TopBass

Heaven and Hell, freedom on earth. Not in DCA's eyes... (I'm still amazed that gets bleeped, every time) Okay, nevermind. I got in a big PM argument with Poodle over Hell and filter circumvention. All for naught, I guesss... See, I wanted people to know I said Hell No! and not #### No!

I have an unnamed source (think West Wing) in MBI that says they are working with the decision makers to change the bylaw wording to not exclude any one corps. I also have it that pretty much none of said decision makers and corps managers even read DCP. I encourage you to contact your corps up-and-ups and ask them about this issue directly to see what their stance on it is. As someone has said earlier there is only one side of the argument being "debated" here and it also seems like everyone's mind is already made up on who the bad guys are. The answers are not always that easy. Sounds a lot like politics. Everything gets polarized on one or two key topics (gay marriage for instance) even though there are hundreds of other things that are more important than what people do in the privacy of their own homes (like recreational drug use.) Standard Disclaimer: I by no means represent MBI, my views are my own, blah blah blah, I'm not even marching next year. Anyone looking to buy or sell a house? I'm now a full-time Realtor. (I can help even if you don't live in the Twin Cities. That's Minneapolis and St. Paul if you are from the West or East Coast and not here in fly-over-land.) Disclaimer II: I love the Renegades, I hate performing after the Renegades at DCA because they love you guys out there, I don't support a rule that excludes you but sometimes think you guys go too far at trying to be rebels and evil. Good luck to every marching member next year! I can't wait to spectate again!

Hey, head-to-head drumcorps would be fun. Two corps compete AT THE SAME TIME. The corps that does a better job or has more people standing at the end of 11 minutes wins. Then have a playoffs system, last corps standing wins the title!

Instant water works. Very well done. Must catch those responsible...

Yeah, a parade would be a bad choice. (Ron Burgundy voice) The highlight of my season is when the last parade is over! Can we require corps to participate in I&E? This would prevent certain corps from discouraging participation and I would really have loved to compete against every bassline in the top ten instead of just three of us out there. From what I saw Bucs basses were smokin'! (FYI - I'm NOT hinting Bucs discourage participation, I can only speak for corps I have personal experience with.) ^0^ ^0^ ^0^

Why I don't care about scores Our score also went down from Sat to Sunday. So apparently we perform better in blinding & freezing rain with no yard lines. Our staff should take note of that. (Although we DID practice without yardlines all day Saturday as we couldn't keep up with the rain on our practice field either.) This same thing happened at DCA-C shows three weeks earlier. We had an awful, flat, problem-ridden show in St. Peter. Then had a kick-###, inspired and driven show the next night in South St. Paul. Score: over a point lower Why anyone pays attention to scores is beyond me. I don't disagree with our placement I just don't see how our show could score less on Sunday than the day before. Leads me to believe the scores have very little to do with what's going on on the field. Now... MN has two Class A championship corps and a perennial top five (hey, fifth is top five!) Open class corps and a brand new College Football stadium (Go Gophers!) opening in 2010. hint, hint ;-) Oh, and to keep this thread on topic, I thought the crowd was flat too. But they generally are for us as it's always a first read. Very hard to know if you like a show or not on a first read. But check out the Vid, from what I hear people thought MBI was very entertaining this year! :P

Parking for members As flyers/drivers we had to park on the opposite side of the stadium from where the busses and corps trailers park. It was absolutely NOT a problem until the end of the night. After all our "encore" performances in the lot we had to walk around the stadium since it was closed. The choices between dark and scary neighborhood or a mile around the stadium were both unpleasant. Keeping the stadium open as a walk through would alleviate this problem or having a mini-shuttle or more security. Scranton has the perfect huge parking lot. Probably the only thing I missed though. Sounds like it'll be addressed by Paetec based on the initial post. Need a better place for photos. They should have set up in the street. Although now I know what it's like to walk on a field of playdoh. BEST idea and forethought was having the huge staging tent so you can at least dry your self out a little bit before prelims. That was great! Thank you! Turf was great! Even better than Indy's field turf. Now... did someone actually suggest adding a parade?

