Tyler C.

That seems simple enough. Thanks again!

Thanks for the response. I asked about the staff because I would love to spend a summer shadowing a DCI percussion section and its staff. I won't have any DCI marching experience; this year would be my age-out. This summer will be my third with Atlanta CV and my second as front ensemble section leader. I soak in everything I can from our incredible staff. I already instruct and arrange for high school percussion sections, but I would love to one day teach at the corps level, so I'm trying to find a way to get some DCI experience, even if it's just observation.

I know DCI itself has internship opportunities, but do corps take on interns? If so, in what areas do they accept them? Could it be possible to intern for, say, the percussion staff? This is just for simple info-gathering right now; the earliest I would consider trying this would be 2015.

I don't think show style and corps style are mutually exclusive. I teach a high school group that marches corps-style competitive shows, but they play cadences similar to the ones in the OP's video in the stands, at pep rallies, in parades, etc., and I think it's good, clean fun. Their school and community hypes it, and because they write many of their cadences themselves, it gives them a great source of pride in their work. I spent my first fall teaching them to use that same kind of performance energy in a slightly different way for their halftime show, and I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the transition was. I agree with Mr. Boo; show-style bands are their own unique arena with their own ways of being entertaining. However, don't write off students from show-style high school bands when it comes to drum corps. A few of the kids I teach are showing serious interest in drum corps- they definitely recognize and appreciate the level of talent and work shown by DCI lines. I would also love to see more drumline "battles" and hornline blowouts in drum corps. I saw a great video recently of the batteries from Blue Stars and Pacific Crest "battling" the morning of Finals this year. It doesn't have to be a drum/horn "battle," either- see Spirit and Crossmen.

Sorry for the late response; CV had a camp this weekend. That was a list of High Drum winners (copied and pasted, so admittedly not thoroughly researched). Smokin' lines, if you will.

1972 Kingsmen 1973 SC Vanguard 1974 SC Vanguard 1975 SC Vanguard 1976 Blue Devils 1977 Blue Devils 1978 SC Vanguard 1979 SC Vanguard 1980 Bridgemen 1981 Bridgemen 1982 Bridgemen 1983 Blue Devils 1984 Blue Devils 1985 Blue Devils 1986 Blue Devils 1987 Cadets 1988 SC Vanguard 1989 SC Vanguard 1990 Cadets 1991 SC Vanguard 1992 Cavaliers 1993 Star of Indiana 1994 Blue Devils 1995 Cavaliers 1996 Blue Devils 1997 Blue Devils 1998 SCVanguard 1999 Cavaliers 2000 Cavaliers 2001 Cadets 2002 Cadets 2003 Cadets 2004 SC Vanguard 2005 Cadets 2006 Phantom Regiment 2007 Blue Devils 2008 Phantom Regiment 2009 Blue Devils 2010 Phantom Regiment 2011 Cavaliers 2012 Blue Devils

Got my CD today. I love the quality! I definitely notice the absence of Fran's senior moment in our show.

How about a compromise? The board could consist of 1.) The directors of the Top 6 of the previous season. Certain financial downfalls could exclude a corps (losses for x years in a row (regardless of net assets), maintaining more liabilities than assets x years in a row (regardless of net revenue), more than x amount of debt at any time, or other factors that I know very little about), and the next highest-scoring corps meeting the financial standards would be included. AND 2.) The directors of the 6 most financially stable corps of the previous season not already included in the BoD by Top 6 placement. The metric for that can be up to much more able financial minds than mine. AND 3.) A non-corps board member as a tie-breaker vote only. Possibly the chair of an advisory board to the BoD. After poring over garfield's excellent 990's thread (linked below; he provides an index in the first post, so don't be scared by the page count), I believe this could create an interesting mix. It would guarantee at least one G7 corps having to get in on financial stability alone each year, which looks like no guarantee for a few of them. It would also give very smart and effective directors of smaller/less competitively successful organizations a much louder voice. This would ensure that competitive standing isn't the only major factor and isn't even the most important factor. It could give a balance of competitive success, corps size, and organizational strength, which I believe to be valuable because of some of the perennial Friday-nighters that look very well-run to my untrained eye (and to garfield in his brief analysis of each corps). http://www.drumcorpsplanet.com/forums/index.php/topic/154521-the-990s/ No matter what happens, giving an instant majority to 7 corps that have already presented themselves as a single unit would be foolish. If we juxtaposed the 2012 Semis results with a hypothetical financial ranking (again, included factors and how to weight them are up for debate by people with much more experience with finances than I can claim), how different would it be? Where would each G7 group fall? Basically, I think the tax forms are more important than the recaps, and I believe that should be reflected in the composition of the BoD.

