Hey hey hey, I've play in both pit and drumline.
I'd say both are definitely hard, but in different ways. I definitely get pissed of when someone in one says the other is easy. ("oh lucky you're in *insert section here* you don't hafta do anything this season!" OH MY FREAKING GOD)
Drumline is harder than pit in these ways:
-Those drums are heavy. And you carry them on your shoulders with a harness. THEY ARE HEAVY. (I still need I chiropractor)
-Marching is also harder than it looks. You have to have really good balance and everything.
-It might not be notes, just rhythms but the music is STILL hard. And try marching and playing it right AT THE SAME TIME.
-You spend all day outside either in the freezing cold for winter season or the boiling heat for fall season (which summer band camp is part of)
Pit is harder than drumline in these ways:
-You have to hit the right notes without looking down
-TECHNIQUE TECHNIQUE blah blah blah... (Especially with four mallets. We don't want our mallets flopping around hitting wrong notes)
-You have to stay late after practice to clean up, and also push around heavy instruments
-With timpani and auxiliary percussion, it might seem easy as heck, but it takes a lot of counting and you have to cover a lot of distance with your arms to get to the right place on time. Also playing mallets with crazy runs and cymbal crashes and stuff.
That's not all there is for either of them, but those are some of the main points. I mean, from my experience, both are about even. I mean, I say we've just all got a case of "the grass is greener and easier to mow on the other side" with the pit/drumline conflict.
I think what we've got to look at is how both of the sections work together, I mean, would a band be the same without them? And they do all of the music for winter percussion season without winds! I say that the whole argument is just a ridiculous waste of time. I've played lots of instruments other than percussion too, and those are just as hard. They're just DIFFERENT.
Also, as far as just general awesomeness, I think that the pit and the drumline are both really cool. I mean, they both have certain traditions, and inside jokes, and really cool people.
RESPONSES:
In response to Shannonigans_x:
Shannonigans_x
Bass players to me have it easy.... you have fairly simple rythms and the only thing that poses any effort is counting which beats you play on. This statement just isn't fair. I played bass my first season, and it was very hard. I mean, my band is a very... good band (I don't want to brag, but our writers don't like the sound of the word "mediocre"), but bass drummers have a lot of hard stuff. Some basslines DO have that trait, but not all. YOU try playing sextuplets at 210 and then say bass is easy. And I've NEVER had a "pass the bread and butter" rhythm (don't know the technical term
crying ) in pit out of the two seasons I've done it.
Now, I think that overgeneralization about bass sounds like it's coming from someone who has played concert bass drum before. I may be wrong, but from my experiences, concert bass drum is NOTHING like marching bass drum. You should try playing it some day. Maybe you'd be challenged, or maybe your bass line is a 36 measure rest kinda bassline. I dunno.
Anyway, for your whole post, I agree, obviously that both are equally challenged and important.
In Response to Horse lady:
Horse lady
but pit is just full of outsiders, trying to set up all our equipment as fast as we can during competitions and performances. I know exactly how you feel about the injury. That's why I did pit in the first place, and I ended up liking it. But the pit IS excluded from the band. And I don't necessarily think it's all the marchers' fault. I mean, the pit (and this is all based off of my experiences) seems to me to separate themselves a bit from the rest.
I mean, drumline in my band have to warm down with an exercise and carry drums back to the band room and that's not to mention when drumline gets cleanup duty, but they still participate in group activities with the winds.
When I was in pit, they'd leave announcements when it was time for the group huddle, so we could go clean up, so when we were halfway to the bandroom, the marchers were ust getting out of the group meeting. Then members of the pit would try to complain about how the marching section(s) assigned to help us for that practice weren't helping us, and I'd just think "well that's because we didn't give them the chance to help!"
I mean, pit does get ignored a lot, but we also just don't
try very hard to be part of the band as a family.
In Response To Alchemic Kraehe:
Alchemic Kraehe
The drumline is made up of the front ensemble/pit and the battery. It's not drumline and pit. My apologies if this bugs anyone. It's a pet-peeve of mine.
I'm sorry about me calling battery "drumline" the whole post. It's just that nobody in my whole school uses the word battery to refer to anything but their phones. Things are different from school to school.
+++ I also loved the rest of your post, though. Marching bass is some hard shiz, especially when you get weird syncopated middle parts. XD
ALRIGHT ONE LAST RANT (auxiliary percussion, aka "rack") This winter season, I'm playing rack for the first time in my whole career this winter, and though our school is known for their history of having one person cover, like, 3 people's worth of rack during winter season, I think rack players deserve a round of applause for being able to play that many instruments at once.
In the beginning, when the music is still developing, it's almost just all rest, but when you get further into the season, you get lost trying to figure out how you're gonna get the suspended cymbal for a measure, then crash AND sizzle on one, then switch mallets for a bass drum on two, then get all the way back to your trap table and pick up the triangle stick AND the suspended cymbal mallets for the crazy triangle parts on all upbeats starting on count three of the same measure then you hafta do that cymbal roll with no time to spare to drop the triangle mallets, then off to the china cymbal... all at 182 bpm.
Some schools have not so much to their rack, and have more people doing it too, and our school's rack part is a LOT easier for fall season, but the rackies deserve some sort of props.
(In our school, there is this family that has three of the siblings in band, and all of them have been on rack. The oldest is known for just being a great musician, the middle is known for BUILDING things to make it so that he was physically capable of getting to the parts on time [and for that time he threw up next to the synth during a full run and kept playing, but that doesn't matter O_o] and the youngest had to cover bells AND rack during winter season.)
Soooo... yeah. Those are my opinions. The end.
*note: i did not mean to bash on anyone in any way. everyone is great. 
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