mad_scotty

you would probably be surprised at the accuracy of online forums in predicting opinion trends over larger populations. you have to know how to count (and what to count) but it can be done, and i'm stating this as a professional opinion backed by research and a real world track record.

i think there's a big difference between judges helping to identify problem spots and judges being trained on a single design standard and advocating for it. that's a recipe to get boring cookie cutter shows, and it makes the judges part of the action, instead of a neutral evaluator of it. we all know of plenty of instances of corps being "punished" in the ge category because judges didn't like the design, when the designs were actually very successful at laying the groundwork for performers to create an intense emotional experience for the audience. and isn't creating a great shared experience for the audience and marching members what the performance aspect of this activity should be about? what genius came up with the theory that pleasing the judges version of good design should be the main goal? after all, the judges are only a single viewpoint, made homogenous by training on design standards. do they really make shows better, or just make them conform better? i think the second is the case, and i see plenty of evidence of it on the field. judges don't score what is better, they score what they prefer. this whole idea that a panel of experts can identify better design and that designers should conform to a single set of rules on design is ridiculous. the people who advocate it are mirroring the same arguments used over 100 years ago to deny the french impressionists entry to the paris salon. the impressionists toiled in poverty for 20 years because they didn't conform to accepted parameters of design. i'm glad they didn't cave to the "judges are always right" nits of their day. now, i'm not saying drum corps is likely to produce the next great art movement like the impressionists. i'm just saying that, as long as a judging panel is allowed to control design we are guaranteed drum corps won't produce much innovation at all.

...or will they go for a stunning visual package with a very mediocre (or typical, for a top 3) musical package? hmmmmmm....you sir, have managed to bring this thread squarely on topic. that surely makes you the rarest of internet oddities.

honestly, i wasn't trying to debate the value of 93 star, i think they were one of the truly great hornlines in dci history. in their own way they deserve mention alongside any of the other legendary hornlines. but most legendary hornlines had something they didn't do particularly well. 95 scouts for example, were so incredibly overpowering that in a couple of places in their show they sound sort of boxy and awkward. like trying to light a cigarette with a flame thrower. there have been less than 1/2 dozen lines all time who could have even played their book, but they weren't sweet light and agile, they were 100% full tilt in everything they did, even the ballad. as for 93 star, well, they seem to get louder with each passing year. everyone knew they were amazingly tight in 93, people were already comparing them to the 91 devs by late july but it was more than a decade before i heard anyone talk about them being loud for that year, much less one of the loudest hornlines of all time. dcp in particular, and the internet in general have a weird dynamic sometimes: if you make even a small passing comment someone disagrees with, or if you apply any critical comment to something someone loves theres a tendency for people to jump on it and obsess it into the dirt. silly, i love 93 star, its one of the shows i most frequently listen to, and one of only 3 i posted on my myspace page (80 devs and 95 scouts being the other 2). but since i don't love them blindly, obediently and unquestioningly i'm the guy who hates on star in an internet forum. like i said, silly. but thats the drum corps disease, people get incredibly angry if you deviate from company line, and dci seems to instill a don't question my authoritar attitude in an unfortunately high percentage of its alums. i still don't think star was that loud in 93. pr was loud, but so were the cavs and scouts. star was sort of close to the devs and cadets, maybe-ish. i still think most of their power in the big hits was generated by the percussion, though. great line, but not a powerhouse. who cares, really though. loud is only one quality. i've heard some ear splittingly loud hornlines that were crappy in every other respect to the point of being offensive (93 phantom in june, for instance, they are one of the few hornlines i've ever heard be genuinely bad out the gate and then excel down the stretch). anyways, i know you tried to rescue your thread, but keeping an internet forum on topic is like herding cats, futile to attempt, and probably not going to give you the result you want even if you have success. for what it's worth, i hope there is a spartacus effect in show design. i hope that effect has nothing to do with storyline shows, and everything to do with corps trying to connect emotionally to a large audience instead of connecting intellectually to a small judging panel. i want to see more shows that have to be experienced, and can't be described in terms of a judging sheet. less paint by numbers, more expressiveness, that gets my vote.

i think people from outside the activity pick a corps based on what they look and sound like during their show, but my advice to anyone wanting to march and trying to pick a corps has always been to pick them based on what they look and sound like in the parking lot after a show. corps have personalities, you can pick them up a little from the shows but its the other 23 hours and 45 minutes a day that make your experience. i think some people will move to a new corps to try for a ring, and that isn't surprising, dci is a youth activity so you'll always have people making juvenile decisions, but most people who switch corps do it because once they are on tour and more of an insider they realize that another corps is a lot better fit for their personality and outlook.

