Tailgate Smoker

Tailgate Smoker is a collaboration between Fat Matt Drums and Drumline Hits, and I am especially pleased with how it turned out. My ideas in this thing kept feeling stale the more I tried fleshing them out, but adding some fresh blood to the mix really did the trick.

Organized into seven movements and clocking in at a whopping 2’24’’, this piece will give your line lots to say and plenty to play to bring that heat on game day! Weaving between intricate licks and heavy grooves, this cadence offers enough to satisfy any fan’s hunger for beats, and the structure affords for easy adaptation to suit any performance venue. Whether a passage is simple or complex, challenging or repetitive, the faithful execution of dynamics by the ensemble will be crucial to the effectiveness of this music.

Sheet music is packaged as a PDF binder including a score, printable battery parts, and optional parts for 4-drum and 5-drum tonal bass lines (original arrangement is for 6 bass drums).

Kick Rocks

Kick Rocks takes a very simple syncopated pattern in the bass drums and layers it with some basic accompaniments in the snare and tenor parts to pack a big punch that nonetheless offers very limited demand for vocabulary and ensemble cohesion.

Sheet music is packaged as a PDF binder including separate scores for 4– and 5–bass arrangements, as well as printable battery parts.

Pound Sand

Pound Sand is a parade cadence that punctuates a round split between the bass and tenor voice with a recurring accent pattern in the snare drum voice. Despite its simplicity, it offers great opportunities to maximize dynamics and shaping, and everything should fit together nicely without too much investment of rehearsal time.

Sheet music is packaged as a PDF binder including separate scores for 4– and 5–bass arrangements, as well as printable battery parts.

How It's Done

How It’s Done is a street beat that was originally written for a drumline with only snare, bass, and cymbals as the instrumentation. I have since added an optional tenor part, and you can compare the recordings with and without to see how the part complements the base arrangement.

It opens with a short bass drum cadence that includes a quote (top two basses in measure 3) from the classic SCV bass drum cadence that dates back at least as far as 1979. The main groove at rehearsal letter A does some sleight of hand, where the snare part of the first four bars of this phrase repeats, but offset by a quarter note, with the bass part slightly modified to prevent uncomfortable rhythmic clashes. A reprise of the bass cadence, colored by some different textures in the snare part, gives way to a segment adapted from a memorable lick from the 1999 and 2000 productions of Carolina Thunder (Independent World-Class WGI ensemble from North Carolina that was active for four seasons from 1998–2001, which produced a lot of the educators I learned from in my early drumming career). Measure 23, which is part of this larger lick, is itself a quote of the old SCV Lezginka lick.

For those unaccustomed to repeat terminology in drumline music: the music is performed from the top until the “D.S. al Coda” at the end of measure 26, at which point you go back to the symbol (rehearsal letter A) and play up to the “To Coda” marking at the end of measure 13, at which point you jump to the coda at measure 27 and play to the end.

Zapatitos

Zapatitos builds out of the traditional taps from the anchor bass that most marching units use to stay in time (when they aren’t playing music or drumline cadences), and it also uses this idea as a musical motif to build up to the reprise of the main groove at the end. A simple walking bass line is coloured with texture from the snare drum before a lyrical melodic line is introduced by the tenors, and then more or less the same thing happens again. Nice mix of highs and lows here, and it should be plenty of fun without too much commitment of rehearsal time.

Big Game Hunters

Big Game Hunters is a groovy street beat that’s all about textures. Snares and tenors play splits as separate groups in a couple places, so watch out for that when reading the score (I tried to draw attention to it). Also, there is a lot of visual flair written into the snare part; it repeats, so just get the motions coordinated, and you’ll be golden.

I was inspired to write this piece after seeing a college line in Utah rocking it with no cymbals and whose tenors had multiple toys (Agogô bell AND wood block!), so I am providing the original arrangement in this style, the “Wasatch Front” arrangement.

But what about those big Southern drumlines with plenty of power and size, whose performers have plenty of fun in their eyes? Enter the “Tobacco Road” arrangement, scored for either 5 or 9 bass drums, tenors with only one toy (an Agogô bell), a couple of other subtle changes, and definitely yes cymbals!

EDIT 21 February 2023: Fixed some noteheads in bars 2-4 of the snare part

Powder Keg

Powder Keg is an explosive street beat full of motion, energy, and groove, with some tasty licks in between. The patterns should all feel quite good in the hands, and this piece, having a somewhat limited vocabulary, would likely suit any line willing to put in the work.

Robusto

Robusto creatively employs repetition and a fairly limited rudimental vocabulary to create many cool moments and grooves across the battery. Don’t get me wrong: there are many challenges here. However, many of these challenges are repeated so many times that a little bit of practice goes a long way for every performer. And for the most part, these challenges will be more mental (rhythms, dynamics, and ensemble cohesion) than physical (chops).

