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Rance Costa

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Rance Costa last won the day on June 5 2012

Rance Costa had the most liked content!

Profile Information

  • Your Drum Corps Experience
    1997-2000 Blue Knights Brass, 2004-2005 Troopers Brass Tech, 2006-2010 Colts Brass Tech, 2011-2012 Crossmen Brass Tech, 2014-2015 Colts Brass Tech
  • Your Favorite Corps
    Star of Indiana, Belleville Black Knights, Anaheim Kingsmen, Hawthorne Muchachos
  • Your Favorite All Time Corps Performance (Any)
    1995 Madison Scouts on VHS is the reason I joined DCI.
  • Your Favorite Drum Corps Season
    They're all the same to me. All the same level of AWESOME.
  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Redondo Beach, CA
  • Interests
    Offending people. Telling drum corps people they are running their organizations wrong. Proposing quick easy fixes for the things these people are doing wrong, but having them ignored because that corps director found the tone of my voice to be objectionable. Getting the claws out for the prideful asshat that would rather run his drum corps on his AMEX card than create an organization that can stand on it's own.

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    rancecosta
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    http://www.rancecosta.com
  • ICQ
    21069630
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    r0nej00
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    rancecosta@gmail.com
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  1. I'm a filmmaker. I communicate in video form. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyzctsA0ZoU Thanks to Minnesota Brass for the access and hang time all last week! Let the Madd circus begin! Their closer features some of Queen's "The Show Must Go On" and I thought it the perfect track for a DCA team who spends most of the season all alone in MN. ;)
  2. The OP is a TL:DR rant that pretty much says "Please enable us to infringe copyright, but help us also police anyone else's use of my pirated material, it's somehow justified"
  3. I marched mello in BK in '98 and we had about half of the line on 2 valve horns (mine included) still and the 3 valve horns were Dynasty mellos that I really liked. It was '99 that BK finally got most / all brass on 3 valve instruments from what i remember.
  4. Chuck confirms on his FB. One positive comment and one negative comment: Positive: Chuck is by far and away the highest skill and most well listened brass arrangers I've had the pleasure of working with. Negative: Not the first time we've witnessed a questionable choice from the TXmen. I'm pretty sure he's doing the Colts again!!! :) So there's that.
  5. I've been lucky enough to be on Jason's brass staff for 7 of the last 9 seasons of DCI; and yes -- if you enjoy high quality drum corps brass playing, march whatever corps this man is teaching. And I guarantee rehearsal will be very engaging. :) INDEED CHUCK! Jason is the man. And increasingly the only man I LOVE to teach with. Really feel like I make a difference when I teach with Jason. There is a VERY short list of people capable of such major transformations in quality of a program in such a short amount of time.
  6. Those of us who 'do audio for a living' will merely suggest that the topic's subject assumes too much. I would not assume that Tom's team is handling the live stream or the audio for any streams other than Nationals finals -- I don't suspect Tom's team does much exceptt provide a video feed from the truck to the web administrator for web replication. As someone who has had to deal with many German, Korean, Chinese production trucks feeds in NTSC and PAL formats over the years, trust me when I say the web stream has many more chances of losing quality due to the limitation of the truck / feed replicator that provides source to the web stream. I watched every web stream this year and at least 75% of the web streams produced by DCI were done independently of a production truck with one camera and it's own microphone setup, independent from the 'pros'. What I'm saying is that there are other team(s) that do the live internet stream than Tom's team, sometimes with different microphones and setups. This simply depends on who is available to DCI to perform this service. I'd suggest that the consistency of DCI's audio recordings from CD to DVD to web has been suspect over the years simply because of differing manpower and ears making the mastering decisions. It has not always been Tom since the beginning, and those with good taste can probably accurately label the years that Tom has and has not mastered these recordings. When it has been Tom, I have noticed and loved it. Even made mention of it to him a couple of times and had a short email conversation about that. At the end of the day, mastering is all about taste. It's possible that the Blu Rays are recorded and mastered from a completely different set of microphones than the ones used to capture the stream sent to the web. Consider everyone that DCI may not be interested in providing the best master of the corps via the web but rather via the permanent archives they sell us, i.e. Blu Ray CD and DVD after some time to master them. The live 'master' of the stream would simply be a reflection of the best mix they could come up with given time, budget, manpower and equipment restraints. TTThere is also simply the limit of bandwidth at the event that can be used safely to provide a smooth streaming experience for we end users. For Tom: I love your work and appreciate the time you donate to DCI for this work. We see here how the masses (even pro audio guys) put you on the hook for things that you may not control. However, maybe internal communication and planning can be facilitated by DCI mgmt to provide the fans at home who aren't aware of this to receive a more consistent listening experience from event to event to avoid these assumptions. Simple standards and practices can be defined to standardize the sound for DCI. But you know this already, Tom, because you are the man. Thanks for everything you do for DCI. <3 Thanks to the OP for having high standards. This leads to consistency and success, especially in recording.