So it begins. After the trouble you went through to get my corps name change stuff figured out in the system, I hope I can be competitive enough to make it worth your while.

Yikes... With CV, we pay for an extra night at the hotel just to be able to go back to shower and relax some before hitting the road o-dark-thirty Monday morning.

Bingo. I think either DCI or DCA needs to reach out to smaller organizations like SDCA and DCNA and aid their efforts to get local drum corps back in communities across North America. DCNA in particular is structured with cooperation between corps in mind. Also, with all the active church youth groups I see down here, I wonder if church-sponsored junior corps could make a comeback, if only at a local level. How would this help current DCI/DCA corps? Well, maybe it wouldn't directly help, but I think it would help bring drum corps much closer to mainstream America than it has been since the AL/VFW days. I've recently been amazed by how many friends I have who have a grandparent or great-grandparent who marched drum corps in their youth (I'm 20). My girlfriend has a grandfather who marched with the Bridgeport PAL Cadets in the early 60's, first on snare, then on sop. He aged out in '64, which from some digging on CorpsReps.com looks like the high-water mark for that corps, edging Troopers and Madison Scouts to make Finals at the World Open Championships and just missing Finals at the VFW Nationals. As someone who has only followed drum corps since 2006, it's really cool for me and my girlfriend to see Chicago Cavaliers, Garfield Cadets, Boston Crusaders, Phantom Regiment, Casper Troopers, Madison Scouts, and Racine Kilties in the same lineups as a corps someone in her family marched with. I can't wait to talk to him about it. I think it would be wonderful to get local drum corps back to a point where state championships are possible. Then, DCI's claim as marching music's major league would actually have some weight to it, since there would be a much stronger "minor league" system to support it. Sure, there's high school marching band, but in my experience with a small band program with mediocre resources, it was fundamentally different. Some of my teaching experiences since then reinforced that. We have to remember that BOA is the circuit of the few... Most high school programs I've seen struggle to compare to BOA, much less to drum corps. It seems like the values and lessons drum corps can teach would be especially applicable in a world where sometimes the only thing needed to keep kids on the right track is a good use of their free time. The obvious challenge is money, but who says these local groups have to tour or even compete? There's an effort to get a corps off the ground here that would perform at arena football games. I know, I'm a dreamer, but if the golden days of drum corps where when corps were as common as a church in the Bible Belt, I think a serious effort needs to be made to recapture that. Much like the major symphony orchestras in America, we can't keep depending on our oldest generations to keep the music alive, because in reality those folks aren't going to be around for very much longer (relatively speaking). It's up to their sons and daughters and then down to my generation to find new ways to bring in the resources to keep this activity alive, and then, accomplishing that, to help it grow again. New resources could mean branching out through the use of local corps to make drum corps more prominent in the average American's life and in turn find new financial supporters of the activity. That's just my favorite brainstorm. Whatever we do will need to be organized and will have to make good use of the technologies available to us (namely, social media). The Internet has driven us even further into our niche and has hidden us away from public view. I would love to see more local news coverage of what corps are doing for our youth... What's your idea? /ramble

Until he took over CV's percussion, Chris Romanowski judged percussion for both circuits. He still judges DCI. As far as I know, Marty Griffin, the head of DCA percussion judging, is still a top DCI percussion judge. I remember him judging the DCI Atlanta regional in 2011 in my first (judged) drum corps performance ever. I'm not sure if that's the question you want answered, but those two are the only ones I know from my brief time in DCA so far.

The Academy are entering their tenth year of competition and have finished in the top 15 five of their six years in World Class/Division I. They are the youngest corps in World Class. Corps still provide horns.

I would bet every DCA corps either has plenty of remaining spots or hasn't started locking spots in at all. I understand that many of these players will want to exhaust every DCI option first, but when those spots fill, I would strongly encourage them to give DCA a look. I'm not sure how many people Glassmen draw from the South, but just in case, Atlanta CV is considering every spot open at least until our next camp for horns and percussion January 12-13. After that, I can't make any promises about percussion spots, but I'm sure we could audition some more horns.

This alone is why I was so disappointed when Alliance went inactive... We lost a geographical rival and their home show right up the road. I hope their efforts to return in 2014 are going well.

...Is it June yet?

That we did. I'll be sure to pass the words along. His DCI/DCA judging perspective makes him unlike anyone else I've played for, and he writes some slammin' beats, too.

