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!

No intention to challenge your credentials -- sorry if it sounded that way. I mentioned it because anybody can edit most Wikipedia articles and correct errors.

Sorry, sop, but I can't agree with you. While I do agree that the jury is still out, anything that could affect the welfare of my kids or other kids 800 miles from home is going to draw my attention and keep it until there's some resolution.

The kid arrived back safely; overnight at my sister's home to load up all his kit and be at band camp on Tuesday. Had a long chat on Skype with him a few hours ago; the world is a happier place when you march on Saturday night LOL! Impressive guns, claims to have an eight-pack, not an ounce of fat on him (BMI of 18.9, by my reckoning). Sort of a mix of eagerness to move on and wistfulness that the camaraderie of the summer has to go back on the shelf for a while. I had to bite my tongue and hide a smile a few times as we talked, though. Evidently there's quite a grapevine out on the road; he has strong opinions about the same topics we squabble about here on DCP, most of them scandalous concerning any corps but his own. What a ride!

I'll be watching this thread. If true, this would be any parent's nightmare. I hope it's not true. You might also want to edit the corps' Wikipedia page. It shows: Directors John Rodriguez 1999-2004 GM Kuzma 2005-2006 David Wesley Roberts 2007-2008 John Rodriguez 2009-Future

At last year's semis (don't know about the other two nights), you could rent an audio gadget at LOS that gave you running commentary as the shows were going on. I didn't bite, and asked here about how it went for people who did. There were no replies, perhaps suggesting that it wasn't popular enough to do again this year?

You're right, but there was sort of a crawl upward during July after they started head-to-head again, with some nail-biting time for fans of all three corps. And yes, the Cavies were the only top-12 corps to improve their position last year between Allentown and finals. Quite a change this year, where their score dropped slightly from semis to finals while the two ahead of them jumped half a point each.

It was pretty obvious that SOMETHING had been there -- on FN, it looked like a blotch on the field. I suppose that's consistent with a piece of turf that hasn't been used as much as the one with the Colts logo on it.

I don't have the time to be more than "impressionistic" fan -- I enjoyed this year's circuit greatly, and there were wonderful shows all up and down the rankings. But I know some of you folks go into the numbers in great detail. Crown started hot but didn't stay on top -- was Saginaw an aberration? Cavies ruled the roost for a while -- a fairly long time in DCI weeks, but then got overtaken. BD surged and fell back a bit. What do the numbers say about what happened, if there are clear trends? Was it a Cavies collapse, or did the Cadets and BD just do a better job of cleaning slowly but surely? Did show changes in July and August correspond with noticeable bumps or drops in the scores of all three? Can you point to design or performance as being more important in the relative rank changes?

I was ready to dive into FN, until JulesBry gave me the bad news. After a little googling about their DQ that year, it struck me that that's the reason the show isn't on Fan Network. We'll see. But there's an alternative take on that, IMO. It was an unbeatable show, but its technical near-perfection went off in a direction that began to worry DCI about the possible influence in the future. Is there any consensus about whether the show played into the decision to revise the judging standards?

It's not worth it to me personally, although I'm sure it's worth it to lots of hard-core fans. The question is which group outweighs and outspends the other. I don't know. I've never attended a finals; seeing all the shows in the semis and quarters has been more than enough for me. The difference between DCI finals and the world series is that you never know who's going to win the world series. A couple of bad bounces could change everything. That just doesn't happen in DCI. Granted, this year is different than the last two and that's the limit of my experience, but it seems to me you have to have a lot invested to care all that much if #8 overtakes #7 for reasons that you probably can't see from the stands anyway. And you never know where the real competition might occur -- 12 vs. 11, 1 vs. 2 or whatever. Not saying lots of people aren't interested, but most of them are concentrated here on DCP. :) Seems to me it's a matter of competition vs. artistry, and especially with Fan Network, finals doesn't add a lot, IMO, to my enjoyment of the artistry. Your milage may (and probably does) vary.