The Art of Establishing and Running a Drum Team - Drum Band

Before doing anything else, if you've never done it before, I recommend attending a few empty communities run by others before starting your own. This is not necessary, but joining a few groups can help you get a sense of how they are organized.

If you can't make it to a session locally, you can find those communities on YouTube. Let's go over some facts first, and we'll dive into the musical content later.

Logistics of the establishment of the drum community

If you're a pretty good drummer — or if you know some great drummers — you can start a circle to socialize, improve your playing, or just have fun. If that's the case, you'll need five or six participants, a venue, an agreed date, and some drummers (djembe, bongo, conga, etc.). Try to find the lowest-cost locations possible, including community centers and churches in many areas. In addition, it may be a good idea to split the cost of the venue rental among the attendees. The length and frequency of sessions is up to you. However, I recommend extending each session from 1 to 1.5 hours, with breaks in between.

It is advisable that everyone bring their own drums, but it doesn't matter if there are a few spares for newcomers who might want to join. Of course, there is always someone who will forget things!

Have a plan

There is no need to have a detailed plan for each session if you are building a community of professional players. Planning can be beneficial if you are relatively new to this type of drumming. A plan that doesn't seem to fit the ethos of the free-play community, but it takes time to build to fit the improvisational, meditative flow. Planning will keep you fun and in control of your practice sessions when working in groups.

Time often goes by pretty quickly when it comes to community drumming, so consider having a master plan that includes only a few items; then there are other additional content for you to use at the end of the session.

If the group continues to meet, you don't need to keep some of this activity for future meetings. There are also loads of online resources with different drum games and exercises that you can apply to your community if you run out of ideas.

Here are a few things your plan should include:

Communicate team information, including introductions, schedules, and boundaries.

When starting the group, it's a good idea to take five minutes to introduce and briefly outline any information about the group or place, which can be helpful if you know this information well. And if you're on a break, let everyone know at this point. It's usually not necessary to outline clearly-bound expectations.

However, it may be worth mentioning any relevant reminders about paying venue rent, venue rules, and some easy-to-forget etiquette points, such as not touching when people are talking. Start at a comfortable and gentle pace - especially at first. Of course, you'll want to start drumming as soon as possible, but it's amazing how quickly a session can go by and you don't want to 'burn out', right?

If necessary, explain the types of drums

If there are a few new people in your group, take a moment to explain each drum sound. Show off the different sounds you can make with each drum and explain the best way to play each drum. This process only takes a few minutes but can make the session better for everyone.

Start-up games

The first few sessions can often get you started with some warm-up games. We'll talk about some of these later in the article, but again - don't rush. Let everyone experience each game, enjoy the process, and get used to playing together.

Introduce three or four rhythms

One beat at a time, introduce three or four rhythms to the group. Take a moment for each beat. Let everyone enjoy playing together and get to know each phrase rhythmically.

Don't underestimate how challenging some rhythms can be to those who don't normally play in drum circles. Five minutes of play per beat is probably a reasonable amount of time. If it helps, you can use short sentences, movie titles, landmarks, and other spoken phrases to let people play each beat correctly.

Here are three examples:

Introducing dynamic changes

Explain how the group can use dynamic changes to develop musical diversity. For example, when everyone is playing together, you can raise and lower your hands to signal to the group that they should play louder or lower.

Finally, you can eliminate this hand signal and encourage the group to listen to (and monitor) each other's dynamic changes.

Divide the group into halves, thirds or quarters and assign a rhythm to each group

In doing this, the idea is to get the whole group used to playing clusters of different rhythms simultaneously while staying on time with each other. This is a new area where everyone can be difficult at first, so if your team is a collection of newbies, start with two simultaneous rhythms and build from there.

Save time to play for free, starting from quarterly notes

It's a great idea if you have some free time in each session—even if it's only for the last ten minutes (though you can certainly spend more time than that when everyone is more confident).

If you're new to drumming, you could try getting everyone to start playing the notes simultaneously at 80bpm. Then invite everyone to branch out by improvising their own simple rhythm that develops naturally over time.

Starting this way can help ensure that everyone stays in sync and helps the team maintain a consistent pace.

Try to encourage people to remember some helpful musical principles — like dynamic variation — and remind people that they don't have to play all the time.

Sometimes, the occasional miss can help create more variety, and that's not a bad thing.

The balance between planning and exhausting work

Try to find a balance between over-preparing and over-preparing. Like starting a campfire, it's all about the right balance between ingredients, activities, and timing.

Ring drumming is often best enjoyed when there is the freedom to play and improvise without many boundaries. However, new circle drummers may find it difficult to improvise without a structured process guide.
Of course, the opposite is also true. If you fill every session with structured activity, you risk strangling the spontaneity of each session. In the end, things can feel stale and sessions can come to a halt.

The goal is to use structure to give people a foundation to build on, then gently remove that structure so that people become more and more confident when improvising.

