MarimbasaurusRex

Wow. Are you this condescending to everyone? Get out of your cloistered little band/corps world and see how far your definition of excellence gets you. I would reiterate my points to clarify, but they fall on deaf ears.

Well, aren't we jumping to conclusions a bit here? I'm not a Hopkins hater at all. And I'm not talking about content. Let's consider a brilliant performer like Miles Davis for example. Probably one of the worst "executing" performers of all time. Yet each note has it's place and can be considered excellent in it's own way. Another example might be the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein. Some of those performances were crass and dirty and the most delicious of all time. Sometimes things can be executed to death, no pun intended but it fits anyway. Excellence is much more than pure execution. When something is executed to death it can become vanilla, methodical, sterile, lifeless, and yes, boring. My remark about excellence at the expense of others was in reference to pilfering the most talented from lesser corps to feed the greater ones. Cannibalism doesn't serve anyone well.

One person's excellence can be another person's useless boring garbage. And when whatever you perceive as excellence comes at the expense of others trying to do the same thing, you are shooting the horse that got you there. This is where drum corps has lost it's way.

I get what you are saying with the whole Cage thing, but technically not quite true. A pure sine wave doesn't exist in nature. It can only be produced artificially by an oscillator. For anyone curious how synths work... A series of oscillators producing multiple sine waves, or other shaped waves produced by adding sine waves at the harmonics, is an analog synthesizer. The synthesizer manipulates these purely artificial sounds to imitate the more complex wave forms of nature. Digital synths work in much the same way, but with an artificial digital stepped rendering of the artificial sine wave. Digital sampling is a bit closer to nature if it is a digitization of something natural. But, a picture of a flower is not a flower, it's artificial. And any digital recording is the audio equivalent of florescent lighting, flashing a series of snap shots of the sound so fast that we perceive it as a continuous thing. Just as florescent lighting is artificial light, digital sound is artificial sound. I would even go so far as to suggest that an electric guitar or bass is more organic than any synth could ever be. An electric guitar produces it's own signal and power through the natural force of magnetism, and produces a pure electronic representation of the harmonic series of the string.

High school marching bands have not really taken the place of hundreds of smaller drum corps. It might make some people feel better to say that, but it's not quite true. Here's why... Only the more affluent school systems have functional music programs at all, let alone good marching bands. In an urban area like central Los Angeles, those kids have never even SEEN a good marching band or really know what one is. They don't have the choice of moving their families to a school district with better resources, instruction, etc. There is no opportunity for these hundreds of thousands of kids (millions on a nationwide scale) to learn the life lessons that drum corps or today's better HS bands provide. We're not talking BOA level here, just a decent program. It simply doesn't exist in many places. These are the areas where smaller drum corps used to thrive. Smaller, and sometimes even bigger and quite successful drum corps used to provide opportunity for kids regardless of economic background or geographic districting. If your school didn't have a good band program, you could join the local drum corps. If your most local corps wasn't so great, you could go to the one across town for the cost of a city bus ride. This, very unfortunately, is a thing of the past. How many great corps came out of urban areas? I'll let others list them if they choose, but consider Bayonne Bridgemen, Boston Crusaders, etc. Here's one example of a student caught in the trap. He's a GREAT quad player and one of the most genuine and hardest working people you will ever meet. Given the opportunity, he could make BD's line, but he will never have that chance. His family lives in south central LA and he went to a high school that has one of the worst music programs in the state. The area is plagued with gang violence, poverty and general misery. Even if his family moved within the district (which is huge) better programs simply don't exist with the exception of a few charter schools which have waiting lists years long, and even then he would have to find a way to get to school every day 40+ miles from his home. His only chance to do something better is to go to a local drum corps. But, there isn't one. It's just not going to happen for him. The logistics and expenses make it impossible. High school marching band, like drum corps, is an activity for the well to do. So, if you live in a good neighborhood with a good school district and go to a school with a functional music program, you can have the "drum corps experience." If not, forget it. The corps of days gone by reached out to kids at risk and gave them opportunities they would not have had otherwise. That simply does not exist today, and that's why HS bands have not replaced smaller corps.

