A point to bear in mind is that there was a pecking order for who was issued what uniforms/cloth supplies were available. Quite often, you will see a certain number of completed items (eg coats) that are just enough to kit out, say, all the sergeants in a regiment. There were two reasons for this - one was the obvious one of shortages, the other was that it took at least half the calendar year to recruit a regiment up to field strength and it was therefore not until the autumn that the CO had sufficient men to justify big clothing requests for the rank-and-file (although there would often be a few re-enlistees and "spring thaw" recruits at the start of the campaign season).
From Katcher's book and the two Ospreys, depending on the amounts delivered, it looks like the order was usually, but not definitively:
- officers who could not afford their own uniforms
- sergeants (including drum/fife majors)
- musicians
- corporals
- privates
So if only 3 or 4 suits of clothing were delivered, the officers got them, with perhaps 1 to the sergeant major.
Thus, something would often be supplied to distinguish the musicians in a unit where the rank-and-file were all still wearing civvies, or such a mish-mash of items that the unit effectively had no identifiable uniform. The drum-major and fife-major might often have a sergeant's uniform which was heavily laced in order to distinguish them from the other NCOs.
RtL