If you’re interested in becoming a drummer for American Rev War reenacting, congratulations! The hobby absolutely needs more dedicated drummers and fifers.
It’s important to know however that musicians play a pivotal role in the running and organization of these events. Just like drummers were historically the communication devices, drummers at reenactments are also used to communicate to those attending the event.
For that reason, before you should expect to be used on the field, there is an essential list of beatings and skills that you need to master.
In this article, I will detail the beatings and skills you need to know and why they’re so essential.
Essential Skills
The absolute minimum you should learn before attending an event as a drummer is how to stand and walk like a drummer.
You should work on these skills at home first:
- Standing with the drum slinged.
- Keep your core tight, chest out, and head up (aka don’t look down at your drum!)
- Holding the drumsticks in the proper traditional grip
- Striking the drum properly and making a decent firm sound
- Be at least able to strike the drum, even if you can’t yet play any rudiments or beatings.
- Marching while carrying the drum.
- Keep the drum centered on your body and not moving around.
- (aka, that the drum doesn’t swing behind your back or between your legs!)
You might be surprised by how many drummers attend events year after year without mastering those four things.
Without these 4 skills, you won’t be able to perform even the most minor of duties. Focus on these first and, even if you can’t play much, you will look like you know what you’re doing!
Quick Note
These four essential skills are not as easy as they might sound. They do require practice and some instruction to master these things.
However, you should easily be able to see why these are the four essential skills you need before you can even think about moving on to learning drum rudiments and the duty beatings.
But, at least, with these four skills under your belt, you could attend smaller events with your unit. So long as you can march with the drum on and firmly strike the drum, you could keep a very simple cadence for your unit.
However, don’t expect to necessarily be allowed out on the field or to brigade with the rest of the fifers and drummers until your skills have advanced.
The Core Beatings
Once you’ve mastered the basics of carrying and striking the drum, you can focus on learning some of the most important duty beatings required at reenactments.
Essential Drum Rudiments
Snare drum rudiments are like the scales for the drum. Rather than having different pitches, we use different sticking patterns to create different sounds.
There are there are only two rudiments absolutely required to learn some of the most basic duty beatings:
Spend a little time mastering these rudiments. Once you’re able to play them with reasonable confidence, you can learn any of the following duty meetings.
Click on the links above to learn more about the history of these rudiments.
Things to Learn First
Probably the most basic requirements to be a functional field drummer are the following:
- The Assembly
- The Preparative
- Cease Firing
If you can play these beatings, you can help to assemble your company and help with assembling the larger army. You can also be utilized during a battle reenactment or musket demonstration by playing the preparative (the make ready) and the cease fire.
- It’s important to work on playing these three essential beatings with precision and clean strokes. Many reenactors have learned to recognize these essential beatings but can only do so if the drummer plays them correctly and cleanly.
Things to Learn Next
Do you want to get to the next level of functional and participate more fully at larger events?
If so, there are a handful of other duty beatings you should focus on.
These include
- To Arms, or the alarm
- The Double Stroke Roll
- NCO’s Call
- Seven Stroke Roll
- The Long March
Mastering your Double Stroke Roll is certainly one of the hallmarks of becoming a proper drummer.
Specifically, the Seven-Stroke Roll, a short type of roll, is used in nearly every English or American cadence.
Once you have a good control over your Seven-Stroke Roll, as well as Flams and Drags, you can try the Long March. This is the most standard cadence played by Rev War reenactors while the troops are marching and can also be played to a large number of popular tunes, such as Yankee Doodle.
The other duty calls are necessary. At larger events, you may not be considered “fully functional drummer” by the drum major unless you’re able to play those beatings clearly.
Conclusion
Once again, it’s awesome if you’ve decided to jump in and become a drummer for Rev War events. Music played such an integral and essential role in historic militaries and we want to see that continue to flourish and thrive at reenactments today.
In order to make sure that we live up to that historic reputation and allow officers to utilize us as their communication devices, it really is essential that you learn and master these essential beatings as quickly as you’re able.
If you’re self-taught, as many reenactor drummers are today, it’s still very possible to become not only an essential drummer but a particularly skilled one with a little bit of instruction and well-structured practice habits.
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Subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out my series on “Essential Beatings for the American Rev War drummer”.
From more tips on structuring your practice sessions, check out some of my other blog posts coming up in the “Practice Tips” category.
