The Plymouth State Drum Line: PSU's New Heart Beat

By Geneva Sambor; For The Clock

On April 27, 2017

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The Plymouth State Drum Line: PSU's New Heart Beat

Geneva Sambor

For The Clock

gmsambo@plymouth.edu

Plymouth State University Freshmen Parish Dawe-Chadwick and Chase Gaudette are both passionate about bringing spirit to campus, and both responsible for assembling the new PSU Drumline. In just under two semesters, the co-captains have successfully transformed the drumline into a recognized student organization, and have arranged to play at hockey games in the Fall and Accepted Students’ Days this Spring.

The Clock: How did you start the PSU Drumline and why?

Chase: Well, we started in pep band and we decided that there wasn’t enough instrumentation in the pep band and we noticed that there was a surplus of drums for a drum line, and we realized that you can have a pep band...well, how did you word it?

Parish: You can’t have a pep band without a drumline, but you can have a drumline without a pep band.

The Clock: What is the difference between a drumline and a pep band? Do they serve different purposes for campus?

Parish: Well, they both really serve the same purpose, but again, you go back to the old days where people would march into war, they’d have their drumline, and their fifes and all that. Then nowadays you have the pep band to bring energy and hype to the school, like at sporting events and all that stuff. And the drumline serves the same purpose, but it’s a more, I guess, simple sound. You have percussion, and but in that [simplicity] there’s so much complexity to it and people love hearing that, like, when we play one of our jams, Trade Off, people love it because it sounds like a drum-kit and it’s upbeat, people can recognize it, and...

Chase: I also think there’s more of a visual aspect to a drumline than a pep band with all of their instruments.

Like you can do stick-flips, and you can do like some really cool trading with drums.

The Clock: What was the first event drumline played at?

Chase: We started at a hockey game. I made sure that we had our name out there, I started out making posters and making advertisements and stuff like that. Parish was the one who got in contact with someone n AllWell to get us into the hockey game and that was...that was in November. We got a lot of compliments after the game. It was great. I loved playing it, people loved us, and people were dancin’ around. I remember one guy who had like an octopus hat, and he was rockin’ out to it. That’s like...we did our job. That was what we were looking for, people having more spirit.

Parish : And then from then on, we just started playing more stuff and really getting our name out more.

Chase: There was another hockey game after that, and then once we realized that there was want for a drumline, we wanted to build up a better drumline. I mean, we had five people at the hockey game, so we decided that we should get more instrumentation, more drums for our group, and to do that we would need funding. So, we decided that if we were an actual organization, a recognized organization through Student Senate, then we’d be able to get funding or alumni grants or something with the Student Senate. Parish started that whole train and got more advertising going.

Parish: Originally we tried to start it as a class in Silver, but it wouldn’t really...it didn’t work out that way, because it would have been better in the beginning as a student organization. I reached out to my old band director from high school (A. Crosby Kennett High School), I was the multi tenor player, one of them, in our high school drumline. My band director and I talked and she gave us a lot of good direction and then the current captain of that drumline sent me sheets of the grooves that they have, and we used those to play at the hockey games. Then, we wrote up our constitution for Student Senate, sent that in, and we were able to show people a video after the hockey games. They were like, oh wow this is really cool, we need this on our campus. And so, Student Senate really liked us and they let us through.

The Clock: How did you go about adding more members to drumline? Parish: In the beginning we had people that I knew really well, people that I talked to. And, I just kind of pulled them into the line and they really liked it. The same people have really stayed throughout, except for a couple people, because they really love the line. Going forward we’re going to be recruiting through our posters and storming campus to really build our name so that hopefully at some point, the PSU drumline is a household name around Plymouth.

The Clock: Describe what the drumline did on Monday, April 17th for Accepted Students’ Day.