Becoming A Drum Major Essay

To become an exemplary leader, one must first possess prior knowledge of how to follow a leader. One must know how followers feel before they act as their leader. Luckily, through my experience as a member of the band, I learned how numerous different types of people learn and reason; which marks one of the reasons I believed I was a favorable candidate for drum major. The path to becoming drum major was not an easy one to follow, but definitely worth it in the long run. At the end of this path, I acquired the chance to place my mark on the band, to help change and mold it into an efficient machine and better in general; a chance that fills me with glee and excitement.
In the beginning, my decision to try out for drum major remained unclear,
It was only a few days before the tryouts and I still needed to set aside time to practice the commands; that goes to show that too much practice on one thing hurts if one does not pay attention to how much time still available to them. Fortunately, as a captain, I already experienced working with the vocal commands, and with my time spent in MCJROTC, I already knew how to project my voice in a clear and concise way that people can both hear and understand what commands I give. Whistle commands gave me extra stress. Only two of them exist, but they sound extremely similar in the middle of a parade and easy to jumble up and use the wrong one. Even the drum major of the previous year mixed up the whistle commands every once and a while. This combined with the fact that I never manipulated a whistle in my life gave me a quite grim outlook. However, practices held after school, at which the field sergeant and drum major give advice and show the potential drum majors how the world of being a drum major operates, gave me much help and insight on what I needed to work on. After a day or two of receiving help on my whistle commands I was confident I could perform them without messing
That was the day we stepped on the podium. A fear of falling plagues my life, which made all of the confidence brought to me before dissipate into a cloud of dust. I climbed up the steps of the podium for the first time and shook like a leaf; this was not exactly my cup of tea. Regardless of this fear, I managed to survive my first time performing on the podium, but I had yet to add verbal cues. One of the cues that our band director, Mr.P, suggested was a stomp to indicate an exciting hit or drastic change in the piece; this terrified me. I cannot remember a time I ever felt as frightened of something as I did during my first time trying the stomp cue on the podium. I stomped, the podium shook, but I gritted my teeth, held my ground, and finished the routine identical to a