really? i always thought they wore them till they were rags!!

i caught them from around the 35 and from right outside the 40 after 1/4's and semis, and i got a lot of drums and a little brass in those big hits. there were a lot of other corps people around, and a couple of people were just blown away and exclaiming at how loud they were in the hits (they were realy into the show) but a lot of other people, who had just seen madison, cavs (best cavs hornline in a LONG time at that point) devs then phantom (LOUD LOUD) were impressed at the cleanliness and rolling there eyes when people said the hits were super loud. i'm in that second group, i liked everything about them live except the sound production, it just wasn't there for me, particularly not right after phantom who really smacked the stands during that 93 show.

entire corps, yeah. but are you sure you aren't giving them too much ful ensemble credit for what the percussion did. still to this day thats one of the loudest drumlines i've ever heard, and in a couple of big pushes they carried the ensemble sound. but the horns, by themselves, they didn't really feel like they were able to generate as much raw power as anyone else in the top 6 that year, even when they cut loose. and remember, this is in an era when a lot of people still equated volume with skill in drum coprs, so star was leaving people a little confused and unimpressed as much as they were leaving them intentionally angered, at least by august when most everyone had seen them and gotten over their original response (i gotta admit though, in june and early july they had a few people fuming)

try saying something constructive. it works better than just finger pointing. and i'll grant you, throwing out a direct correlation between 93 star losing and dci suddenly shifting away from anything that appeals to fans geting approval from the judges is a huge stretch, but the two events did happen at roughly the same time.

i saw star live several times in 93, including finals week where i wgot to see them from right downtown at 1/4's and semis. they were the quietest hornline in the top 6 by an order of magnitude, really the only weakness of that amazingly tight line, unless you want to harp over the lack of higher faster louder type stuff in the book. and phantom was popular in 96, but really, really clean too. and still tied with a corps and show that was leading the charge towards, well, the shows we saw win almost everything for the last 10 years.

actually, if you saw me in a nice restaurant on a date you'd see me wearing a sports jacket, nice open necked shirt, pants and dress shoes. the colors are a little different, and the cuffs of my sleeves and pant legs narrow cut instead of flaring, but basically an updated leisure suit. and i'm no fan of the jonas brothers, but when i hear them i'm impressed with the professionalism that goes into their material. i don't watch american idol, but why are you assuming the second best person beat the best person in finals? it seems the general consensus of the voters was that kris was the superior talent. the point is selling albums and tickets still, isn't it? seems like american idol has a decent formula for figuring that out, at least. when you're in the entertainment industry, like american idol and drum corps are, you should worry about selling tickets. tickets keep the busses rolling, and lord knows drum corps could stand some extra revenues right now.

there was a fan response caption, once. actually a caption designed to take those "wow moments" that impacted the stands into account when scoring corps. they called it ge and it worked wonders throughout the 80's, where the top shows were well designed, well executed, and generally speaking crowd pleasers. then in 93 star came in second place with an unlikebale show performed by a hornline that couldn't project (most of the people i talked too on tour in 93 thought they sounded like a slightly cleaner version of the 93 blue knights) and an enormous pit. then the vids showed up in everyones mailbox, and apparently that corps projected very well into the mic's because now the show was a challenging show performed by a pristine hornline that usddenly sounded like a slightly cleaner version of the 91 blue devils (same enormous pit). dci has suffered from a 15 year hangover from that offseason of people trying to figure out how the cadets won. aparently ge got the blame, because that category hasn't really been judged according to dci's own criteria since (unless someone can think of an instance where the more popular corps beat the cleaner corps between 1994 and 2007).

this may seem like an obviously true assumption, the idea that a very small pool of more educated, better trained experts will be much better at evaluating something, and a large pool of less educated and trained generalists will be worse. the only problem is that it doesn't stack up against real world metrics. crowds tend to be pretty smart. and when you look at real world examples they tend to be smarter than the so-called experts in some surprising ways. there have been some pretty interesting studies on this recently, real groundbreaking work. i've seen studies that show that large pools of small individual gamblers will more accurately predict outcomes in athletic events than the pros who set the lines in vegas, and that large pols of individual small investors will generally beat the average returns of wall street money managers. the wisdom of crowds, it sounds like a completely ridiculous idea, but in the end you have to rely on what the metrics are telling you: experts are well educated in a narrowly defined scope, but in the end a crowd has a larger aggregate iq and can process more information from more sources more quickly than individuals can. and they are a more accurate barometer of real world events as a result.

