Aight, so towards the end of the school year last year i was a junior. We have stone age drums and i had been after him to raise some funds for new equipment. My BD comes up to me one day and hands me a marching catalogue and tells me to pick out what i want but i have to keep it under $X. So i pick out some stuff since our current drums are older than anyone at the school can remember, and give him the list that he says he'll order. So over the summer I'm totally psyched to come back in August and get to play totally rad new drums. I walk into the band room a few days earlier than everyone else to see if i can help put the new stuff together and get organized. It turns out that my BD never actually ordered the stuff, he "forgot to" So to compensate for not ordering them, he goes out and buys a couple cowbells and toys for people to play. Now, we're stuck with our old Yamaha fieldcorps snares and Mcormick's (I've never even heard of this brand before) Tenors and Basses. We only have 2 Functional snares, 1 1/2 sets of tenors (one set is decrepid and barely hanging together) and 4 basses (all of which are missing a fair amount of lugs). This really sucks for the rest of the people that want to get into drumline but cant. Now they are stuck marching tamborines, cowbells, etc. I am sooooo pissed.

Has this ever happenned to anyone else?

i heard that man my schools drums are old and he says hes going to get new ones but i will be in colloge before the line will use them and i tried to get him to put stick carries on my snare(im the only one) and he said he would but never orderd it i say he never will ethier

This may sound dumb, but if you need money, you could always try fundraising for it. Ya know, hit up big and local businesses for some money, then you could order stuff yourself, and not have to rely on a band director.

we were gonna do that but then he chimed in and said he would pull some money.

That totally sucks. I would be so mad. Thats really messed up how a band director will do that!

LOL. In my opinion, all band directors should be percussionists!!

Ya, mine is a trumpet player, so you can imagine what he thinks of percussion.

I'm pretty sure he forgot on purpose. He's a trumpet player so you can see that he really doesnt give a Monkey Man bout percussion. What really pisses me off is that a few weeks ago in concert band, he told us that he has about $3000 worth of sheet music that he was gonna send back. Serisously, with that much money we could totally get new stuff, but he just doesnt want to spend it on what we want. Also, about a month ago he was talking to us about not having enough people marching, but he's the one that decided to make marching band optional. He also complains about the band not sounding good, but the reason we don't sound good is because our equipment sucks. I think that he thinks that after my class graduates, the classes below me wont care about marching band so he wont have to buy any new stuff.

Oh yes, we did have people with tamborines and cowbells on the field. he made MARCHING optional, but everyone in band has to go to the games and play in the stands. We only have about 10 drums that people can actually play on so all the other percussionists play the toys, i even remember someone playing the vibraslap.

I can relate with the whole band-director-being-a-trumpet-player-so-percussion-isn't-important thing, but all I can say is make the best of it. Equipment does not determine how good a band is. Your playing will determine how good you are. It will, however, help or hurt morale. Since your line doesn't like to be seen with old, dirty drums, it makes you feel somewhat inferior. Ever notice that when a line gets new drums after having the same set for 10-20 years, they talk about how good everything will be?

If it's your last year, then it's too bad that you had to use those, but now you can look back and go on to bigger and better opportunities. Colleges and drum corps have the budget to offer you the best anything, whether it's the drums, instructors, or just the experience.

true, one of the main problems is that the middle schoolers see us playing on these crappy drums and decide to either not march or quit band altogether. We're not a bad line, its just that it would help a lot if there were enough drums for everyone to play.

Man that’s gotta suck. I went to a brand new high school so all the equipment was brand new. Sadly in the 4 years I was there all the hoops on the basses broke and one snare broke, the tenors were the only things to survive.
Our BD was a trumpeter but he understood what the drummers needed. He and I are good friends. We made sure the line got things that it needed. The only problem was Yamaha sent us two snares, one bass, and one tenor that were the wrong color. So that was annoying. Then when ever we would order heads we'd only get a few of them at a time so it made putting new heads on a real hassle.