A college or high school line could enjoy this one while knocking it out of the park, although a high school instructor should be cognizant of the rhythmic challenges (particularly the syncopation in the bass line) and whether they fit into the wheelhouse of the performers who are earliest on their journeys as rudimental drummers.

Main Stage

Main Stage is a heartfelt homage to the heyday of Big Room house music at massive EDM festivals like the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, EDC Chicago (RIP), and Ultra Music Festival in Miami. Simplicity commands immense power, and from 2013–2015, you could experience it in its purest form, louder than Hell, with top-shelf lighting and pyrotechnics, and a whole lot of energised people eager to eat it all up. With changing popular taste and the questionable future of big festivals in the United States, it is nice to look back fondly on a very special moment in time, exemplary of the zeitgeist and a generation coming of age.

From a more practical perspective, if you’re going to write a cadence whose main bass drum groove is just quarter notes, you should really only do it once, and you’d better knock it out of the park. So if anyone asks about that crazy beat your line is playing, just call it ID – ID.

Cottonwood Crunch

Cottonwood Crunch uses simple dynamic phrasing and a little bit of visual flair to bring life to a very straightforward rhythmic idea. Nice and accessible, this piece could easily be embellished with repeats, endings, and section soli content in order to bolster the composition while still playing to your performers’ strengths. Enjoy!

Relaxation Time

Relaxation Time is a straightforward street beat that was written for a parade band that included drumlines from three different high schools; accessibility and adaptability were the goals here, but this piece still manages to create some interesting moments and pack a nice punch too!

Strut

Strut is just what the doctor ordered! A solid one-minute street beat that’s reasonably accessible and gets a lot of variety out of a few simple ideas. If a pattern is tricky, it will appear a few times, so that a little bit of woodshedding can go a long way with this piece. A college or high school line could have a lot of fun with this one.

As a bonus, I’m including a score that has parts for differently-sized bass drum lines, since not everybody rolls with 5 basses. If you’re looking for more stuff arranged for differently-sized bass lines, my offerings through Marching Monk and through Tapspace include extra parts for differently-sized bass lines (2–9 basses, and 4–9 basses, respectively).

Hike

Hike is a university-level street beat that takes you on a syncopated journey through boisterous grooves and minimalist ditties based on a rhythmic motif that permeates your percussive adventure. High risk, high reward… nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Fox Hunt

Fox Hunt is a medium-level street beat that’s always in motion. A high school could rise to the challenges of this piece, and a college/university could play it really well without being bored. Lots of nice shaping in the tenors, with different textures used across the whole battery, creating interesting moments that either shatter or satisfy listener expectations. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Fat Matt street beat without lots of power and excitement at the last rehearsal letter.

Bass Cadence

This Bass Cadence served as the introduction to NC State’s arrangement of Spider for many years. It has since been retired, so I want to share it here, since I have not written anything else quite like it. It is arranged for 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4-drum bass lines. The NC State version is the 9-drum arrangement, while the VDL recording is the 6-drum arrangement; I am providing both for reference.

Stop Breaking Down

Stop Breaking Down is a bass drum cadence with an optional full battery component, inspired by the Widespread Panic cover of that tune… particularly Dave Schools’s catchy bass line.

EDIT 21 February 2023: Fixed a typo in the flam taps in the tenor part of measure 16.

The X-Ray Climb

The X-Ray Climb is the result of playing around with MuseScore notation software for a couple of evenings, just to try it out. MuseScore is a free musical notation program that has a free extension for drumline notation and playback. It’s a pretty solid piece of software, and it’s absolutely amazing for the price! There were only a few things that I gave up on trying to figure out how to do (like adding my copyright notice, so I just did it in PowerPoint), and it was intuitive enough that I could write something new and original by just playing around with it. Like when you play around with a new musical instrument (like a bass or guitar), and there’s just something fun and interesting about it which helps to direct your ideas, leading to the creation of a new song… there was something about the experience that made this cadence what it is, and I am very pleased with the result. For comparison (and because I am especially proud of my VDL mixes), I’ve rendered the same composition with the VDLite sound library.

Thunder Horse

Thunder Horse is a rhythmic tour-de-force that employs variations on some very basic swiss triplet patterns to create a range of groovy feels that relentlessly push forward. Add some Agogô bell in the quads to really bring the funk, and make sure you've got a good handle on different dynamics, because you're gonna need it. 

Quad Damage

Quad Damage is a groovy street beat with plenty of advanced soli licks supported by battery impacts that tie everything together, so there's never a dull moment. This is a "new" piece, but all the elements existed in an old Finale file (pre-2011) that I recently dug up, where I had collected ideas that never made it into other pieces.

Malignant Narcissism

Malignant Narcissism is a street beat based on the eponymous instrumental by RUSH. The notes should all be very physically achievable, but there are some moments that will be very demanding of ensemble cohesion. Don't hurt yourself!