Tenor drum
A tenor drum is a membranophone without a snare. There are several types of tenor drums.
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Early music tenor drum or long drum is a cylindrical membranophone without snare used in Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. It consists in a cylinder of wood, covered with skin heads on both ends, that are tensioned by ropes. Played with two sticks, this type of drum varies in pitch, according to its size.
In a symphony orchestra's percussion section, a tenor drum is a low-pitched drum, similar in size to a field snare, but without snares and played with soft mallets or hard sticks. Under various names, the drum has been used by composers since the mid-19th century. It is particularly noticeable in scores by 20th-century English composers such as Benjamin Britten and William Walton, and American composers such as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber.
Tenor drums are used as a marching percussion instrument, commonly as mounted sets of 4-6 drums allowing one person to carry and play multiple drums simultaneously. Other names for these drums include names specific to configurations by number of drums: "duos" (2 drums), "tris", "trios", "trips", or "triples" (3 drums), "quads" (4 drums), "quints" (5 drums), and "squints," "hexes," "six-packs," "tenors" or "sextets" (6 drums). The number-specific term "quads" is often used as a generic term even for configurations with more than four drums.
Typically there are four main drums, usually either 8, 10, 12, and 13 inches in diameter (which is referred to as a high school configuration or small block tenors) or 10, 12, 13, and 14 inches in diameter (referred to as a Corps configuration or big block tenors), plus one or two accent drums (typically 6 or 8 inches in diameter)). The accent drums are also known as shot, gock, spock, or spike drums; they are usually tightened as high as they can go to achieve maximum effect. Other percussion instruments, such as cowbells or cymbals mounted to the rim, are sometimes also added.
The purpose of the tenors in the marching band is to add more color to the music. In big lines, there can be as many as 6 tenor players. Many high school marching bands will have one to three tenors, while it is typical for World Class drum corps to contain as many as five or six. They tend to supplement the snare part, and often the tenor parts are rudimentally identical to the snare parts. Movement around the drums allows tenors to function as melodic percussion, as each drum has a different pitch.
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