Meg Roussos / The BulletinFrom left, Tricia Connolly, Chris Guy and instructor Ed Best all practice drumming techniques during a three-day Scottish drum clinic at the Bend Fire Station Sunday in Bend.

About a dozen Central Oregon drummers spent the past three days immersed in the intricacies of playing Scottish drums.

“We are relearning our basics, which is actually really difficult,” Patricia “Tricia” Connolly, a firefighter with the Bend Fire Department and drummer in the Bend Fire Pipes and Drums band, said Sunday.

Connolly was among the drummers who took part in a workshop led by Ed Best, a drumming instructor from Southern California. The workshop, staged at the fire department’s training center on Jamison Street, started Friday and ended Sunday. Scottish drums include three types — bass, tenor and snare — all played to accompany bagpipes .

“We don’t play a drum set,” Best said.

The drums add different elements to a pipe-and-drum band’s music, Best explained. Bass drums create the heartbeat , or guiding rhythms. Tenors add notes, and snares provide pop.

“They embellish what the pipes are playing,” said Susan Jensen, pipe major for the Cascade Highlanders Pipe Band.

Jensen helped teach members of the Bend Fire Pipes and Drums to play the pipes. She started her own band about a year ago and figured members in both could use guidance on playing Scottish drums, so she and Mike Baxter, pipe major for the firefighters, organized the weekend workshop.

They brought in Best, who has been playing for 32 years and teaching for more than 20 years. As a 7-year-old in Pennsylvania, Best said, he went to see his father play the bagpipes in a pipe-and-drum band.

“I want to do that,” Best remembered saying of the drummers in his father’s band. His dad tried to persuade him to play the pipes, Best recalled, but when he realized he could not change his son’s mind, he introduced young Ed to some drummers.

Now Best, 40, travels the country and meets with students online to teach them how to play the Scottish drums. Along with teaching drummers a range of drumming skills, including taps, bounces and buzzes, Best teaches tenor drummers tricks with their sticks, such as twirls, that they can do during performances.

Jensen called such moves “flourishing” and explained how they add to the look of a band.

“That’s strictly for show,” she said.

Like many of the drummers at the workshop, Redmond’s Bill Adams, a member of the Cascade Highlanders, said he played drums when he was younger and wanted to get back into drumming. He started about a year ago and is learning the nuances of playing Scottish drums.

“We do a lot more than keep time,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7812, ddarling@bendbulletin.com