Tenor Drums in Marching Bands

The tenor drum is just one of the a lot of drums employed by American marching bands. While now most normally located in parades and on football fields all through halftime shows, this instrument has been employed given that the mid-19th century by a assortment of composers. It is a reduced-pitched variant of the snare drum, a different marching band staple. On the subject, the tenor drum is very easily acknowledged, as it is carried in mounted sets of a few to 6 drums. This set up enables the musician to pay many drums at the same time, including to the richness of the percussion.

Tenor drums are performed with a large variety of implements, all of them a variety of mallet or drumstick. The heads of these beaters might be created of a wide range of products, including wood, plastic, nylon, felt, rubber or fleece. The drumheads of tenor drums are ordinarily as taut as attainable, generating a comparatively higher-pitched audio that is extremely helpful in outside scenarios.

As mentioned, tenor drums are carried and performed in sets. The title of a established generally refers to the range of drums it has a “quad,” for illustration, is composed of 4 drums. Just about every drum in a set is of a distinctive diameter and hence makes a different pitch of audio. Both of those the loudness and the selection of the tenor drum make it a important addition to marching bands. A band might have as lots of as 6 tenor drum gamers, every single of whom can have as a lot of as 6 drums for a grand whole of thirty-6 devices. Tenor drums are typically applied to accent snare drums, but they also add melodic percussion.

A established of four tenor drums will ordinarily be organized so that the cheapest drum is on the player’s considerably still left, the 2nd least expensive is on his much suitable, the 2nd highest is on his center left and the best is on his middle correct. When a tenor drum is performed, it is struck close to the edge of the head. This sort of a system will allow the drum to task optimum resonance and tone. As for the strategy that governs switching from one drum to the upcoming, there are two main systems. The more frequent consists of permitting the drumsticks to shift across the drums in a straight line. This model decreases the amount of place the player need to vacation by means of, therefore quickening his execution. The other technique dictates that the participant follows an “arc” from a single drum to the up coming. The arc system was a lot more common in the before days of the tenor drum and is almost never utilized now.

The use of tenor drums in marching bands may well likely be attributed to their classic use in navy drum corps. In these circumstances, the devices re applied for timekeeping as perfectly as musical purposes. In a armed service drum corps, three forms of tenor drum are employed: the flourishing tenor, which is characterized by the player’s remarkable drumstick movements the alto tenor, which is played in tandem with the bass drum and the rhythm tenor, which is employed to accent the snare drum part.