mad_scotty
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Posts posted by mad_scotty
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The visual version of this got me. As more of a hear first watch second kind of guy, I want to get people talking about some of the tiny, but interesting things they hear in corps shows that really stand out. I'll throw in a couple. I tend to rotate what I listen to around a bit, and lately 98 Devs and 87 Scouts have been at the front of the line.
---The sop soloist who throws in the high note at the climax of the opening statement, about 2 minutes in, OK thats a pretty exposed spot but he nails one night with perfect tone and tops the entire corps for about 4 seconds while they are at a very healthy volume. Sweet.
---In the first minute of Madison's American in Paris (my all time fave Gershwin interpretation in drum corps) Madisons Contras are perfect. I mean stunningly perfect on a really exposed, melodic part. I don't know if it's the single best minute by a contra line ever (from 3:00-4:00 in the show) but if we ever have that discussion they'll be in it. Great evidence that Bb horns don't make great lines better so much as they mask mediocrity, too.
---And my all time favorite weird little thing to hear in a show is the guy you hear on the recording going "UHHHHHHHH-HUH" in every single Blue Devils show in the 1980's. My seat partner from Madison and I wondered about that one for 15 years before someone in here told me it was Scott Johnson, then the BD snare tech, and it was always before the snares did something cool. Good stuff.
So what else can you guys come up with, I might want to relisten to a couple of shows here again and see, ahem HEAR what I missed!
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when i saw the name of the thread i thought it was going to be about people's tendency to slip into "my corps is perfect in all ways at all times, and your corps isn't" mode. it's one of the few things about the men of madison that i've never been fond of, the strong tendency i've noticed by guys to slip into that blind to our own faults mode. but having marched madison and not developed any attraction to sweaty guys, i guess its natural i assumed it was something else....lol
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Your memory is selective. Great Divide and Chain Reaction were insanely difficult and most of it was done by the whole ensemble at a flat-out run. On the flip side, I listened to 93 Scouts for the first time in ages and there was some really tasty stuff in there indeed. I always thought that the closer was the miss in 93 Scouts. There was a whole minute of that show that the writers forgot to give you.
I agree with you on the closer. In the first camp we stopped referring to it as "encore" and started calling it "color by numbers". the hornline hated playing it, but we loved playing numero uno. it didn't get the crowd response the cheesy ballad closer got, but in 4 minutes we articulated more styles and played in more tempos than any other corps did in their entire show that year, and our ears were aggressively challenged through the whole piece, it was really hard to pick up the chords and stay in tune on the fly. not a crowd pleaser but a technical feast for the players, i just hate that the only recording anyone ever gets to hear was in a torrential downpour with everyone phasing in and out of tune.
as far as the bd show, you're right, there are some wicked full hornline and sectional runs, typical wayne downey stuff, but they are pretty few and far between, to me. my selective memory thinks that about 45% of that show is carried by the hornline, the rest by soloists and small ensembles, and those runs are in between. great stuff, but the hornline might as well have been tacet for the other 55% of the show. and thats just the brass book, throw in percussion and the full hornline was doing something really interesting for about 1/3 of the time. not a bad show or bad hornline, but comparing it in difficulty for the full ensemble with a 91 or 02 bd show? i'm not seeing it, still.
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some of those old 70's-80's madison gunlines were pretty great. i've also always enjoyed the 92 cadets flags, very, very smooth delivery.
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Interesting you should say all of that.
not following here
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didn't the bridgemen sop who played that sweet solo in land of make believe in 78 wear shades with white plastic frames?
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Maybe.. but I don't think so. This from the American Optometic Association's web site for whatever it's worth :
Astigmatism occurs due to the irregular shape of the cornea or the lens inside the eye. The cornea and lens are primarily responsible for properly focusing light entering your eyes allowing you to see things clearly.
The curvature of the cornea and lens causes light entering the eye to be bent in order to focus it precisely on the retina at the back of the eye. In astigmatism, the surface of the cornea or lens has a somewhat different curvature in one direction than another. In the case of the cornea, instead of having a round shape like a basketball, the surface of the cornea is more like a football. As a result, the eye is unable to focus light rays to a single point causing vision to be out of focus at any distance.
you realize your post said what mine did, only without mentioning pinholes in the iris (the second most common cause for astigmatism, and the cause for mine, which is where i dredged up all of this arcane knowledge in the first place)? the first guy probably meant the same thing, but he made it sound like it was a deformed eyeball, which is a little more extrmee than a slight warping of the lens or pinhole in the iris. i was just trying to say that an astigmatism, while inconvenient, isn't all that uncommon or gross and you wouldn't notice one walking down the street. thats all.