  7. So many topics catching my eye this year... I've been lurking forever but always on tour haha. BD made me a fan in 1997 against my will with their amazing PQ (it's a technical term, you wouldn't understand ;). Since then its been hit & miss, but that's the nature of art. I need to re-iterate my BD hostility by saying generally i don'tt like them but I cannot deny their amazing structure and execution top to bottom. That ORG is tight. That being said, here are my thoughts on This year's BD production. One of maybe 3 in the last 15 years of being a captive observer that I think they NAILED. Stravinsky broke all the rules. So does BD. Amazing arranging by the designers and a solid visual component. I'm programmed to love Crown and I do. But for me the voices in the show are a deal breaker. The rest is perfect. Cadets I like, but they seem to lack the whateverittakes to beat the previous two. If they get 'Cadets Clean' they could take it. Watch out for Vanguard. They are extremely dangerous. Love the effect with the hidden brass playing fortissimo near the end of the show. Nothing but class (it is the most brisk version of Les Mis and perhaps the most 'upbeat' sounding I've ever heard, borderline "in a hurry" to me, but I get over it when I'm soaked with the absolutely CLASS this corps has in it's production. Love the top groups this year but I derive large amounts of physical pain from hearing harmonized rhythmic counting over the best brass sound in DCI. Keep it up you guys, this is a race to the finish, and its ttthe corps with 2 more gears left that's going to take the title! Always a fan,
  8. Oh the bandwagon is hot to jump on the Hopkins hate. As someone who grew up hating Hopkins because of the hyperbole dispensed by those 'in the know' in many discussions such as this, I am not surprised to see this response in general. I did surprise myself by my thoughts after reading the local news article about him. I find his public posting on Facebook to be succinct, to the point, and with the BEST FOR HIS CORPS in mind, while not tearing down anything else. He admits hes a stickler for the best rehearsal zones for his corps, and I appreciate this. As someone who has marched for a corps that shared as little as 2 shower heads and one dirt 3/4 field at a show site for total rehearsal space, I know what its like to be on 'both sides' of the top 12 with regards to quality of housing. "BRAND NEW" the news article says about the housing site. My memories as a drum corps instructor about "BRAND NEW" schools is those are the locations that are the MOST strict with regards to facilities. There will be a 75% chance the gym floor was recently surfaced and not accessible, there will be a 50% chance the outdoor grass field was recently seeded / sodded and not accessible, and theres a 75% (industry standard) chance that the showers will be too few in number and very cold at a 'brand new' school since not everything is fully functioning yet. Perhaps Mr. Hopkins (unlike other corps directors) is capable of assessing the situation and reaching out in his social network to rectify what would turn out to be a couple of bad days in the south. What if he was *gasp* actually able to improve 3 days of rehearsal conditions with that posting? In fact, he was. And things are fine. Aside from the whining Southerners who apparently think the phrase 'less than wonderful' means "#### your mama". I have witnessed the steady decline in general quality of housing sites for top 12 groups (and lets not even talk about those groups not in the 'top 12') since 9/11. I have been on the scene, and even in meetings with school administrators who describe post 9/11 security requirements to be too high to allow an independent organization to stay at the school overnight leaving doors propped, etc like corps do. What DCI has not done is whats important here. DCI -- if they are to schedule to tours and housing -- need to spend more resources on many things, but cultivating relationships with housing sites year over year apparently is high on the list since sir Hoppy was able to score such good housing in just two days with one heartfelt and truthful Facebook posting. Everyone who is a hater of Hoppy certainly has valid reasons. But using this recent Facebook posting as an excuse to dump your truckload of hate onto him about other topics is not appropriate. This guy wentt to bat for his team. #### Mississippi if they can't take the truth. Personally, as a Hoppy hater, I give this man a giant standing ovation for reaching the required ends for his kids. As for the backlash in that local news story, let me quote Gov. Jerry Brown of California who recently discovered some objectionable press about hi state from Gov. Rick Perry in TX: "It's not a serious story, guys," Brown said, "It's not a burp. It's barely a fart." Thats how I feel about this thread and the news story and I hope Mr. Hop shares the same sentiment. Nobody read it and if anyone were to 'inspect' the living conditions of these corps on tour generally, methinks many of these teams would be shut down by the authorities. So, thanks George Hopkins for improving your team's lot in life. It's not your fault others do not share your same level of expectation for your group. Keep on keepin' on.
  9. I have made it a point over the years to simply lurk on the drum corps forums and not participate in discussions. I learned a hard lesson in 1998 in the "Idiocracy" sense that reasoning with folks here is usually met with sarcasm. Thank you, original poster, for thinking big about this. Conversations like this will be better received in private. Most folks here won't understand the 30,000 foot level of intent from the OP. PM sent. Let's do lunch :)
  10. Thanks so much Tom! You've finally done it, what so many people before you were trying to do... Accurately capture the sound of DCI!!! I can't even begin to explain how much of a difference the DTS-HD mode makes for even the lay person. My fellow tech geek here at home came over yesterday and I showed him the staggering difference in sound from the Dolby Digital audio setting to the DTS-HD. He was flabbergasted and he knows the spec difference. He just hadn't heard it used in a medium that could take advantage of it 'fully'. Now he's begging me to see DCI live! Love it. Big ups Tom and the team for the best disc ever!
  11. Awesome job on the Blu-rays Tom, they are excellent! My home system sounds great, even at the volume taste we apparently share, 1 notch below blood from the ears ;)
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