The CB700 snare drum was fun to set up and make playable, and it sounds nice. But the short lugs meant I couldn’t tune it as high as I’d have liked, and I didn’t want to risk breaking anything. So I’ve tuned it as high as I safely can and put it up for sale cheap.
Enter what will probably be my final marching snare drum purchase.
The truth is that I want to have a marching snare in my collection, and I want it to sound and feel decent. I also won’t be marching a whole lot in the future — Long Covid has made things more challenging and reduced my stamina — but it would be nice to have one on hand when I want to set it up in a park and chop. I found an older Pearl snare drum from around thirty years ago. It needed some parts and I got it very affordably. Best of all, it came with the throw-off hardware and original nylon snares intact. (The nylon snares alone retail for nearly $90 new, and I wasn’t up for paying that much. I could have swapped in wire snares but they would sound very different.)
After adding replacement heads and tuning it up, I’m pleased with the result.
I’ve been wondering about the state of marching percussion these days. Not the high-tension or the Kevlar heads, those things are what they are. But the idea that the top drum lines in DCI, WGI and BOA can march a brand new line of snares, tenors, basses and all the carriers and stands, and then turn around and sell them to another group for two thirds of their original and very high price. Meanwhile, the poorest schools go begging for scraps and are forced to use forty-year-old drums that are literally falling apart, because they cannot afford to repair or replace them.
Modern marching snare drums can retail for between $400 and $2,000. Tenors and bass drums cost as much or more. Consider the average number of drums in a marching battery and the cost of outfitting an entire drumline can go into the tens of thousands of dollars.
The average DCI drumline changes drums every single season. That’s $20k to $35k every single year. And while I can appreciate that marching drums get heavy use, I cannot imagine why any corps or band would need to replace an entire drumline every year. Heads, rims and bolts can be replaced. And while there’s often some scheme involved whereby a DCI drumline can buy drums partly on time and then sell them to pay off the remaining balance, it all still seems so wasteful. It runs along the lines of DCI corps and the top BOA bands ordering new uniforms every year, a trend that did not exist until roughly ten years ago and which is now standard practice.
(Keyboard percussions can also be changed and upgraded, though I can’t imagine it’s on a strict yearly basis. A new marimba can cost upwards of $10,000 and most DCI pits have at least five or seven.)
The degree of waste in the modern marching arts is appalling to me, and it should be appalling to anyone else with a pulse. With so many schools struggling to serve low-income communities, it seems patently unfair that things should be so out of balance and so wasteful. I think that’s part of why I’ve had a hard time relating to the modern marching arts, and why I probably won’t follow them so much anymore. I’m content to play for my own pleasure and let the whole scene move on without me.
I was able to find most of the marching snares I’ve had over the years for anywhere from $0 (the Slingerland single-tension I got a few years ago) to $100 (this Pearl marching drum). Depending on condition, I’ve been able to get them all working again for anywhere from $10 to $40 in replacement parts and some elbow grease.
I’ll try to find some time and space to chop on it tomorrow during the day, and post a video later.