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Or Clark Kent...
Yep....you could've been a Playmate and no guy would've touched you with those things on!
whoa, hold it there pardner!!! make fun of this guy all you want (he's a corps geek, he should be used to it by now) but leave naughty librarians out of it!!!!
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lol. okay.
In 93, I'd put Star right up there with BD in terms of difficultly, but not Phantom or Madison...not even close.
seriously man, bd's hornlines didn't play that many notes in 93. have you heard the phantom sops and mellos in 93? more impressive than anything bd's full sop line did that year, i thought. and listen to madison's book. i know we played in an absolute downpour and it was a crappy recording from finals, but our opener was the most musically challenging chart any drum corps tried that year, everyone was just flying the whole way through, and i'll put our soup against bd's any time. they had better soloists and great small ensemble work, but the hornline as a whole spent too much time playing long tones behind the solo/ensemble work and not enough swinging. all in all, a square chart. seriously, listen to the shows again back to back, bd had a clean hornline, but for sheer difficulty of book? no, not there, not for the whole line, outside of the small ensembles there just wasn't all that much meat in the 93 show. a couple of cool licks in the hornline (after all, its bd we're talking) but not one of their best books for the full ensemble. i always think of that show as bd's small big band show, after the top dozen or so guys who did all the work the rest of the hornline might as well have been the blue knights for all they got to hang it out and really play.
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And what you're saying is, that's exactly what they do today as well - except the payoff moments are loud angry staccato bursts, virtuoso ensemble drumming, rifles throwing fours, etc. So maybe the 1970s and 1980s - attempts to make a drum corps sound like an orchestra or jazz band - were the aberration?
That's heavy.
maybe an aberration, or maybe the pendulum just swings back and forth on this. at some point people got sick of all the choppy medleys and repeating the same stock songs in the 70's and wanted drum corps to tell a story, become more of a long form lyrical poetry or broadway type presentation. then people got sick of the drama and wanted more quick hits in the late 90's. now you see shows like 07 crown and 08 pr and it looks like shows that try to do more storytelling and present more melodic themes are getting popular again. and honestly, i can't really speak to the 40's and 50's, so no telling if this is cyclical or evolutionary, at least from my perspective. maybe a little of both would be my guess, though.
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Mad Scotty, that is a good point. How much do you think this kind of arranging was due to the constraints of having either prescribed or traditional "compulsories" such as an off-the-line, drum solo, concert, color presentation, exit, etc.?
I would add that I think the modern arranging style is completely a response to a judge-friendly dominated creative process that has seen a lot of corps trying to produce winterguard shows to please the visual and ge judges, as opposed to the old style where music/brass execution/brass marching was judged first, last and middle, and percussion and guard were considered "auxillaries".
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Mad Scotty, that is a good point. How much do you think this kind of arranging was due to the constraints of having either prescribed or traditional "compulsories" such as an off-the-line, drum solo, concert, color presentation, exit, etc.?
Not at all. I think medleys were just really popular in the 60's and 70's. they were a staple on variety shows and i believe a couple of them also made the pop charts. Back then the "impact moment" in drum corps was the payoff of the familar chorus of a popular hit, and arrangers generated audience impact by splicing together a bunch of payoff moments.
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One thing I think people miss all the time about the choppy arrangement that frustrates so many people---it isn't really modern. Listen to old school drum corps shows from the early 70's----the arrangement was super choppy then, too. Half the corps threw medleys into their shows back then, they would spend 30 seconds on one song then shift to another. If you can't find the recordings just go to corpsReps and look at any show repertoires from 70-75, you'll see song lists that go 10-12 deep regularly. I used to have a recording of an old Madison chart that had some stuff from the Wizard of Oz in it that must have been 8 songs in 2 minutes, seriously. The diference now isn't the lack of exposition, its the lack of lyrical quality to the music. Drum corps have their hornlines do a lot more percussive stuff, using brass to describe visual moves instead of emoting a theme. Audio recordings of modern corps make no sense, the music is more like a film score now, punctuating and enhancing the visual, rarely offering much that can stand alone on its own merits as pure music.
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'93 BD? Seriously? '93 BD? Hardest show ever? No way! That wasn't even the most challenging book that year?
