Tenoris4Jazz

Honestly, who the hell is playing Bingo these days???? Does anyone under the age of 35 even know what that game is?

Yes, but if you couldn't play, the visual had a muted effect. I've never seen anyone do an encore performance of just the visuals without playing, but I've seen dozens of stand still performances with music.

This sounds so weird to me, still. I can remember not too long ago that guard didn't even factor in on the sheets, except to contribute to overall visual and GE. Now, a good guard can make up for weaknesses in areas that used to cost you placements. I'm still not sure I like it either, but that's the way the activity seems to like it.

Not a complete list, but... 1. Suncoast Sound, 1984, the balloons released at the wall. The single balloon from the field and then all the balloons from the stands... that still gives me chills. 2. The turn backfield, the fade out of the sops, then the drumline crescendo to THAT low brass downbeat in Maleguena, Madison 1988. At that point, you knew, "$h!t just got REAL!!!!" 3. Spirit of Atlanta, 1980, the hornline turns to the stands after the gun goes off... I cannot watch or listen to that without crying.

That brass book was such a departure from what BD had been doing since '75, it took a long time for me to really enjoy it. However, I listened to just the Emerson's 1st a LOT... that last chord nearly broke my stereo!!! That has got to be one of the loudest and most powerful notes in DCI history.

The theater where I watched is usually the primary non-IMAX 3D screen room, so the sound was maxed out. Having heard the show at the Ga Dome a few weeks earlier, I knew it would be impossible to capture in the theater, but it was enough that most of the folks watching were really impressed.

So, if I'm not local, and I'm a college student, I not only have to pony up $3k or more, I have to tell my parents that I'm blowing off a semester of school to march? JMHO, but that's insane.

Plus the added bonus of not having to pay huge rights' fees to play it.

I wore that shirt at least once a week to HS band practice and NOBODY understood. Still my favorite corps t-shirt of all time. Identifying innovation is like identifying a recession... you can't determine it exists until you see the trend develop and go back and find the initial creation point.

I know that now! It used to put you right in the wheelhouse of the hornline, but I don't know that I ever felt like I got "hit in the face" like that this year. I think Crown got me two or three times, and Blue Devils maybe once, but no one made me reach for the earplugs the way Madison or Spirit used to.

smh... I never thought I'd see the day when GT would be supplying instructors to World class drum corps. I remember when the peak of the GT band performance was playing the Budweiser theme at the end of the 3rd quarter!

I think all groups have too much volume coming from the pit. It was worse in person than listening via stream, but maybe that was because of where I was sitting (17 rows up on the 45). I've always felt that pit instrumentation is meant to enhance the music, not take over from the horns as the primary voice. It may be that parts of classical music meant to be played on piano are being played by 5 pit instruments at once. As a side note, the top volume level of horn lines is a lot less than it used to be, and it's not just the switch from G to Bb horns. We amped up the pit, probably too much, and the horns lost their top end, which makes for a problem. I listened to the final 20 seconds of 2014 BD over and over and I kept waiting for that extra gear from the horns, but it never came.

The same fans who cheer the hiring of the new coach are the ones yelling and screaming for him to be fired after a few bad seasons. Staff change announcement are a lot like coverage of the NFL Draft. It all sounds great at the time, then when it doesn't work out people say, "What were they thinking?" It's all optimistic right now, which it should be. We WANT all the changes to work out for the best, but we secretly know they all won't.

Were they offended by the poor execution of the drill? Or the fact that it was the Kansas mascot being attacked?

This was high school, but we split our french horn players evenly between flugels and mellos to have both voices. As to the marching with a french horn question... are we talking about the ones Cadets used this year, or the marching french horns that half of corps used back in the 70's and 80's? My HS band director marched '78,'79,'81 with SOA and '82 with BD and played french horn all 4 years.

I think the Bridgemen is a great parallel. If I recall, they lost a bus while on tour and that was it.

Of the 95,000+ people in the stands, maybe 100 would know who SOA is. Most are just (and these are MY PEOPLE... GO DAWGS!!!!) drunk rednecks watching a football game.

I had premium seats in Atlanta this year and the four seats next to me stayed empty until the final 6 corps took the field. I don't know how long they'd been there in the dome, but they didn't bother to sit down until BK took the field. They get counted as "paid attendance" but they're only partially there.

If the median was 38, and the average was 186, you have some extreme outliers. For those who haven't had several semesters of statistics, the figure in the middle of the list is the median. That means half the results were less than that and half were more. To have a median of 38 and an average of 186, roughly 5% of attendees drove more than 1000 miles to see a show.

I was always fascinated that the audience for professional golf was never bigger or more passionate than when Tiger Woods was winning virtually everything. You either loved that he was dominating or cheered for him to fall in the ocean. I know there is a similar feeling about BD, but I think it's more of a productive feeling. Lots of people want to see BD knocked off their perch, but they want to see it done by someone outdoing them at their best, not BD falling down. Can it be there is an element to GE now that includes the David vs. Goliath mentality?

Maybe I'm too old, but there's no way I'm putting teens and 20-somethings in charge of a $3 million operation. There's a reason why you don't see many 21 year old CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. Now I can see this happening with a smaller corps, or even incorporating the age outs for that season in the process, but I can't imagine Wayne Downey handing over the reigns of BD's hornline to kids who weren't even born until after he'd won his 7th championship.

I'm sure this will be a popular answer... Star 1993

I have always had a problem with this. If the professional judge can't figure out what it is that you are doing or are supposed to be doing, that's a design issue, not a judging issue. Poor communication of the theme SHOULD knock your GE score down a bunch, and you shouldn't get points back because you wrote an essay to explain yourself to the judges.

As it relates to subjectivity and the casual fan... my hometown newspaper sports guy wrote a post season "awards" column for football. Knowing nothing about judging a marching show, but having seen over a dozen halftime performances during the year, he said the best band was the one that played "Tequila" as part of their show. Forget that it's a song hardly worth playing in the stands for 10 seconds... he "liked" the song (GE!!!!) and therefore ignored the fact that the other three local HS bands were far superior in execution. I think this reinforces the fact that the "casual fan" judges a show more on how much they know and like the music and how much they "get" what's going on with the guard and story.

Wasn't the problem with SCV in '80 that the staff thought they could design a show better than Gail? So he let them run with it and it failed miserably, hence the mid-season re-write.