Greater Richmond Pipes & Drums

The Greater Richmond Pipes & Drums are a 501c3 organization who's mission is to teach and promote Scots-Irish culture through music. We specialize in the great highland bagpipe and pipe band drumming. We would like to reach out to the Richmond area home school community to offer our services in teaching your students music, whether the pipes or drums. You might be wondering what credentials we have as educators. We have two middle/high school band teachers on our Executive Committee. The majority of our drum corps have degrees in percussion from VCU. Our primary instructor teaches percussion as his full-time profession and was a percussion instructor for Collegiate and several of the Henrico area high schools. We 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. We primarily teach highland bagpipes which would include 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, As well as 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.