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Phantom1701

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  • Your Drum Corps Experience
    Magic Pit, PR Auditionee
  • Your Favorite Corps
    Phantom Regiment
  • Your Favorite All Time Corps Performance (Any)
    89 Phantom Regiment
  • Your Favorite Drum Corps Season
    1996
  • Gender
    Male

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  1. Thanks for a great season Phantom! One of the best PR shows in a long time. The activity as a whole may have turned into a one-horse race, but you just keep doing what you do best. Keep pushing, keeps striving for excellence.
  2. I tend to agree. PR was sharp beginning to end. Great energy. Mandarins started out flat. To their credit though, it got better as it went along. Never know how the judges will see things, but definitely felt like PR was at least a couple of tenths above Cadets and Mandarins tonight. Guess we'll see.
  3. It definitely feels like PR has the most inconsistent reads at the moment. It could be down to the performances and what is happening on the field each night. From what I've seen so far it feels like their score can catch up to the corps in front of them once they are able to clean and work on some of the GE points. Almost feels like they are trying to do too much and not focusing on key moments. If you look at the tops groups, aside from strong performers, those shows really come down to key moments and cohesive story.
  4. Really excited about the new staff announcements! I don't know how they managed to convince those guys to come back, but glad they did!
  5. And you are qualified to say this because you have an equal amount of musical knowledge and experience as JP? Yeah, thought not. 😉 It's all good. Personally I think SCV's pit has put them over the top on more than one occasion. Just as Rennick's pit (or his wife's) did in 2010. Battery wise.....there are harder books out there. Clean, absolutely, but content.....meh. Go listen to Cadets 2016 or even Boston's battery this year. I would put either of those over SCV, yet SCV took the Sanford. So it's pit+battery, not just one or the other.
  6. Just go and listen to any of JP's tapes. His musical knowledge and acumen is in a different stratosphere. He can pick out the 4th inner beat of measure 5 in a 12 measure passage. His ear is unreal. Anyway, total jealously of his skills aside (answering EXITMUSIC's question) the actual number a judge puts down is of course completely subjective. It's not like the judges remember exactly what they saw back in minute 3 of a 12 minute show, but it's an overall impression of a performance at the end. General effect is one of the most vague categories IMO since it doesn't look at just one thing. It's basically if the whole production "works" according to the requirements on the sheets. That has little, if nothing to do with what we as fans think of the "effectiveness" of a show. Most of the time we are just left to guess.
  7. JP is one of the best judges in the activity and I believe he calls it like he sees it, without bias. If he had BD on top last night, then there is likely a good reason for that.
  8. I can imagine how hard that must have been. Sometimes things that seem so obvious to the staff just doesn't translate to the judges or audience. It happens. Really sad to see both Cadets and PR struggling this year. Kudos to the other corps that have passed them, but just a shame from a strictly historical and emotional standpoint to see these amazing corps struggle. If they don't get things turned around, eventually the talent will just give up and go elsewhere. As much as kids may just want to march, they would also like a chance at a medal. It's human nature.
  9. It certainly does feel like it is heading in that direction, yes. I just hate seeing a DCI institutional corps getting squeezed out because they didn't choose to play the games a other corps have. An off year here or there, fine, but Madison has never fully recovered and maybe never will. Short of a Bill Cook type of monetary intervention that can buy and retain a top staff for years to come.
  10. I completely agree with this statement. Kids these days do follow the top staffs to whatever corps they are at and those corps in turn are the ones who are succeeding, competitively. Hiring from within is great and may pay dividends in the long-term. Short-term however, it could get rough. The question is will you stop attracting the top talent in the activity if too many years go by without enough competitive success?
  11. Sure, but that was 20 years ago. Don't get me wrong, Lee has a great resume and reputation in the activity. So it's not as though he would be a bad hire by any means. Just saying that Cadets might be better off turning to a younger, up and coming writer/caption head that can bring a fresh perspective to the corps. Perhaps even a protege of Rennick or McNutt.
  12. Fair enough. He's definitely a top-6 type of writer, though I don't believe he's ever had a line win the Sanford. I could be mistaken.
  13. Really? Not a big fan of his writing, but he definitely is a well-known commodity in the activity. So who knows?
  14. This exactly. 1000% spot on. I think sometimes people assume that judging is a science and that judges evaluate captions in some sort of a vacuum. But the truth is judging is very much an art, and a subjective one at that. When I would judge high school bands, I would absolutely reward the smaller groups if I felt they were maximizing their show, whereas most of the other judges waited for the 5A and 6A's before giving out top box scores. But to me each sheet is specific to the group in front of you and they should be rewarded for what they attempting/achieving relative only to themselves. If that is top box worthy, then it is top box worthy, regardless of any other factors. DCI on the other hands is very good about lining up the captions close to the order of finish. Yes, there are exceptions, like with the Rennick's were with Phantom (and probably a few more), but for the most part it seems as though your caption scores/placements goes as your GE and overall placement goes.
  15. I'm not sure how exactly? I said that DCI is going the way of WGI, but that doesn't mean that someone of Gaines' quality can't see both activities for what they uniquely are and write/design accordingly.
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