I'm certainly no expert, and I haven't been around long, but I've never heard a DCI or DCA drum tape where the field environment actually kept a judge from doing his job (and I'm a nerd about that sort of thing). The most serious concern is when drill delays a judge in transitioning from battery to pit, or vice versa, and there's a brief moment of dead time where the judge can't evaluate anything but compositional/idiomatic elements. I just don't think that's enough to move them upstairs. I don't think I know a drum staff who wouldn't want a judge on top of their battery for half the show, because I don't think a judge could "properly evaluate" a drumline from the box when you start having to rank the top percussion sections in DCA. At a certain point in the season, the top several are all clean, and the difference is in the details. This is certainly no intended disrespect to you and your decades of experience, Mr. Peashey. I'm just giving my perspective as a percussionist, a high school percussion instructor/arranger, a fan of drum corps for six short years, a member for two even shorter seasons, and a man who hopes to become even more involved in the activity I love. I would even support adding a percussion judge to the box, especially when amplification comes into play for 2014, but I simply feel we would be giving too much away if we removed the field judge.

I'm not familiar enough with the debate on the location of the brass judge to comment, but I'm relieved to hear that the perc judge is staying on the field. Putting that judge in the box would be a terrible idea... If you want a perc judge up top, have one there and one on the field. Amplification could even be on that judge's sheet.

Sure, you can use those instruments without amplification and have them heard. It's simply a personal preference that I don't like the sound quality. To me, it seems like those instruments have to be played up several dynamic levels in order to balance, and it sounds harsh to me. For example, I would much rather hear the amplified sound of a tambourine playing at piano than the sound of a tambourine being played at forte just to balance with an ensemble piano dynamic. They may achieve essentially the same volume, but with much different sound qualities. The same applies to every instrument up front. I'm 20 years old. I first learned of drum corps in 2006 and went to my first show in 2007. Until marching CorpsVets 2011, CV and Alliance were the only all-age corps I had ever seen. I say that just to admit that I have never enjoyed the harsh quality of un-amplified front ensembles, whether watching a high school band, a college band, or a drum corps. I never liked it in high school, and I didn't like it when I started watching DCI shows from before pit mics. Several of my favorite shows are from the '80's and '90's, so it's definitely not a bias against the entire era. I often wish I had a chance to witness a bottle dance, a sunburst, the original Z-pull, SCV making a whole corps disappear, Phantom's "Bacchanale," Star's cross-to-cross ending, Blue Devils seducing everyone in '92, Star '93, and countless other classic moments. DCI was already mic'd by the time I found it, and that's the sound I fell in love with. I'm certainly not trying to bastardize anything. Thanks for the well-wishes, and I'm sorry the activity isn't what you knew and loved. I imagine the day will come when drum corps becomes something I feel has passed me by, but I'm going to love every minute until then. To high notes and clean beats, Tyler

I believe amplification finally makes those "same methods that hornline and battery have always used" available to front ensembles. It gives them a fair shot to balance properly within the ensemble sound without playing up to their ears. They keyboards in an average DCA pit are practically inaudible within the ensemble sound when playing below a solid mezzo-forte (depending on the corps' size), unless they're playing a unison rhythm of some kind. Amplification allows for a front ensemble arrangement to have as much depth and complexity as a horn book and still come across. It's apparent that some people still consider the front ensemble to be a subordinate ensemble, and that's a personal preference that I can understand. The ever-changing and evolving landscape of drum corps creates division all the time (starting line, inspection, key, valves, every design element, amps, synths, etc.). I would simply ask those people to watch this short video of the front ensemble of the 2010 Sanford Trophy-winning Phantom Regiment percussion section waking the corps up with the opening and closing pit features of that year's show. If they played with that level of musicianship and touch without amplification, the thick texture, rich harmony, and rhythmic/melodic complexity would never come across that well. You would hear accents, glock, xylo, upper register of marimba and vibes, and auxiliary percussion. However, you would miss much of the phrasing of each line, and, lest we forget the venue for our activity, you would never get the same lush sound projected to the audience. DCA front ensembles now have the capability to provide more to the overall music package than ever before. This is without even mentioning the possibilities for auxiliary percussion. Properly balanced small instruments ("toys" like tambourine, triangles, castanets, claves, wood blocks, etc.), effect cymbals, concert snare, drum set, timpani without the awful popping sound made when played too hard, and even clapping or snapping are just a few possibilities. Yes, poorly-balanced amplification is atrocious, and I hope DCA takes the year before it kicks in to discuss how to reflect that on the sheets.

I can't stress this enough, but EVERY spot is still considered open. We've got 128 in our sights, so tell your friends. Next camp for brass and percussion is January 12-13 at New Manchester High in Douglasville, GA. Come hype with us!

Whoa!

Dothan on the 25th is about the same distance as the other two, if we could manage a Thursday show... Spirit will be there.