In percussion breaks... I tend to only write a 2 to 4 measure drum break.
If it's a percussion feature... I won't drag it out and make it booring. I'll write it so that my students can show what they can play and then move one... there's no point of having a long winded solo that will bore people. I hate it when groups just have a feature just to make their show longer.

The band marched to our right and left (we were in the center). They did snugglebunny of weird stuff. We walked up to were the drill set us (it set us up were we were standing about a measure before the break). When the actual break started it was (going from left to right, crowds point of view) Three Snares, Tenor, Four Cymbals. And Four bass drums 8 steps behind us.

The far left snare and far right snare marched forward. The Tenor and far left snare marched forward next to each other. The other two snares and the two middle cymbals marched backwards. We marched forward/backward 4 steps and did the matrix for 3 beats then on the 4 we came back up and marched back to our spots. The two cymbals standing next to eachother had a matrix cymbal fight and so did the two snares. Me and the quince were but he would have had to flip up his drums and it would have taken to long.

The bass drums did the same only the just did a 180 flipping the bass line instead of marching forward/back.
We also threw in a couple leans and steps forward/back.
It was great.

DCI drum breaks last year were mostly monotonous and forgettable. Everyone seems afraid to hangout for a while and play something cool – just a furious 16 counts of flying notes bordering on epilepsy.

Interestingly, the Cadets, who really didn’t have a discernable drum feature until 1995, now seem the most likely to develop a meaningful piece of percussion music during a show.

There were two 16 measure breaks in my school's show this year. Over the years, watching and playing with the band, I've established that my director likes to park the drumline and have the rest of the band do some random dances. There was only one show we played where it actually worked out well without making the band look stupid.

With a "Grease" themed show this year we had two awsome drum/pit breaks. The first was at the very beginning of Greased Lightining, it was eight measures of unrated percussion. The second came during Born to Hand Jive, thirty six measures of battery on rack in a call and answer to the trap set. Can you Hand Jive?

We never did anything like those. We play corps style. Straight up. I'm not saying we play as good as any corps, but we never take off our drums or do a groove section. Our breaks are meant to show off our playing abilities. Not necessarily rock out.

my high school had a break where the band was doing a sort of cavies style "dance" visual while the battery crabbed up and left... sectional solos.... stoppped... had a loud butt dut then threw in some crazy singles and into another loud butt dut.... then a huge groove section with the front ensemble

my last year of high school, we were doing "Godzilla eats Las Vegas" for our show and in the drum break we just stand in a arc, while the band did a scatter drill into a swirl on the field then they did the "follow the leader" run action (like they were running away from godzilla) when we reached the end of the feature we formed a block and all moved diagonally while everyone form around us for the frank sinatra section...

good times, good times.

this year, thanks to a new director who sucks at life, our "drum feature" if you can call it that, was 4 bars long. the one last year was kickin.

My high school band was less about large drum breaks and more about several 2 or 3 measure long fills.

We did have one decent one my junior year though. It was fun, we started low and quiet but eventually got to play all above our heads and basically beat the crap out of our drums (while maintaining form and technique of course).