No. Two reasons - 1) Nine years marching burned me out. 2) They grounded my instrument and I wasn't very interested in standing on the sideline while everybody else did drum corps. Regrets - None.

In the seat with knees up or stretched out under the seat in front, across the seat, on the floor under the seats, in the aisle, in the luggage rack, in the bathroom, on the bathroom floor (ick i know but sleep is sleep), across the back window over the seats, in the doorway steps, standing up in the aisle... if it's a place on a bus, I've slept there.

I agree that it's a deterrent. But that doesn't necessarily stop it from happening (as we saw in 77). Those who will do that sort of thing don't really care if they take everyone else down with them. The guilty party should definitely have a real price to pay. I just feel for the innocents who were victimized by the cheaters and then further victimized by DCI. We were ALL victimized by it, especially in the national TV days. It made all of DCI look bad, first because of the cheating and then because of the punishment. Nobody wants to see the innocent members punished and embarrassed in a national spotlight and that's exactly what happened. I understand why they may have felt they needed to do it, but the public acknowledgement of cheaters in the ranks did nothing to further a national interest in drum corps. The huge deterrent was one toward local participation. It's a fine line between enforcing the letter of the rules and shooting yourself in the foot. It should be noted that the adults who broke or "misinterpreted" the rules paid very little price at all, if any. They weren't the one's being DQ'd, the kids were, and the adults continued in their positions for years to come. And I know for a fact that the deterrent didn't stop the cheating. It just made people cover their tracks better.

I'm not going to name names, but I know of one corps for sure that had a person celebrate their age-out year and then go march another age-out year with another corps. He had a friend who's mother worked at a hospital and made a fake birth certificate. He looked way over 21 too so it was really pretty obvious, but no one said anything. That's what made the whole DQ thing just a pile of sour grapes. Corps with overage members were pointing the finger at other corps with overage members. A few actually got caught, but most didn't. It's probably a little harder to do today, but I would expect there are still a few out there every year who manage to bend the rules. It's not that hard if you know someone in the right place.

All the more reason that those who have followed the rules shouldn't lose that investment because of poor decisions by the adults in charge, the ones they trusted to do the right thing with all that money. And no, it's not serious, it's kids running around playing music on a field wearing goofy hats. The New York Philharmonic on Mahler night is serious. Murder is serious. Having your home foreclosed by the bank is serious. Perspective.

Personally, I think that approach is taking things a little too seriously. It's supposed to be fun. It's music. With kids. But, I respect your opinion.

The of-age members paid a higher price than anyone else involved and that was a shame. In my opinion, a more fair and appropriate course of action would have been to remove any over age members and let the corps finish the season fairly, then bar the adults responsible from future participation in DCI.

Nice. Dissing on a dead guy while those who loved him still mourn. Very classy. As if you know squat about what Steve Jobs did or didn't do in his private life, who he did or didn't give to. OK, he didn't give you a free computer. Maybe he was right about not giving anything away to people like you!

If anyone "gets" the Phantom mystique and sound, it's Don Hill, an old Illinois guy from way back with Des Plaines Vanguard. Good call for Phantom.

I was addressing all of the posts above, not just yours, Mike. I appreciate that corps want to move into areas that are mainstream music (not that John Adams is mainstream, far from it, but you know what I mean). I don't have anything against that at all, never have. But, one thing I was taught in drum corps (perhaps above all others) is that if you are going to do something, you should try to do it at the highest possible level or you shouldn't do it at all.

The sound guy currently on tour with John Adams is a friend of mine and I know for sure he spends a huge amount of time in each venue getting the sound just right. Which goes back to the original point of the thread. You just can't do it well in 5 minutes with limited middle range gear. The idea of getting a student from an audio engineering school makes sense. But, how does that translate to "real life" experience for the student. It really doesn't. I think any corps would be hard pressed to find a quality guy who would devote that much time and effort to something which doesn't further a career in audio. It's hard enough to get good sound in a small club with a 2 hour set up and an hour sound check. Trying to do it in a stadium in a matter of minutes is really asking the impossible. And the point of the audio outcome affecting the score is quite pertinent. It's a performance as much as any other aspect of the show. I've sometimes thought that the only fair way would be to have one sound system that's used by every corps and run by the same person. I've also wondered why the mix isn't performed from the box. Casting a remote from an iphone or laptop is quite common for location sound these days. It's not really all that expensive to do either. It's as if the corps are approaching audio from the dark ages, basically slapping sm57s on everything, setting a basic mix level and that's it. Not at all the level of excellence and effort put toward other aspects of the show. Audio is like an afterthought, but it's become a huge part of the show and in turn brings the quality down to high school level.

