A bit of a bucket as yet, feel free to chuck more in.

General[edit]

• http://www.hpb.dk/artikler/gb/Young_and_Chatto-History_of_the_military_drum.pdf A Brief History of the Military Drum Leading to the evolution of Pipe Band Drumming Drum Major Wilson Young and Drum Major Allan Chatto OAM
• http://www.miayf.org/percussion/ Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, percussion section
• http://www.percussionclinic.com/infoorc.htm#snaredrum Percusssion clinic, snare drums and other instruments
• http://www.promark.com/pmProductDetail.Page?ActiveID=3917&productid=172 pro-mark, scroll around various stick designs
• http://www.vintagedrumguide.com/ history of some drum brands
• Sensations of Tone is available from several sites, including both online browsable HTML and downloadable PDF

Suppliers[edit]

• http://lapercussionrentals.com Los Angeles Percussion Rentals has lots of interesting factoids. They manufacture bell plates for example.

Orchestral[edit]

• http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/thesoundexchange/the_orchestra/sections/percussion/ site of the Philharmonia Orchestra (UK)

Hornbostel-Sachs[edit]

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/texth/Hornbostel-Sachs.html Hornbostel-Sachs classification system at Virginia Tech.

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/ The Virginia Tech Music Dictionary home page, which gives indexing that the above link omits, at the cost of a narrower text window and no useful URLs.

Some VT definitions not all that helpful either, eg drum kit refers to a drummer in a rock or jazz band, a narrow view of some classical musicians one feels, there is now neo-classical music arranged for flute and three drum kits, for example, and the site links to pitch from the phrase pitched and unpitched and pitch links to tone with no other useful information and tone gives no useful information at all, so there's a chain to follow to try to define pitched (percussion) but it leads nowhere.

Also some VT definitions are just plain wrong, eg http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/textc/cymbal.html currently reads A percussion instrument made of a circular brass plate...... No, most cymbals are bronze (see cymbal alloys) including all mainstream orchestral and jazz and rock cymbals. A few beginner's cymbals and a very, very few specialised cymbals and nearly all toy cymbals are brass. A common mistake, unfortunately, and while bronze may be an ambiguous term avoided by some (but not by cymbal makers and enthusiasts, as of yet anyway) the term brass is just plain wrong here. It's a bit like saying that violin strings are made from fishing line... well, on some toy violins they are...

http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/cimcim/uymhs03.pdf Revision of the Hornbostel-Sachs Classification of Musical Instruments by the MIMO Consortium, 8 July 2011

• Percussion Instruments and their History by James Blades (London: Faber & Faber, 1971) ISBN 9780571088584 .
• The Oxford Companion to Music.
• A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. (Original four volumes (1878, 1880, 1883, 1889) available online.)