Seriously, I mean, have you heard Phantom, Madison and Star from '93? That was a great year for brasslines, and Blue Devils were about the fourth hardest ensemble book that year. I mean, I know a lot of you guys only gt this stuff from the discs, and BD sounded like they were cooking that year, but I saw them live several times in '93, and I was honestly a little disappointed. First off, their version of Strawberry Soup is still the squarest I've heard. And honestly, all that really ripping stuff you hear on the cd from them that year was played by about 9 guys. That show was a small ensemble/soloist feast, but a full hornline famine, the corps played a lot of long tones behind the font men that year, more so than in any BD show I've ever heard.
I love the Blue Devils, really I'm a total BD fanboy (and this is coming from a Scout) but that show didn't place nearly the ensemble demand on their musicians some of you seem to think. Now 80, 84, 91, 98, 99, or 02 Devs, that I'll give ya. Right along with the 75 Muchachos, 75 81 83 88 93 95 and 96 Scouts, 83 84 87 93 98 and 02 Cadets, early 2000's Cavaliers (though I can't bear to sit through any of those shows, I'll admit they were hard to pull off), star 89-93 (except 92---ewww), and phantom 82 93 96 and 08. But 93 BD? They don't even get in the conversation as far as I'm concerned.
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a couple of comments:
---sunglasses on the field only in vk? haven't any of you seen vk or the bridgemen???
---an astigmatism is a misalignment in refraction that causes light sources to blur slightly, and its usually caused by a slight misalignment in the curve of the lens or a pinhole in the iris, or colored part of the eye that allows a second light source pass the lens. a deformed eyeball would be a far more serious (and less common) type of problem, i think you misheard a bit of what the eye doc told you there.
---i wore glasses in my marching days. they were obligatory for me, i'm legally blind without them. they were thin wire frame glasses though, not real noticeable. but they could be dangerous, the '93 madison drillwriter decided that it would be cool if the contras marched backfield doing 3 to 5's and passed through the tenors (no, really) and one day in practice a tenor whacked me so hard that my glasses flew apart. literally, th screws holding the frames together all flew out, both lenses and both arms ended up on the ground in 4 different directions, and i had to leave vis. practice until we could scramble and find a glasses repair kit with a couple of extra screws to rebuild my glasses.
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EVERYTHING is a choice.
you choose school over drum corps. you say "i can't march" when you really mean "i am unwilling to do what it takes to march."
there's nothing right or wrong with your decision -- just realize that it IS a decision, not an uncontrollable mandate.
if i were in your shoes -- and i very nearly was at one point -- i would have taken a semester off to make money and march. believe it or not, school can actually wait a little while.
i hate to tell you this, but only someone who has faced nothing but easy choices and light responsibility could possibly think that everything is as simple as that. people have very different options to choose from sometimes, and there is no such thing as choosing drum corps over school, i'd hope that any corps director who thought a member was even contemplating that would pull them aside and try to talk them into coming back to some realistic priorities.
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you think thats unfair? i hear there are kids who drop a substantial fee at every camp, and the corps keeps bringing them back and sucking them dry even though its clear 5 minutes into the first camp that they will not be offered a spot on the line. some of them get strung along all summer as "alternates", even. there are other kids who pay 2-3k a year for a spot on the line, and that covers not just food and gas for the buses but big $$$$ for props, electronics, custom designed and built guard equipment, new uniforms for the guard every single year, for the whole corps every few years, and salaries for bloated staffs of 40 and 50 year olds with day jobs who then turn around and accrue income from h.s. bands by selling the reputations they earn from drum corps. talk about unfair! you could kill electronics, and drastically cut back on visual aids and props, and keep the salaries lower for the part timers who do most of the design work and charge half the dues. and lose nothing artistically by challenging designers to be creative without just cutting a check and taking the easy way out when they are writing a show.
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It's been done successfully already with a British football club (roughly the equivalent of a minor league baseball team). The group, http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk/ recruited over 30,000 members who all pay an annual subscription fee of 35 pounds each. A year in they bought a team for 600,000 pounds, and the online community owns and operates the club. The community itself has the role of general manager, and all club decisions are discussed in the online forums and voted on.