Bass Ensemble MBI - 95 (1 point in penalties) Corps Vets - 90 Carolina Gold - 85 Good times!

Sweet! Bass ensembles being judged against bass ensembles! I like the sound of that. Of course, we weren't really paying all that close attention to time since we figured we weren't being judged against like competitors. I suppose we should probably time our solo now! Fran, umm, yeah. Didn't realize that Barbara Haring was coordinating this. My bad. The check went out today so we are IN!

Look for an ensemble by MBI's Bassline. I wish there was an actual bass ensemble category though! Fran, the check's in the mail! It'll go out next week.

Nope, the religious right killed the boy scouts. Check out Penn & Teller's ######## episode on the subject. I'm a former Madison Scout and I wouldn't let my kids be in the boy souts. All they teach is bigotry. Although I agree with the original poster on DCI. I do not like the emphasis on design. Shows used to be complete in the beginning of the season. Now it's obvious when the real ending isn't in the show yet. Why are paying customers in June and July not as important as paying customers at finals? And maybe if two finals tickets didn't cost $123 more people would go!

I should expand this thread to audio's as well. We definitely have audio's in the show every year. You usually can't hear 'em on any recording (if they are done right) but they are fun for us to know they are there. There is a cool audio in '91 Scouts show actually, you can hear the cymballs going "whoa-oh, whoa-oh" during City of Angels. I'm not sure if it was staff sponsored or not but it was pretty cool and fit the music so I'm assuming yes. I have a visual WITH an audio in honor of Pete H called the choad-a-dactyl, the sound goes, "CAW!" like a crow and visual looks like the winning kick in karate kid, sort of. It's been in the show each of the last two years! The snares have a fun audio during a long rest where they sing the music in "meows" And if you were wondering, the bassline is responsible for the "wait for it" audio. Ever seen the Robin Williams comedy special involving monkeys throwing ####? It's in reference to that. Which one did you hear? There's actually two right now but will probably be cut down to one. One is definitely better than the other.

The MBI bassline is very busy planning visuals for your viewing pleasure. Every year we seem to come up with the "best visual ever" and then of course the next year we top it. The snuggy vish is still a personal favorite of mine circa 2004 (and very functional too in the middle of the show where you are already pretty much guaranteed to have one, wearing a unitard. Just imagine being able to pull that snuggy out and have it be PART OF THE SHOW! BRILLIANT! Next time the staff takes out one of our visuals [the hop] they may think twice, just what are we going to put in its place?) But I digress, back to the present. Does anyone out there have a stock visual they do every year? I have one I personally must work into every bass show I march and it's been in every year I've marched Bass. (In case you're wondering - 94, 95, 96, 98, 04, 05, 06) This vish is blowing on the mallet and wiping off the drum head. I love it and even if I didn't, I think I'm too supersticious to leave it out now. We've done the snuggy vish two years in a row now. Will be three as soon as we find a spot for it. And for the best visual ever this year? We are adding some pointless spins just for fun quickly followed by a super fun break-dancing move. These have been done before but not in this order and not in a spot that fits the music more perfectly. It's very dangerous writing in so many rests for us. And yes, we already have a practice vish, one only done in practice and only when we stop at a certain part of the show. Of course, it's the same practice vish as last year, almost the same form too. This seems fair though since the '06 MBI Bassline is the same as the '05 Bassline, we might as well recycle our visuals too. Another one of my favorites from last year is our random visual spot. We've been doing this for the last couple years as well. Rather than always having the line do stuff together it's nice to be able to have some originality every now and then. Our goal is to entertain and we like to keep the five or six people that look our way at least once in the show with the best performance possible. These random visuals would even change show to show so you'll never know what you get with us. Of course, the main reason we do this is because if the staff saw what we were doing they would probably take it out. So while we have practice only visuals, we also have SHOW only visuals. Anyone else do this or are we special? I probably shouldn't be talking about this... WHOOOPSIE! So, what's your favorite visual you've done and what are some of the favorite you've seen? If any of our staff is reading this, I'm just kidding. Go back to ignoring us.

