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bartyount

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  • Your Drum Corps Experience
    Sky Ryders 90, 91 Bluecoats 92, 93 Jackson Generals 04,05,06 Bluecoats Volunteer 07
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    Jackson, MS

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  1. Thanks for the article and video Mr. B! I've been a Kenton fan since the 86 Suncoast show. :)
  2. I marched mello at Bluecoats in 92 and 93. We used 3-valve G Kanstul mellos both years.
  3. This is the crux of the problem - people don't recognize the music. I am pretty familiar with Cuban Fire and I only recognized about 2 bars of La Suerte De Los Tontos (aka "The Sweat of Tonto"). Also - you say "listen again". This is another big problem in my opinion. It seems to me that more and more, it takes multple viewings of a corps to connect with and start appreciating their show. The vast majority of people that see a drumcorps show during the summer attend one show. They don't get a chance to see it again. And so they don't connect. That could explain why you don't see growth in the fan base like you used to. We aren't creating very many new fans because it's only the people who are hardcore (hardcorps?) enough to go to multiple shows in a summer that are becoming fans anyway.
  4. 1990 was the first year I marched and first time I ever saw a drumcorps perform live and I was awestruck by Crossmen. Love that show - so full of energy and the intro is just supercharged!
  5. Crown was the only corps in the group you mentioned that was at the show. I was pretty bored too, so it's not that they wouldn't have enjoyed drumcorps regardless. The people that I brought have pretty diverse tastes and both generally like things like this that are sort of out of the mainstream. Also, one of them had been in, and enjoyed marching band in HS, and so is familiar with the marching music activity in general. They both were able to appreciate and were impressed by the talent and execution. It's just that nothing connected. If there had been a better lineup, the opinion probably would have been different. But I think that with a few notable exceptions, the shows this year were pretty uninspiring.
  6. I am grateful to have been exposed to a lot of new music through drumcorps. That being said, there needs to be some sort of balance. This summer, I took two people to a show who had never seen drumcorps before. They were completely bored. They did not recognize one thing that any of the 11 corps at the show played. And it's not that they're musically illiterate either, because I was only familiar with a few myself. And then to end with BD whose show had no melody and came across as just a bunch of noise.... (sorry to beat that dead horse to a pulp - but that was our perception). I was embarrased to have convinced them to go to the show. I feel like I wasted 4 hours of their life. I don't have a problem with corps doing new stuff or experimenting with different material/concepts etc (like BD). But remember - you have to do something to connect with the audience. There wasn't much audience connecting going on this year in my opinion.
  7. Yeah - I did it. I voted for Red Violin. In all honesty, it's hard to top 2008 and I should have voted for it. But I seem to be the only person on the planet the liked 2009 so I thought I'd give it some love. Honorable mentions to 2006 and 2007.
  8. heheheh ... good to see the "family" atmosphere I remember from my years in the Bluecoats (and still experience in all my interactions with fellow alumni) is still going strong. Blloooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wait... what? That was a Bluecoats thing? Uh-oh. No wonder I don't have friends outside of drumcorps.
  9. This is so true. Especially since Cadets and Cavies have gone longer than they are used to without a chamionship (5 years for Cadets, 4 for Cavies). They are getting hungry.
  10. Nice job man! You guys made us proud! Enjoy your nickel - you earned it.
  11. I agree that member retention is a huge factor (along with consistency of staff and some other things that were mentioned). I believe it's one of the biggest factors for Bluecoats current success. When I marched, Bluecoats was one of those "stepping stone" corps. Yes, we had our share of vets who remained loyal to the corps, but alot of talent moved on to the top ranking corps instead of returning to Bluecoats. In 1999 the corps dropped out of top 12 and the vets recognized that the competitive success of the corps depended on member retention and it was really emphasized and instilled into the existing vets and incoming rookies. You can see the results of the member retention in the progress made in their finals placements over the last ten years. But even in 2007 when they placed 7th, it was arguably the most talented corps to date. They just had the bad luck of it being a very competitve year (bad for them, but good for fans I think) where Crown was also up and coming and other established corps were all packed together within 1 point score-wise.
  12. Best of luck to Ryan! Hopefully he will recover quickly and in time for next season! Couple of comments: As for a member potentially injuring themselves further by trying to move - things are pretty fluid during the show - heart rate and adrenaline are super high and when you fall you don't really have time to sit there and assess the situation. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even realize his leg was broken. He did what members are instructed to do which is in the event of a fall, get out of the way to prevent further injuries. From everything I've heard, things happened relatively quickly. For people who didn't see the fall directly, they probably assumed it was just a fall and the member would recover. It would have taken a few moments to realize the seriousness of the situation. It doesn't sound like there was an unreasonable amount of time before someone went to help. So I wouldn't fault DCI or the Crown staff for the handling of the situation. Someone mentioned that they should have stopped the show. I think if the DM had recognized the seriousness of the problem, the best decision (in hindsight) would have been to stop the show. I don't think there's much risk in doing that. Everyone should be watching the DM and if he gives the cutoff signal in the middle of the show, everyone should know immediately. I was performing once where this happened because of the threat of lightning. Everyone stopped at the cutoff and we cleared the field and no one was hurt. Debilitating injuries during a show are extremely rare so there are no real procedures for that. I bet that will change. I would guess that the procedure from now on would be that the DM will be instructed to stop the show if there is an injury on the field.
  13. Sorry to hear that. I'm still perplexed by his article though.
  14. This whole article is bizarre. First we have the criticism of the use of the images of the cross in Star's 1991 Roman Images show: The third and fourth pieces in Roman Festivals is are "The Jubilee" and "The Epiphany" respectively. Both are references to Christian celebrations in Rome (Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire around 400AD) so I don't see why Mr. Smith would take issue with cross imagery. He then goes off on a tangent describing how a Texas HS marching band who had lifted the show from Star was in some "religion in public schools" controversy for using religious music and symbolism in their show. But he doesn't really follow up on this with a point. Huh? What exactly was disturbing and offensive? What statement does he think they were trying to make? It almost seems that he's saying that he doesn't like religious material being used in a drumcorps show but he makes no mention of Cavies show that year which was titled "An Advent Collection" so I'm still lost on what his point is. Then there's the fact that the whole Star issue seems to be an aside to his main point which is that drumcorps was moving away from entertainment and that we all needed to demand from corps that they go back to producing entertaining shows. Huh? I understand we have all have different tastes and opinions of shows but I think 1991 was a pretty darn entertaining year top to bottom. I can only remember the top 14 from that year because that's what's on the CDs, but I felt that all of those top 14 shows were great entertaining shows. To me 1991 was a good year for entertainment. If we were to compare entertainment value of 1991 to 2010 - 1991 wins by light years.
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