Greater Richmond Pipes & Drums

The Greater Richmond Pipes & Drums are a 501c3 organization whose mission is to teach and promote Scots-Irish culture through music. They specialize in the great highland bagpipe and pipe band drumming, and would like to reach out to the Richmond area home school community to offer services in teaching students music, whether the pipes or drums. They have two middle/high school band teachers on their Executive Committee. The majority of their drum corps have degrees in percussion from VCU. The primary instructor teaches percussion as his full-time profession and was a percussion instructor for Collegiate and several of the Henrico area high schools. They have three piping instructors, two of which are full-time piping instructors and currently teach pipes at Benedictine College Prep. They are also among only a handful of Open grade pipers in the state and have competed at the highest level at the World Pipeband Championships.

Instruction includes learning how to read music, either standard notation or percussion. They primarily teach highland bagpipes, including marches, dance tunes and piobaireachd (classical piping music). Highland piping also translates to Scottish smallpipes and border pipes. For drumming we teach Scottish snare, tenor and bass, marching band, orchestral, rock and other popular forms. Scottish band drumming is similar enough that it will help the student prepare for college marching band if that is something of interest.