I started playing drums at 12 in a drum and bugle corps. Gave me a solid foundation in the rudiments.
Later on I took up rock and blues which required more heart than technical skills and I always felt that by starting out my drumming career with the precision requirements of field drumming that it held me back from developing my abilities to express soulful drum riffs. But in my day I could do single, double and triple paradiddles and long rolls to perfection.
I still get chills watching top drum and bugle corps in action.
@aligncare Just about everyone in my family except for me, have marched in and or taught in drum and bugle corps - senior and junior corps. Even though I never marched (somehow spending my entire summer drilling in the heat, giving up my weekends, getting yelled at and paying for the privilege, just didn’t appeal to me : ) ) but that’s how I met my ex-husband (a drummer) – he marched with my brother in the Yankee Rebels and later the Reading Buccaneers and later my brother and both of his daughters marched with the Hathorne Caballeros. And that’s how my two of my nieces met their husbands and how my nephew (also a drummer) met his wife who was in color guard in the Crossmen when my nephew was a drum tech. My nephew taught percussion for several drum and bugle corps and competitive HS bands. He still drums but only as a hobby now. He has a drum kit in his basement and uses it as a form of stress relief and exercise.
It’s a running joke in my family that if it were not for Drum Corps, our family would be half the size it is now.
I do enjoy going to shows.
Here’s a video of one of my great nephews drumming at a junior show parking lot practice when he was only six years old. He even played a drum solo with the band that played at his parent’s wedding and blew everybody away.
His dad is a musician and now a music teacher but for a while played tuba with the Baltimore Symphony. My great nephew never marched in drum corps but took up the trumpet. And he was even a better, a phenomenal trumpet player and could have and should have pursued a career, gone to Julliard or Peabody. He was also a phenomenal baseball player, a pitcher who as a teen in HS was scouted by some MLB scouts. Unfortunately after his parents divorced he fell in with a bad crowed, got into drugs, got arrested, was really screwed up for a time. But lately he's gotten his life back together, is drug free and is on the right track and is playing trumpet again.
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