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Quad Aces

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Quad Aces last won the day on May 28 2012

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  1. What happened to Poppycock? Honest question - I always enjoyed the witty posts.
  2. Any luck with this one? This is the exact one that I was going to recommend, but you beat me to it 😀. I’ve stayed there a couple of times, and it’s a good hotel. Very convenient - to downtown Canton (nice set of restaurants/bars), Akron, NFL Hall of Fame, and especially the airport if you need it. I can provide some good restaurant recommendations in downtown Canton, if needed!
  3. Totally different than a band who wheels 32 ten foot towers around the field as a part of the performance. IMHO, YMMV.
  4. Unless it stands upright, is at least a few feet tall, needs to be assembled/disassembled for each show, and takes up an excessive amount of space during transportation, it doesn’t get my vote as a prop - lol! One could also argue that William Mason’s uniform capes were a prop. Certainly an integral part of the show (and used to great effect), but doesn’t fit my definition above - lol! Legal Disclaimer: all said tongue-in-cheek of course 🙂 I really enjoyed William Mason’s show - they were fantastic as always! Their off-field woodwind ensemble (gasp!) was amazing, and really added a tremendous amount to the show (and now I will duck for cover on here - lol)!
  5. As Jeff pointed out - Carmel (2nd) had no props, and William Mason from OH (6th) also had no props. And, the reps from Carmel and The Woodlands were not only the same as 1985 Cadets and 1994 Blue Devils, they were also arranged in the same manner - long stretches of melody, no chop n bop, no snippets of source material only, etc. Arranged very similarly to their DCI show counterparts. Yes, plenty of what you mentioned on display over the weekend too (of course), but these two shows - Carmel, The Woodlands - were pretty incredible in their own right.
  6. Matt in a suit - lol! Was very happy to see him become the head director at Avon (after all of the years as an assistant director). If they won BOA Grand Nationals with him taking the job at the beginning of the Summer when he was knee deep in Crown stuff, can’t wait to see what happens next with a full year of planning. If you caught Matt in a suit, you may have also seen the interview Dan Potter did with him and his daughter (one of the Avon drum majors, I think) after their performance - nice moment for the two of them.
  7. As seen/heard over the weekend in Indy at BOA Grand Nationals: Carmel H.S., IN (2nd place), show title “Prophecy”. They did Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony, as was used in Cadets 1985. Carmel’s entire show came from this symphony. As an interesting side note, Carmel had no props in their show. The Woodlands H.S., TX (5th place), show title “Day Danse”. They had Chick Corea’s “Spanish Fantasy”, “Day Danse”, and “My Spanish Heart” as their rep, as was used in Blue Devils 1994. They were easily one of the crowd favorites and brought the house down every time with each of their three performances over the weekend. Both of these bands were truly amazing, and were very faithful to the source material. As soon as I saw that Carmel was doing the Jeremiah Symphony, I knew it was going to be incredible, and once I saw that “Day Danse” was The Woodlands’ show title, it immediately became the show that I was most looking forward to seeing. It was great reminiscing about these old DCI shows while watching two of the best bands in the country this weekend.
  8. I have been great friends with an old brass instructor of mine for almost 40 years now. He also was a private instructor for me (trumpet). Phenomenal musician, and an even better friend. He asked me to stand up in his wedding, and to this day, was the only DCI Finals that I have missed since 1989 (if that tells you anything).
  9. I’ve been to Finals every year since 1989, except for one - 2001. So 34 total for me. Missed 2001 because I was standing up in a good friend’s (an old trumpet teacher of mine) wedding. Being a band director himself, you would have thought that he would have avoided that weekend for the wedding, since not only was the wedding on the same day as Finals that year, but periodically, future anniversaries would be too, but anyway… 😀. There were a number of musicians besides me, including a Cavalier alum, that were all following the scores during the reception that year. However, it was before the scores were readily available via the Internet, and we were relying on phone calls from a friend of the Cavalier alum who was in attendance to keep us updated. For the record, my friend that got married is now divorced, but is very happily remarried since - and their anniversary is NOT in August at all. As far as my favorite Finals - there are a lot of great memories from the trips we had with our group of family and friends (some that we marched with together) that would go with when Finals were at a different location every year. We would piggyback a vacation onto the competition back then. If I absolutely had to pick my favorite Finals, I would say my first one in 1989. After seeing it on PBS for the prior four years, it was really exciting to finally see it in person. Either that one or 1997, when I was still in graduate school, and my Master’s Exam (culminating exam that I needed to pass at the end of my course work to officially receive my Master’s degree) fell during the Finals trip. At this time, the exam was only offered twice a year, and you had to take it with pencil and paper in-person at the school, no online possibilities existed. I didn’t want to miss the test, nor the Finals trip. I am fortunate that one of my really good friends in our group that would go every year was an airline employee that would accrue free flight passes as work benefits. He told me that if I bought my original plane ticket, he could give me one of the free passes to fly back home after Finals to take the exam and then fly back after taking it to rejoin our group in Orlando/Disney for the rest of our vacation. Good times 😀.
  10. Don’t have a lot of insight in how it works, but I did hear that too. Also was mentioned that it was done the same way that the cello in Troppers 2022 was done.
  11. It appears that the show tonight is still on (but Cavaliers pulled out).
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