Tito John

Everything's great; everything's good. I love every corps. They're all just so fantastic my heart flutters, and there's nothing I don't like about any of them. So you drove him away. Good for you.

Getting rid of the smells too easily would eliminate about 25% of my kid's tour stories. I'm all in favor...

This is probably only loosely related to the thread, but in my random walk through Fan Network videos, I watched the 2000 Cadets' show yesterday. Quite a few similarities in the "hot-dogging" to XtraordinarY.

Thanks. I'll look for the app. This was just astonishingly good.

I just stumbled across an audio recording of (the title said) Phantom Regiment's horn line playing "Amazing Grace." Phantom Regiment doesn't have an official corps song, I gather, but this and two others have served unofficially. Seems like it couldn't have been recorded on the field or in a gym. Did they do this in a studio? Do other corps do the same thing? "How sweet the sound" doesn't even come close to describing how lush and moving this arrangement and performance is.

This thread has been a wonderful education for me. Thanks to all the contributors.

Living in Korea, where my 12.5 meg Internet connection is the bottom of the line in cost and speed, I was dazzled by Fan Network's beta high-speed feed. FN is the best investment I've made in a long time, and kudos to DCI for it. Even though I'm limited to watching what the camera is watching, I doubt that I'd ever be a more sophisticated viewer than their cam-switching engineers are. I'd like to see all the shows live. But I'd like to see them at a small venue, and I don't really care if they're early and a little unpolished. The energy is what turns me on, and you'll never get that on FN or even at Indy, where you're just too far away. I haven't seen any of the shows at a theater, but many of the comments here suggest that managers are afraid of blowing speakers. FN lets me watch the shows over and over, at my leisure, absorbing comments here and watching, the next time, for what's been commented on. I guess if I were really, really a fanatic, I'd obsess about differences between semis and finals. But live or not, I couldn't ever tell the difference in how the shows should be scored from the second-last evening to the finals. In short, I would like to see all of them live, sitting on bleachers at a high-school football field.

It probably takes several centuries of experience to guess how many butts will be in seats for your show, set up and test the electronics, tweak the sound board and get everything ready for the performance. Seems pretty clear that even an expert with state-of-the-art tools can't do that in five minutes, and probably not unless he's measuring where the audience is sitting. This is an entirely different question that the esthetics of electronics, and it seems to me that some of the comments have gone off on the tried and true tangent of arguing about the latter instead of the focusing on the most interesting point that the OP raises. If I understand it correctly (and exaggerating a little for effect), the question is whether or not present-day drum corps can ever do electronic music right. Nothing to do with whether electronics is good or bad for drum corps -- just whether it can be presented effectively given the constraints of the activity.

As a relative newcomer to DCP and drum corps, I sort of picked up stuff here and then on the forum and am wondering how much is right and what is wrong. Drops don't count, I read early on. A recent thread suggested that stumbles and falls don't either, if the recovery is fast. But missing a dot does, even if there's a fast recovery? What about fraks (...if that's the right slang term...)? For example, the Colts' solo trumpeter messed up the ballad a bit at semis in 2009. (On the video and DVD, his good quarterfinals audio was evidently patched in.) Would that have affected the corps' score on semis night? I guess my only observation would be that the fewer "rub of the green" elements there are in the scoring, the more stable the scores will be. How you see that depends on where you stand.

Is it clear that the shows ended up making good money for the TOC corps? I don't think the question is as naive as it might sound if there was some travel jiggery-pokery to be done and a different show forgone on that night. A glance at the schedule doesn't seem to show that the G8 did four shows more than anybody else.

No matter how small the scale, the net effect of this flap, unless it's settled, will be an increase in copyright infringement as people rip the DVD to put the music back in and pass it along.

It's too bad that the early corps, who have some very good shows as well but don't get the attention that the stars do, are at a double disadvantage with the acoustics. There were a couple of reverse shots of Jersey Surf in the FN video, and it must have been a little discouraging for them. Edit: OK..."disadvantage" isn't quite the right word. Lack of fans AND worse acoustics.

I was looking for your posts from shows earlier this summer to see just how bad it was, but couldn't find any. Was it so bad you took down the posts? Actually, though, it strikes me that most of the "grammar cop" posts here are made at least half in jest, unless the corrector makes his own mistake, in which case he's going to get pounded. Like it or not, and especially when you're a faceless few lines of type on the Internet, it's human nature to let the appearance of a post influence the assessment of the contents. All the big browsers except for IE have a spelling checker, and there are add-ons for IE. They won't find things like "loose" for "lose," which is my pet peeve, but they'll catch a lot of things. Or not. That function has been a major embarrassment to me, and there are some sites that have a whole bunch of "autocorrect funnies," ranging from the mildly humorous to the howlingly obscene. But automatically inserting apostophes in contractions slightly outweighs the other PITA elements for me, so I leave it on.

No, this is all new to me. He didn't get his musical ability from my genes. If you'll allow me to deflect the question about where he marched, I'll thank you. I enjoy posting here, but I sometimes have ...ummmm...strong opinions, only occasionally backed up by knowledge. I don't want to risk blurting out something that might embarrass the kid or his corps.

My kid became an all-state tubist because of drum corps. He first picked up the instrument five months before his first corps audition. Sounds like you're way ahead of his level when he first marched, and his corps was about the same level as the Crossmen. DO IT!