Atlantic Indoor Association

October 2011

Bill Bachman is a widely regarded, internationally recognized tenor drummer, drumset innovator and clinician. In a lengthy interview exclusively with this writer, Bill explores and explains his journey in marching percussion from North Texas to the genesis of his signature products.

In this episode, Bill discusses drumset players’ transition to quads, what he really thinks of snare drumming, and his own “clueless” time in high school. With total seriousness he talks work ethic and the online era of YouTube. This is the final part of a three-part series based on an interview in January 2011.

MK: What would you say about the – let’s start to get into the way a high school kid is thinking, or kind of where they’re at. You’ve got a high school drumset player who’s thinking about tenors, which is I know, sort of the most natural instrument for them, more than often anyway, when they look at playing in a battery. So what would you say about a young kit player who’s coming over for tenors. What can they take, what should they leave.

BB: I think it makes total sense to play drumset – let me back up a little bit. I don’t know why there are so many snare drummers out there. I think there’s a whole stigma of snare being the top dogs. But, I think, if you take any snare drummer and you put them with three other quad drummers, who are better players than him, and you add the excitement and fun, you’ll probably never go back. And plus, if you want to make a great corps, your odds are better of making it on quads.

If you’re a good snare drummer now, you’ve got an average quad pretty quickly and it’s a safe bet you’ll be glad you did it and you would never want to play snare again after that experience, as long as you’re playing legit quad parts, with the arounds and the other stuff. What I’d love to see is more snare drummers cross over to quads it’s just – it’s doing yourself a favor. Plus, matched grip is great for playing every other instrument where traditional is pretty much marching snare and that’s it.

MK: Right. The high school drumset player, then, he’s going to – the other thing that struck me when I got back from drum corps, at least the first summer or two, was – coming back to the drumset, coming, let’s say, from the tenors. So what, how do tenors – with the rest of the percussion section.

BB: Alright. When you play quads, the side-to-side element is almost like a little bit of a Moeller whip, built in. And so I think that’s why quad players tend to have more of a flow, because there’s so much more movement and you need to do a little less work to compensate for that. So I think it’s a more natural instrument to play as far as skills crossing over, into other instruments.

Being a drumset player, mainly, these days. I was initially a machine gun on drumset back when I was super young and extra clueless. So, there’s a stigma out there that drumline players sound terrible on drumset, and 90% of that is true.

All the control in the wrist-turns and the chops and the exertion. If you’re using your hands then you’re outputting, and that just sounds terrible on drumset where just it needs to breathe, so you need to be just as fluent as humanly possible, just sort of dropping the stick. And you need to be really good friends with the Moeller stroke, in order to get a good sound that you need, regardless of pocket, out of a drumset. So my hands – the further along I go, the more weird things my hands do, just in the interest of getting the job done and doing no more work than necessary. So it’s kind of cool.

With the rudimental background, I always have firepower to just throw anything out on the drumset I want to. But at the same time, rudimentally, I can play a lot faster and smoother than a lot of guys, because of the flow, and a lot of that borrows from Moeller. So they both help each other out well; you just have to understand what works here and what works there. What to do. You know, lots of guys are still overusing their chops when they play on drumset versus just getting the heck out of the way.

MK: Gotcha. Now, can we go back to your time in high school. Tell me about, when you were playing in high school maybe you’d seen drum corps on TV or your friend told you. You were playing in a high school line…tell us about all that a little bit.

BB: I was about as clueless as it gets. So, I was at High School High – podunk, clueless. I was a drumset player, I got Genesis in the seventh grade. So that was my focus, playing progressive rock and Phil Collins was my hero. And he’s still one of my favorite drummers of all time. People have no idea what he used to do to create.

So then we got a drumline instructor, and he kind of turned us on to that side of things. And by the time I was graduating, I guess I had some decent fundamentals but I was still pretty darned clueless. And I’d had no exposure to drum corps. My first – I remember marching Dutch Boy in ’91, I was the last cut from the snare line because of my traditional grip, and I ended up playing bass drum. And I remember lying on the floor at the drum camp, and I could only name six drum corps, and I had Madison and Cadets stuck in my head. So my first drum corps show was on the field. Dropping notes and missing sets. I sucked, I was bad. But I worked my butt off to figure it out.

Here’s another thing, sort of on a related note. Most young guys have absolutely no idea what it takes to do this stuff for real. You have to be so good as to your level of perfection, in order to get good. Fundamentals; the super flowing three strokes, the up stroke-down stroke, accent-tap control, it has to be so detailed and so ridiculously perfect that it has to be, you know, ridiculously good. So most people don’t know enough to know what is legitimately good to play at a drum corps level.

I talk about this at clinics a lot. I have a hundred snare drummers auditioning. I ask, “How many can play flam drags?” And probably 80% are going to say, “Yes.” Whereas in reality, you probably have about 15% that can play it with proper flow, sound quality, and height. There are probably about ten who can play it with legitimate, perfect rhythm. That’s how these things get narrowed down real quick. So, you take any fundamental hand motion or rudiment, and you have to turn on a metronome with subdivisions, and play it absolutely perfectly for twenty minutes, 45 minutes until you’re in a zone where your head feels heavy, get into a whole out-of-body thing and watch your hands go in slow motion. You know, that’s the only way to get good, is a massive amount of repetition to program the muscle memory to automatically play it perfectly, so that you can think about everything else. That’s it.

MK: That’s a huge task. Obviously there’s been a rise in the use of YouTube, and you don’t have to drive four hours once a year to the closest drum corps shows anymore. You have great drumlines, and you can watch great stuff. While that may not convey the hard work that those people are putting in, are you seeing any – in the most general way, because you travel a lot, are the players any better or do you think that that immediate kind of exposure to everything that’s online now has helped the players or helped the activity? I’m sure that it has, but…the players.

BB: There’s one of the biggest things, is just having a really good teacher. And there are kind of hot spots around the country. You can get all kinds of inspiration on YouTube. But if you don’t know how to use it, it’s worthless. I talk about this a lot.

These days, I sound like a grouchy old man. These days, everything’s free, everything’s instant. But they’re losing the actual value of things. For instance, a side note, music. If you download for music, if you download tunes for free, the ascribed value to that music is zero. So you can never expect the artist to make anything again because he can’t feed his family. And it’s the same kind of thing.

That’s why I haven’t written a book of quad solos. Kids will just Xerox copy, 2-4 pages and I don’t have that kind of time when I need to make money to keep my house and my family set. But, it’s the instant gratification generation where they watch it and they play along and they think they’ve sort of got it. But most people don’t have any idea just how much they don’t know. And so having a great teacher to do that is good. Because there’s more resources than ever. And some of them are actually good. You know when it’s free.

But generally, you get what you pay for. And if you pay for good materials, you’re off to a good start. And the biggest thing is: you get a good teacher who can actually take the information you have and help you apply it and act upon it. So I’ve actually been doing Skype lessons with drum pads, going back and forth, and I’ve gotten a handful of guys who are just totally reinventing their whole technical approach and it’s the complete transformation of a drummer. I love doing that. There’s stuff on my website about that. If you’re in an area where you don’t have a seriously solid, experienced teacher, the Skype thing is a possibility.

Do you have suggestions or submissions? War stories from the floor, questions or other interests? Email Michael Kirby at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .