Buy The Best Drumsticks & Percussion Gear With This Great Checklist! Drumsticks and mallets sorted by percussion section: This checklist of percussion essentials will help you find the best drumsticks and be prepared for anything related to drumming: Drumset, drumline, or concert percussion! These items are sorted by section, so check out what you might need by your instrument. Check the gear out below… Photo credit: Leah Hetteberg Drumset / Concert: Innovative Percussion Drumsticks Drum Pad (Practice Pad) Drumstick Bag The Innovative Percussion drumset drumsticks are perfect for withs ..read more

New Free Drum Cadences, Free Drumline Street Beats, & Free Drumline Cadences! Download and use these free cadences with your group! In the spirit of more free drumline music, we’ve just added three new free drumline cadences, drumline street beats, and drum cadences for drummers at all ability levels. From beginner to advanced, that’s a total of nine drum cadences added for you for free! Check out the free drumline exercise and music page to download them. With four main drum cadences included for free on the drumline warmups page, as well as in the pre-built instructional packet, that m ..read more

FREE Winter Guard Music & Winter Guard Soundtracks for Your Ensemble If you’re looking for a winter guard music edit or a winter guard soundtrack and need the best price you’ve found it! Guards rely so heavily on their music that it’s important to make sure the quality is high and the editing is perfect. However, the show music also needs to be competitive, which is why you want to work with an experienced sound designer to create your sound. Patrick R. F. Blakley at WinterguardMusic.com has been performing, directing, judging, and designing show music for WGI groups for almost 30 years ..read more

Most drummers will find a good assortment of cool drumset accessories simply by browsing online or watching drum videos, but some drumset accessories fly under the radar! This is a list of some of the best drumset accessories drummers can buy which is made up of some clever solutions to interesting problems, and can also help you become more creative in your playing! Let’s trim the fat and get right down to business!   1. Quick-set Cymbal Nut: Quick Release Nut for Cymbals     These quick-release cymbal nuts will help you load-in and load-out faster at gigs and shows. These cli ..read more

Meshuggah – Gods of Rapture Here’s the long-awaited second installment of the Steering Wheel Rhythms posts, and it’s actually a two-for-one special with Gods Of Rapture by Meshuggah! There are two sections of this song we’re going to break down the rhythms for: The syncopated section of the intro and then the repeated rhythm under the guitar solo as a bonus.  Note from our legal department: PatrickRFBlakley.com and its authors shall not be held responsible or liable for any loss, injury, or damages resulting from the use of these materials. Steering Wheel Rhythms, and all other musical ..read more

Buy Unique Drumline Apparel and T-shirts for Marching Band and Indoor! Recently there has been some demand for drumline apparel and custom t-shirts for marching percussion. I’ve decided to push this into several specific areas of marching percussion and drumming in general. There are even some colorguard and winterguard apparel as well! (I know how much winterguards like to keep it in the toaster.) If you don’t find what you like please feel free to contact me and let me know what you would like to see in the shop, whether it’s a design idea or just different clothing options for a current d ..read more

Note: This post has been condensed into a dynamic formula that can be found here. Enjoy! The Easy Speed of Sound Delay Calculator for Marching Band and Drum Corps has been described in a previous article, but we both know that it’s a tricky concept to explain in pure text form. Recently I’ve been working with my friend Pat McNeil to design an online field graph to help visually interpret the equivalent sound delay on a football field. First though, a huge thanks to Pat for his help with coding this, please check out his site at PatMcNeil.net to get in touch or check out his content. . Speed ..read more

Animals As Leaders – The Woven Web Breakdown Introducing “Steering Wheel Rhythms” to the PatrickRFBlakley.com percussion articles! Steering wheel rhythms are going to become a regular installment with sheet music representing certain parts of various songs. Usually, the songs will involve quite intricate rhythms or phrases and they’ll also tend to be from songs that make us want to pound them out on our steering wheels! Note from our legal department: PatrickRFBlakley.com and its authors shall not be held responsible or liable for any loss, injury, or damages resulting from the use of these ..read more

Terre Hill, Woodard, New York State: Surrounding History & Exploration An essay by Patrick R. F. Blakley Ok, it’s been a while since I posted anything here, but it’s with good reason! I’ve recently just completed a 17,500+ word research paper focused on the Terre Hill area of Woodard, NY inside the town of Clay. This is not at all drum related, though I did sneak in a marching band fact with historical relevance. I don’t blame you if you just scroll past this one, but if you’re in the area you might feel a little compelled to check it out! I’ve also included a family tree as well as some f ..read more

Sound pressure level decibel decay over distance calculation This information goes hand-in-hand with Sound Delay Calculator and will help you calculate the sound pressure dampening across different distances! For the below calculations, we’re going to use the altitude at sea level, use a scientific pitch of C6, and imagine the playing field as an anechoic chamber, put simply an isolated area without an echo. This allows us to simplify the calculation and we can then use that relative information in reference to environments on the marching field. We’re also going to do any calculations with o ..read more