Repertoire
Show
This year's Marching Colonials show features music by Russian Composer Dimitri Shostakovich. Percussion parts were written by Steve Ballard, Brett Garrett, and Joey Rivera, while the show music itself is arranged by Jay Bocook.
Exercises
8 on a hand
A classic, simple exercise, designed mainly to warm up the hands. 64 counts long, each hand plays eight eighth notes. Each section has variations on this core concept, and the pit change scales on each rep, following the circle of fifths.
74-8
Although the reasoning behind the name has been lost in the depths of time, 74-8 is a pit exercise written in three parts, emphasizing offbeats and doublestops.
Accent-tap
This exercise is designed to train the player on the differences between accents and taps, and to increase accuracy over irregular intervals.
Swing Double Beat
A variation on the traditional double beat, the Swing Double Beat is in 12/8 time and is one of our longer exercises this year. It is meant to build up the chops of both the left and right hands equally, with an emphasis on the double bounce, which is an essential technique in drumming.
Green drills
A pit exercise devised by John Hamilton Green that focuses on scalar runs. The players play sixteenth notes, once up five steps, then down, then back up, then down, then up, then down, then all the way up to the eighth step, then halfway down as before, then all the way down to the tonic.
TJ Thirteen
This is a battery exercise that is new to the TJ repitoire this year and it is based on an exercise that is used in professional drum corps. It consists of 5 distinct variations followed by a 6th option to play all the variations consecutively.
TJ Paradiddles
This is an exercise that is meant to work on the paradiddle and paradiddlediddle rudiments. These two rudiments tend to appear a lot in the compositions of our instructors.