Click, Click. The universal drumline code for “relax.” This one marked the end of the homecoming halftime show. It was sub-par, nothing too great, nothing too bad. I was pleased at the time, but as I walked back I was given reason to think I shouldn’t be. Lucas, the drumline instructor called for everyone in the drumline to come back and have a quick chat before we took our third quarter break. All sorts of things were running through my head; Was it that ‘J’ in the closer tore? Was it the sticks we dropped in the drum feature? Was the opener slow? He started talking, “That was one of our better shows.” What the heck does that mean? We never get that short of a talk! I try to be patient as Lucas continues, “I have something to tell you guys..
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I walk out to the trailer thinking to myself, “This practice is so awkward.” We take our drums out and Zach, the previous bass drum tech, walks up just in time to start rehearsal. He will be leading them from now on. Everything goes normally, until we get to what would normally be the end of fours. The battery relaxes and waits to move to the next exercise, but then the metronome gives a handful of even faster clicks. Zach’s voice rings out, “Don’t tense up, the moment you squeeze is the moment you fall behind.” We start the next rep, quicker than we’ve ever done it with Lucas. Everybody squeezes at some point, 168 was hardly our comfortable 144 beats per minute. Next, we learn a new exercise, Gallop. A simple double stroke warm-up with one goal, make every single note sound exactly the same with as much volume as possible. As we get into the snare complain that the exercise is easy, to which Zach challenges that he could play it louder than the entire 5 person snare line. They egg him on only to find out the obvious, we no longer have Lucas as our instructor. Zach plays the exercise with all of the power of a thunderstorm contained in his hands. Then, he taps off the first snare drummer. It sounds like a light rain on a tin roof, nothing compared to the first. He had shown us that we had a problem, everybody was short changing their second notes, as a result we were losing a tremendous amount of
I walk out to the trailer thinking to myself, “This practice is so awkward.” We take our drums out and Zach, the previous bass drum tech, walks up just in time to start rehearsal. He will be leading them from now on. Everything goes normally, until we get to what would normally be the end of fours. The battery relaxes and waits to move to the next exercise, but then the metronome gives a handful of even faster clicks. Zach’s voice rings out, “Don’t tense up, the moment you squeeze is the moment you fall behind.” We start the next rep, quicker than we’ve ever done it with Lucas. Everybody squeezes at some point, 168 was hardly our comfortable 144 beats per minute. Next, we learn a new exercise, Gallop. A simple double stroke warm-up with one goal, make every single note sound exactly the same with as much volume as possible. As we get into the snare complain that the exercise is easy, to which Zach challenges that he could play it louder than the entire 5 person snare line. They egg him on only to find out the obvious, we no longer have Lucas as our instructor. Zach plays the exercise with all of the power of a thunderstorm contained in his hands. Then, he taps off the first snare drummer. It sounds like a light rain on a tin roof, nothing compared to the first. He had shown us that we had a problem, everybody was short changing their second notes, as a result we were losing a tremendous amount of