Auditory communication is utilized by many avian species for territorial defense and sexual selection. A primary mode of communication for woodpeckers (Aves: Picidae) is drumming in which an atonal acoustic signal is generated by rapidly beating the bill against a resonant substrate (e.g., tree). Similar to bird song, woodpecker drums exhibit characteristic patterns, including frequency (beats/s), length, and rhythm. Given the patterns evident in these features, we wanted to determine whether a consistent pattern of amplitude could be observed in woodpecker drums. To investigate this, we analyzed audio of Downy Woodpeckers (Dryobates pubescens) drumming from both our own sound recordings and those publicly available from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Xeno-canto. We measured sound amplitude from the waveform of each recording as the peak amplitude of each beat within a single drum. Beat amplitudes were then normalized to account for the variation in amplitude scaling between recordings. We found that most drums begin with a “ramp-up,” where the amplitude increases within the first few beats of a drum. The other characteristic patterns of the drumming signal—frequency, length, and rhythm—vary from one species to another and may be integral to species recognition. The observed ramp-up pattern in amplitude may be encoding communication information, but we speculate that it may also reveal evidence of elastic contributions to this physically challenging behavior. We intend to broaden our dataset to include additional woodpecker species to see if this pattern holds.