maybe, but what about an activity like dci where the judges stopped judging according to the sheets over a decade ago? have you ever read the ge criteria, one that essentially describes crowd pleasing as a key criteria? i've seen interviews with judges who are pretty open about what they are looking for, and it isn't audience response. you also quickly assumed that in my example the corps who is pleasing the crowd is doing something bad, not just failing to meet the judges preconceived notions on proper design. why assume that anything popular will be wrong? i ask because in terms of their being a spartacus effect this seems to be pretty much the heart of the argument. can't you play to the crowd and be sophisticated and competitive?

try this one on for size. 2 corps at a show. the judge tells corps A that part of their show isn't working from a design standpoint. it's clunky, awkward, and overdone. the staff says wow, we really need to work on that. the judge goes to corps B and gives them virtually identical advice about a section of their show. the corps says all due respect, but the audience loves that hit, and we would rather work on cleaning it and keep it in. a month later the same judge sees the same two corps at a different show. corps A has made changes per the judges recomendations, and their new show, while still a little dirty, matches the judges notion of what proper design should be. corps B is still running the same stuff, very clean by now, and the crowd is into it, but they are clearly using designs the judge has staked their professional reputation on deriding a month previously. and you think there is no conflict at all for this judge in this show? they can remove themselves from the situation emotionally and give both corps a fair shake? in all the staff meetings you have sat through, all the designers you have collaborated with, have you really not noticed how emotionally attached people get to their notion of what the proper way to do something is? how easily they shift from thinking something is a cool idea to becoming an evangelist for that technique to thinking anyone who doesn't do things that way is lost in the desert? i'm not saying a judge will be as bad as a staffer who spent a year planning, teaching, and cleaning, but if they have even a shadow of that emotional atachment to the use of certain ideas in design then they are clearly not objective. i see this in my line of work all the time. one of my companies main products is a line of consulting services we market primarily to fortune 1000 companies, entertainment and athletic brands, etc. our consultants are truly gifted individuals with serious track records of producing for some of the worlds most recognizable brands, and they are well worth the six figure salaries they pull down. they are well educated, curious, open minded, and eager to learn. and occasionally i will tell one to do a strategic appraisal, and make a list of recomended changes and next steps for the client with targeted benchmarks, metrics and methodology to assess achievement. pretty simple. they go away for 1-3 weeks, come up with a plan, i review it and approve them to go live with the client. and every once in a while these bright, commited, open minded eager to learn people will get off the phone with the client and come at me looking like a burning eyed prophet of doom and tell me they want to quit, or fire the client, or burn the office down, or whatever, because their advice was shot down. these guys are real a listers, always thinking, learning, and growing, and aren't naturally inclined to be pushy and arrogant at all. but they work very, very hard at what they do (to the point i have to monitor their days off to make sure they actually take them and recharge) and they are so invested in working to give the client the very best advice they can give that when a client basically blows them off they sometimes flip. i have to bring them back down to earth and calm them down (i really am the calming influence at my company, of course i can't express my opinions very freely theirceither, though) and i get them to give the client what they want. in the end, the client pays our bills, and their salary, so we try to educate clients on best practices and give our best advice but we always come around to delivering what they are paying for. but my people, who do what dci judges do: observe, evaluate, and make recomendations, spend so much time working on defining what is best so they can give the most professional, well refined advice that through the process they become emotionally invested in the advice itself, and sometimes lose perspective as a result. i find it hard to believe that my people are less professional, talented, educated, or ethical than dci judges. and i also find it hard to believe that dci judges are immune to the issues my colleagues have to work through. of course, i doubt any of this will really resonate with you. the real issue here is that you feel the judging system works, and as long as you are happy with the systems end product it will be easy for you to rationalize its culture and methodology. it will be just as easy for you to ignore the serious concerns of people who see problems where you believe none exist. if the results are so good, then the process HAS to work, right? but i ask you, dci fans seem to me a fairly intelligent and educated group as a whole. if the judging works, why are so many educated and intelligent people so convinced that it is massively flawed, and that results are far too often skewed as a result?