Another reason the new Heavy Hitter pads are overpriced. Or everything is, actually.

Just found this for sale online.

Granted, the shell is probably done and would need to be replaced, or cut down and matched up with some shorter tubes to make it work again. Either step would make this a working drum again.

Someone got a little crazy with a torque wrench.

The drum retails new for around $500.

Selling it as is for $150 shipped is either a master stroke, or an indictment of the entire marching percussion industry.

Considering that the new Heavy Hitter pad (my favorite whipping boy for now) retails for a hundred bucks, it might be more economical to buy this drum, toss the shell, sell off the lower hardware and tubes and just keep the top as a super-loud practice pad. Those are selling for a couple hundred bucks anyway, and honestly, one of those will last you as long as a couple dozen of the Heavy Hitters.

 And you can change the head whenever you need to.

Now, to be fair, while the Heavy Hitter isn’t getting a lot of breathless adulation from me, I have to say that the whole damned marching percussion scene is slightly ridiculous these days.

And I blame it on the modern drum corps scene, with its bloated excesses of glamour and piles of money at the top-12 level. 

Today, a top-12 corps can buy a brand new drumline — drums, carriers, stands, covers and cases, for around $50,000, use it for a season, sell it off at 1/2 to 2/3 of what they paid for it, and start again the next season. Some big, well-funded high school band in Texas will happily spring for it, use it for several years and then sell it off to a smaller school for half of what they paid. Eventually, the drums wear out and have to be scavenged for parts, which will be sold in ragged condition for far more than they’re worth.

And yeah, the recycling is nice. But it’s not a solution when the starting price is more than the annual salary for a first-year high school band director at an average, non-powerhouse school.

The whole marching arts movement has become bloated, with overpriced gear and uniforms (LEOTARDS, people!). Top-12 drum corps have annual operating budgets of a million dollars a year. DCI itself is a juggernaut with an estimated 2024 budget of $28 million. And yet, the kids still have to pay in excess of $4,500 a season to march.

This is so far from the vision of the drum corps activity of forty or fifty years ago, when drum corps was an activity that gave kids something to do and keep them out of trouble.

A friend pointed out recently that childhood and adolescence are different now, and that high schools offer many kids the opportunity to march in a quality program (that is still too expensive for many families), and that with the advent of smartphones and the internet those old fashioned kinds of trouble aren’t as readily accessible by kids.

And yet, in order to get into a top-12 corps, you’re expected not only to play and march at the highest level, but you’re also expected, apparently, to be active on the socials and market your musical skills there, so that the corps you join can use your socials as another marketing mouthpiece. (I just learned this the other day by lurking on Reddit, where the kids generally hang instead of Facebook.)

I’m an old fart, I admit it. 

And this kind of sickens me.

If this is what drum corps has come to then I’m glad I’m not involved.

But it does help to explain why marching percussion gear sells for so damned much money with folks no longer bat an eye.

And it reinforces my love for homemade pads. 

The excess of the activity is really getting to me today.

I’ll just show myself out.

DCI will eat itself. And maybe it should.

Over on a drum corps discussion group, someone went to a lot of trouble to consider how Drum Corps International might be restructured as a response to the shrinking number of competitive drum corps, in order to keep the activity financially and socially viable.

It was a detailed plan.

And I think it would fail.

Here’s my response:

*****

Clearly a lot of thought and care went into this plan. But at the end of the day, there simply are not enough competitive corps left *in existence* to make it viable, for the management and funding of the activity or for the fans.

If someone saves up several hundred dollars (tickets/gas/lodging/potentially unpaid time off work) to travel to watch a drum corps show, they *might* fare better getting to a show that’s closer to home. If they do, how many will travel farther to see a second show somewhere else?

DCI has changed because the whole world has changed. While they have done an admirable job in bringing the marching arts to new levels of quality and artistry, it has ultimately come at the expense of high levels of participation. There are far fewer competitive drum corps today than forty or even thirty years ago, because there are now far fewer people who can afford to participate. (The root causes of the higher costs have been covered elsewhere.) DCI’s continued refusal to see this is evidence of the leadership’s own hubris.

As much as I love the marching arts, I can see a time when independent competitive drum corps in the style of DCI and national touring no longer exists, and it may well happen in my lifetime. Everything is just too damned expensive now, and wages and schedules and real life cannot keep up with the man-eating leviathan that DCI has become.

Want to save drum corps? Make it local and grass roots again, and make it smaller. Make it shoestring. Make it gritty and scrappy again. And reach out to the communities who are really good at doing gritty and scrappy. Examples that come to mind include orgs like Bay Ratz Marching Battery in southern Mississippi and Mad Beatz in Philadelphia. And don’t make it competitive, at least right out of the gate. Make it performative and community-minded, period.

The beats will be dirty to begin with. That’s okay. The average parent or city leader doesn’t care about dirty beats. They care about kids marching down the street in matching t-shirts, making beautiful noise and bringing smiles to peoples’ faces, and hope to their hearts.

DCI will eat itself. And that’s too bad. But that is what the weight of hubris can do.

Make drum corps truly relevant to the community again, and you just might save it.