If enough DCP people and outsiders could be recruited to pay a small membership fee the community could select a staff, decide the corps names and colors, pick out uni's, and design the show. It may sound crazy but these Brits didn't just buy their team, they led it to a championship for the first time in history and are now trying to grow and move up in class so they can compete against the big boys. Exciting stuff! And they really run it as a community, every single decision that would normally be made by a general manager, from authorizing each months expenditures, to roster and staff decisions, to deciding on new marketing schemes is all made by the community. This is a successful and proven business model.
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Has anyone seen ads about a Star Alumni project popping up? I logged onto my myspace page to check messages just now and saw a sponsored ad for StarAlumni.org. I don't know anything about the project, but clearly they have a budget because by a google sponsored intelligent ad ain't cheap.
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Just interested - would you have started this topic if the Colts had released a similar statement?
Thought not...
Have a nice day.
out of bounds, way out of bounds, the colts didn't release a classless statement like that and there is absolutely no reason to suggest even hypothetically that they would.
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Way to resort to personal insults to cope with people you dont agree with. For the record, 300 pound linemen may be incredible athletes, and experts at their craft, but arent going to be at the front of a drum corps jogging block anytime soon. Most of them need oxygen after returning a fumble more than 50 yards. As I mentioned earlier - excess weight is just another liability to corps. It can be overcome, certainly, just like anything else. Oh, and 'how you start' has a lot to do with how you finish. If it werent so, noone would give a #### about the winter season....
i normally would never do that, but considering that the post i was responding to was written in a snide and condescending tone, and the person both claimed professional expertise on the topic they were discussing and said something any athlete knows is provably false i took a liberty.
oh, and drum corps should never be about winning a title, or placement. i mean seriously, no one should ever feel a need to turn to a small group of biased and subjective respondents to validate any period of their life. drum corps is about challenging the members, giving them opportunity for achievement and growth, and giving them usable life skills they can take with them after drum corps. everybody who won a gold medal with phantom last year will turn 22 or die trying sooner or later, and you'll probably be able to count on one hand the number who receive any personal or professional advantage from winning. but all of them are better for trying, and doing the things they had to do to get through a drum corps season. there's real value in that, not in showing up perfect and finished but in the things you do to bring you up to a world class level. many, many hundreds of kids have shown up to their first camp fat and out of shape, some have quit, some have stayed and dragged their corps down, but most have grown and developed and succeeded. drum coprs is at its heart a developmental activity, a starting point, not an finished ending. hopefully you'll be able to develop a little more perspective over time and see that.
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Yup. Its fair. Sorry
no its not, its stupid, conditioning is part of drum corps, there are a lot of skinny dudes who can't hold their horn up and a lot of fat dudes who can't run multiple reps in every corps in january, and by july they are built up into machines. short of a major handicap there's no such thing as someone who is too fat or too weak to march drum corps, just someone who isn't dedicated enough. besides, as george hopkins used to say before he went crazy and thought drum corps should go pro, there just aren't that many jobs out there for center snare players, and the point of drum corps in the end isn't about making people better snare players, its about making them better people, and you don't do that by turning away people who need to work harder at the door. you do it by teaching them how to work harder and pushing them to overcome whatever weaknesses they bring to the table.
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Right, and your dads bluegrass band has less than 2 minutes to do a sound check right? Apples and oranges bro, don't even go there.
great point here, and the biggest reason i'm opposed to the use of electronics on the field:there's just no way to use them competently and professionally within the activity as it is currently structured. when i compare the slapdash use of amplification on the field with the incredible precision of marching, musical performance, and guard/dance work i choke on it. i think the only remotely effective use of electronics in a drum corps show was in 07 crown, where they used a crappy pa on a field in a stadium to portray the sound of, well, a crappy pa on the field in a stadium. it came across as entirely natural and believable, the rest of the time electronics are about as well integrated as a mime in a death metal concert. competency of use is such a core feature of drum corps i can't believe how many people are willing to discard the principle entirely just to focus on one narrowly defined style of "innovation". there is no achievement in electronics.
DCI and Social Networking
in DCI World Class Corps Discussions
Posted
I work in social media, specializing in online communities and leveraging existing channels (like facebook and twitter) for major brands and i'm always a little disappointed at how slow dci has been to pick this up. i sometimes wish i had the bandwidth to take them on as a pro bono client, but honestly, even if i had the time i wouldn't, i've worked with people in the past who weren't invested in the projects success and it tends to be a failure. still, if anyone knows of a drum corps that wants to improve their social media footprint i'd be willing to at least shoot them a couple of ideas.