat and Triple Beat
-Chicken and a Roll / Triplet Burr
-Paradiddles and Paradiddlediddles
Also includes unison lines of:
-16th Note Grid
-Triplet Grid
-Triplet Diddle
-8 and 25
-Fulcrum Rolls”