What’s the best thing about marching drumming? Leader of the Gothenburg Drum Corps in Sweden, Per Björkqvist, asked me this question some years ago. I gave it some thought and answered, “everybody can join!”. And yes, if you have fun pieces to play, you can arrange them for all levels so everybody can join.   

In this booklet, Per Björkqvist has written drum parts for three of my pieces from Easy Duets (previously published by Edition Svitzer). These parts have their roots in “warm up exercises” often used in the world of drum corps. Per and I hope that these pieces can get everyone to play together and further strengthen their interest in playing percussion ensemble music. 

Daniel Berg 

As a percussion teacher, you need to inspire your students to play different instruments, musical styles and concepts. We need to work on lots of layers to get the students to groove and learn new things, often inspired by their friends in a social community. There are three important roles for having a successful climate to grooving: 1. you need to play together with others; 2. you need to understand what it’s about and; 3. you have to learn new things every time.   

Often, there is too little time to rehearse everything that you want to work on in a rehearsal; warm ups, time keeping, period playing, rudimental drumming, new tunes and so on. In these three tunes, we tried to combine a lot of these ideas. Our first goal is to let the students play a lot and have fun, (it’s much more fun to play then to count rests). You can add one or more of the percussion parts to the great pieces that Daniel has written, depending on the setting of your ensemble and level of your students. Good luck and have fun!  

Per Björkqvist