DarrenE

My understanding is that Crown still doesn't have their closer on the field. Will they have it in Muncie on the 29th?

I have a couple of completely disjointed thoughts on these subjects so I'm going to bullet point them so they don't get muddled together. People now look back at Star of Indiana like they were the peak of the art. A ton of people HATED Star of Indiana when they were winning. "The best corps money can buy" is something I heard all the time. Just look at some of the videos. They would do incredible things and get very little crowd reaction. When they folded the corps the prevailing opinion that I heard was that they had a temper tantrum for not winning so decided to quit. Any other explanation was met with eye rolls. Amplification: It can be well used. The thing Cavaliers are doing with moving their marimba around the field couldn't be done without the amplification and it that is awesome. (It pains me to say that because I've never liked the Cavaliers.) My biggest point is that it should be judged like anything else. If you have technical difficulties and it is distracting and awful because of it the score should reflect that. I saw a show this summer where the narration which was a main feature of the show kept cutting in and out and all sorts of other technical issues. It clearly ruined the show but didn't seem to be reflected in the score. Singing and Narration: My main issue is that we have world class brass, drums, and visual on the field and then very amateurish narration and singing. If a narrator is going to be a focal point of your show you need to audition for a narrator and not just grab whichever baritone player sucks the least at it. The guy from Cadets is very good this year so that should be an example. I don't know if they auditioned for him or just got lucky so somebody else might chime in about that. Trombones: They stopped using bugles and switched to regular band instruments a long time ago so I don't really care too much about that one. The complaint is actually kind of silly. It seems to me that It is only because it looks different that people notice the trombones. People don't seem to care about the Cavaliers Euphonium so evidently as long as there are buttons to push it is OK. After hearing SCV I actually think the trombones at full blast sound more like the bugle low brass sound of old than the current band instruments everyone is using. Body movement: Use it if it adds to the show. Don't just have the brass line stop and point their knees to the left and then to the right and then both at the same time. Sometimes just standing still can have more visual impact than flinging your legs around for a few seconds. I actually chalk this up to the amateurish thing. They feel like they need to throw something in there because everybody else is doing it but don't know how to design for it. It gets thrown in later instead of being part of the overall design. I think I had some more but that's enough typing for me tonight. :)

My biggest issue with changing to regular band instruments is that the tone is completely different. One of the biggest appeals of the Drum and Bugle corps for me was the different sound from standard marching bands. Many of the comparisons seem to be made from 2000+ to the seventies and talk about how the music quality is so much better and then ignore the late eighties and into the nineties when the music performance level increased dramatically but they still had the bugle sound. I think one reason people that are new (meaning in the last 14 years) don't understand the complaint is that they have never actually heard the live sound of a 70 bugle brass line. It is totally different. You can argue whether it is better or not but there is no question in my mind at least that it is tonally a very different different sound. My biggest issue with amplification is if it is going to be used it should be judged and if it sucks because of technical difficulties it should be reflected in the score. It doesn't seem to be from what I can see. I was at one show this summer where one of the corps had a major malfunction with the narrator and it basically destroyed the show because it was so distracting as the sound cut in and out throughout the whole show. It didn't seem to matter in the score. I see a lot of talk from DCI about how this is a sport but then they give a pass when something gets flubbed up. I've never seen a football game where the officials gave someone the touchdown because they usually would have have made it to the goal line but through no fault of their own tripped and fell short. Is it an elite competition or isn't it? To be fair you couldn't do what the Cavaliers are doing with their marimbas moving around on the field without amplification and that is pretty awesome. This from someone who has never like that particular group. I also think it is funny the people having panic attacks about the trombones but nobody seems to care about the euphonium in the cavaliers show.

If you changed this earlier year to 1988 I at least would give a different answer.

How did this add to the conversation? Quit trolling.

That's actually why I came here. I just tried again and it connected this time and could logon but can't get anything but the main landing page to load.

I would agree with you if it hadn't skipped Phantom Regiment and Cadets at my location.

I just got home from viewing this in the theater. A couple minutes into Phantom's show an error message popped up that part of the recording had been lost and then it skipped to right before Crown started. I only saw maybe two minutes of Phantom and none of Cadets. I'm not happy at all.

I just went through this whole thread. The first half is people complaining that they don't like that Phantom is going to be the same as every year and living in the past and the second half is complaining that all these new fangled uniform styles and uniqueness make people feel uncomfortable and can't they just wear what they wore in the (insert poster preference year) show. Bipolar thread for sure.

I assume you were sitting in the stands because that is the only way you could reasonably make that judgement. You should let us know how it sounded live.

It was fine for me. I doubt YouTube is having trouble handling this load. This is nothing for them.

They're not too bad. You just hose them off every once in a while.

Since people are talking about records and firsts for things. How about this one. Isn't Crown the first corps to ever win Division II (now Open Class) and then World Class?

The tiny bass drum is going into orbit around the huge bass drum like an electron around the nucleus of an atom. I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw it . It's a physics joke.

This is the poorest quality video feed I've seen in the last two years.

Why are they wasting the high bit rate feed on a shot from the tunnel while the normal feed looks like it is being shot using a potato?

Cadet's ending was not good. I hope I didn't dazzle anyone with that technical analysis.

The dude you can see in the reflection walking around went ahead and ran into the tripod to make sure we all noticed he was there.

Different strokes I guess. I really don't like this show. I'm definitely not a hater either concerning BD. I find it terribly boring.

I think it is pretty much impossible to tell from a Web feed what they actually sounded like live.

It's fine for me so far.

I wouldn't be so willing to believe that unless I saw some numbers. Marching band is a big deal in Indiana. State Finals draws at least as big a crowd as DCI finals and probably a lot bigger once you figure in that there are four classes. The stands are stuffed for dozens of shows per weekend all fall.

I'm still convinced that is mostly from people who have never seen both. Even if you think the show design was better in 89 they choked the finals performance. Major execution flaws including flubbing a pass-through drill move by nearly five yards from side to side.

Yes

Just don't open the tread if you don't want to participate. It's not like the forum is that busy this time of year. Forums where the whole front page is stickies of five year old threads with 900 pages each suck.