His name was Robert Paulson...

The more people the better! There's nothing worse than "performing" at practice only for your staff. Of course, having lots of people around did make it hard for our (bassline only) Bare-### Bolero segment in '96 Scouts during our 60+ count halt. We had to wait three weeks until we were in Alabama where only about 15 people were watching. MN Brass rehearsals are always open as far as I know and sometimes throughout the year we've advertised (unpaid I'm sure) our final rehearsal before heading off to DCA. So if anyone is going to be in the Twin Cities check our web page and stop on by, say hi to the top bass, and buy him a beer at Chammps after rehearsal! It's snowing here again today for the third time in 10 days!

Well, you missed our BASS CADENCE last year, dude, that added loads of enjoyment. But maybe just to us. We even changed it and made it easier when the corps couldn't march to it because they don't like off beat accents. I don't know, we didn't have any problems. ha ha

John, if you're buying you can show me how to play it, even though I've been playing it for 12 years... ha ha

Hey Paul, I hope that avatar pic is a future bassdrummer! Let me know if you need some spare mallets to put in his hands

Hornline and drumline played the opener together for the first time last night, this 2 minute tune highlights all of the strengths of this corps! A really fun opening by a recognized and winning soloist, drum grooves and exposures, and blinding fast horn licks. I'll have to assume the guard will be featured as well. It was fun fun fun! (Maybe this should be moved to the plastic hype thread, eh? What can I say, I'm excited to march this year!)

They want to win. Plain and simple. In '95 and '96 Scouts we wore our drums for our bass ensemble, did full-body visuals and brought the house down and came in 2nd both years. '96 we even had a Disney theme to our ensemble and it was hilarious and well played with funky meters, time changes and monster beats. I saw SCV (the winning line) do their encore at Epcot that year before our whole corps did our exhibition and their feature was boring and played, same ol' same ol' drum to drum blah blah blah with their drums laid out on the ground and them running around them like every other bass ens you've ever seen. Yes, I'm still bitter... heh heh Seriously though, if we had won in '96 and did that encore with our Disney theme, we would have got a standing O instead of golf claps like SCV did. #####es. <**>

bump, smell the MBI bassline tonight at Highland Park HS in St. Paul, in about 2 hours We'll play for you too, just follow your nose when you get in the school.

my corps friends and I always chant "Plastic Hype, Plastic Hype..." over and over again whenever we witness the fake hype a lot of people and instructors do to themselves. That being said, MBI is going to WIN DCA this year, all we need is 5-7 more good horns, a couple pit players, a few in the guard, maybe a couple sewers... But THEN we are set. If you want to march, HURRY, those spots are filling up fast! One of them just filled up while you were reading this! MBI for President /sarcasm sew-ers, people who sew... like flags and uniforms. Although, if you marched Brass you'd know the drumline always meets at the sewer whether there is one or not.

I love seeing all the hype on Scouts '95, it was incredibly fun to march as well, so now you'll see my bias. 1 - Scouts '95 2 - Phantom '91 3 - Blue Devils '90 (favorite drum feature all-time) 4 - Scouts '97 5 - Crossmen '92 6 - Star '93 7 - SCV '89 8 - Phantom '89 9 - BD '95 10 - Cadets '89 (best bassline I've ever heard on a recording) Anti-vote: SELF-CENSORED - I decided I'm too negative. CHANGED MY TOP TEN too, if people are wondering why some of the votes may not work out if they are calculating on their own, but if the OP ever recalculates it will be right on now.

Happy Birthday big guy! You're in so much trouble tomorrow night... This is my 100th post!

Flattery.... will get you everywhere. Talk to me goose, who are you? Thanks dude!