If balance can be ensured, you will see progress in the session.

Finally, you can start each session with a warm-up game or two and then move straight to freestyle drumming.

Game Start

Here are some warm-up games that can be a good start to your session. They are especially good for beginners, but they can be used in any context. There are plenty of drum circle resources online, so search them up further on Google!

The Name Game

The Name Game is a great way to introduce people to each other and it can help relax people. Each person takes turns playing three notes and then says their name. Try to make sure that each person says their name on beat four and the next person starts playing on beat one.

This is a simple game, but it can be complicated for non-drummers, so feel free to play it twice if necessary and show encouragement throughout. To make things more complicated, you can use some more complex rhythms for the first three beats and try increasing the tempo quickly.

Finally, you can repeat this game over and over while changing the category for each round. So you can — for example — find out everyone's favorite food or their favorite TV show.

Mirror Game

In this game, one person is assigned to play a beat and the group has to repeat it for them. So again, try to make sure everyone stays together when they do this.

You can start by playing a few rhythms yourself and then assign other members of the circle to try. You can increase the tempo, make the beat harder, and add things like dynamic variation to make this more complicated.

Phone

This is like the Mirror Game, only this time a rhythm has to be passed through the circle. Again, you can start things off with a few beats before handing over responsibility to other team members.

As with Mirror Game, you can try increasing the speed, changing the dynamic level, and making the rhythm harder to play. You can also slow some rhythms right down and - for seasoned circle drummers - play two different rhythms in opposite directions.

I like to play drums

In this game, the moderator says the phrase, "I like to play the drums." As for the word "drums", everyone should play their drums once. Make sure everyone plays simultaneously and concisely.

You can then say that sentence faster and slower, varying the speed to try to get rid of people who are in their game.

You can change things up even more by leaving out the word 'blank' - or any other word(s) in the sentence. Despite the lack of words, each drummer must still play simultaneously when they get to the point where the word "drums" will be spoken.

For example, you could say, “I like…”

Here, the words 'play the drums' have been omitted, and each participant has to imagine the words and play at the right time (you can also remove all the words from the sentence and see if everyone still has time). no). For a bit of fun, you might decide that they have to put the drums down and not play until the game restarts when someone gets kicked out.

You can choose the "champion" of the game based on who gets to the end without getting caught.

More inspiration

If your circles meet regularly, you may end up finding yourself looking for ways to add variety to your sessions. The following ideas are designed to be a starting point, not a destination.

Each can be used as a starting point. Then music can be allowed to grow and develop spontaneously from these original ideas

Drums from a picture

Ask the group to bring a favorite photo, picture, or painting to class. Then select one of the images to place in the center of the circle. Use an image as a starting point for drumming. This is highly subjective and not true/false. A stormy sea image can inspire a great deal of improvisation in 6/8; A macro photo of an insect can conjure something quieter and faster.

Beat a drum from an object or animal

In this approach, everyone in the group takes turns naming an object or an animal. From that list, a person is selected. The next drum sound comes from the qualities of that choice.

For example, an elephant might inspire loud, slow, pounding drums, while a sports car might evoke fast, pounding drums.

Drum from a phrase

As we discussed earlier, sometimes using a phrase is a great way to start. This time, the group doesn't have to play every syllable of the phrase — although this is a great place to start — instead, the meaning or sound of the phrase might suggest something interesting.

For example, when I was at school as a child, we would play a game where you had to avoid walking on cracks in the sidewalk. We say, "Don't step on the crack, or you'll fall and break your back!"

Using this stage, the word 'don't' can be found in the center of the djembe; "Back" and "crack" can be found on the edges. The group may start by playing the syllables in the phrase but then develop different rhythms and other musical ideas. It is possible that the team tried to focus less on the syllables or sounds in each phrase and instead chose to focus on its meaning.

For example, the phrase “There's a rain brewin” can be paired with each drummer playing something that sounds ominous, tense, and dark. The popular lyrics "The sun has got his hat on and is coming out to play" can conjure something light, playful, and quick.

Epilogue

Drums in circles can be a lot of fun. If you're a seasoned drummer and know a bunch of good players, you can start a round of drumming quickly once you've prepared the logistics. If you're at a lower level, I hope this article has presented you with a few ideas to help catch the ball and shake up the sessions a bit along the way. If you don't know a lot of drummers or are new to drumming yourself, you may need to develop your circle slowly and patiently — bring people to you and have fun.

Feel free to take these ideas and work with them or change them up in various ways to suit your team. In the end, however, the best way to start an empty circle is to reach out to some friends and get started. So I hope you do the same and have fun with the process.

In the following article, we will talk about getting started with a lap drum in a school or care facility. It's a valuable thing to do, and sometimes it pays well — so keep that in mind. See you in the next posts!

See more:

Electric drum

Mechanical Drums

Drums & Percussion