It seems like a lot of money, but in the bigger picture it's chump change. Look at Revo's web site and they state "tuition" as $2400. That 11k was the equivalent of less than 5 corps members' fees. If you can't float 5 delinquent/late member fees, you probably shouldn't be on the road at all.

Have to agree with the OP that Bridgemen 77 is the most influential show ever. Not because of the show design, although I really loved the music, the "human" feel to the show, and the "we do what we want" aspect of their performance style. This show is the most influential because it was the day DCI lost it's soul, on national TV broadcasting the saga live to every home in the country. I think even at the time no one understood how truly special that was. A few years later it would be gone. Although there were many great drum corps shows through that time, this one was the black eye of DCI. Rules are rules, but looking at the faces of the kids performing that show... well... it was just wrong. I know my parents and many others lost a lot of respect for drum corps as a whole and it made my own justification for doing drum corps harder to sell. I hadn't even marched DCI yet (I was in DCA) and I was embarrassed for them watching the thing. Disqualified? An audience favorite? Really? Over what seems like a technicality? The details of the event are arguable until the cows come home, but the impression of drum corps as a product really took a hit that day. Before anyone says 75 Muchachos, that was before the spotlight was really on. By 77 DCI had found a TV audience. The Bridgemen were revolutionaries and I really think 77 changed the course of the activity in huge ways, but not in their direction. They lost the battle and the war. And the knee jerk reaction of the entire activity sent things on a more conservative, dare I say uptight path which lasts to this day.

As someone who has done countless contemporary music concerts, I can say without hesitation that audience members LOVE this stuff, all 9 of them!

Caption... OK, so who's the wise guy who put the goldfish in my drum?!

OK, so pseudo science aside... All you've managed to show with this thread is that drum corps is for the judges, only. Nothing new there.

You will also get an absurd amount of EVERY sound. Physics does not discriminate between sounds which are produced acoustically or electronically. While there is certainly validity in the idea that various performance venues will have resonances in certain areas, in a stadium setting the bass trap concept doesn't hold much water. A sound at a frequency of 20hz (the lower limit of human hearing) has a wavelength of about 17 feet. Any spatial dimension larger than 17 feet will resonate (or "trap") frequencies which are lower than we can hear. Subsequent harmonics of those frequencies diminish exponentially. This is why concert halls and recording studios have a high ceiling. Also, to create a standing wave (the definition of a bass trap) there must be either an enclosed air tight chamber (resonator) or parallel surfaces. Yes there are places where a stadium will trap frequencies that we can hear, but it's not a very accurate rationale (or excuse) for overall balance problems.

I agree that the Evans bass heads sound pretty good. But don't get even a minor nick in an Evans bass head or it will rip rim to rim faster than you can say Remo. Remo still wins the durability contest, especially with the emperor suedes on quads, but no pinstripes because those things pop just looking at them (and they sound wonky too).

Hey Sam, I've met this person. She studied at Northern Illinois and was also a student of Leigh Stevens at some point. She knew all the right people at Northern and a bunch of others, so definitely legit to some extent. But, when I asked her about what they played at Star 93, she couldn't remember if they played any Bartok. Seemed a bit odd to have marched one of the most legendary shows of all time and not remember the book. Go figure. She told me the flood story too, not sure if I believe it. As for the Patriots, she said she studied at Eastman for a while, so that would make some sense, although the Eastman folks aren't too high on their students doing drum corps. Could be she's embellished her "resume" a bit.

While I have great respect for both posters above, I have to say STOP! Show your instructor the problem to find what you are doing wrong. A sharp pain in the joint is probably a pinched nerve and will need time to heal, so take a short break and fix your technique. And as Mike said, RELAX. Tension is the usual culprit and is caused by poor mechanics. If your "machine" is operating properly, there should be no joint pain. Muscle pain is another story!