sop16

Does anyone still have 2006 patches?

I have given amps a fair trial at the DCI shows I have been to. Some corps just amplify the pit in a tasteful way which is ok but not entirely necessary, and seems way way more trouble than it's worth lugging all that stuff onto the field. As far as amplifying vocals and narration, if I wanted to hear that sort of thing, I'd watch American Idol and such (and I don't). I guess if DCA allows amps I'll be retiring from marching early. :(

It happened in the midwest. It follows that it will also happen out on the west coast someday.

7 hours of driving and a border crossing each way from WInnipeg to Minneapolis.

I didn't mean corps from Chicago. I meant corps from anywhere which are now active in DCA and started within the past few years. Music City Legend comes to mind, and there are others as well. I would imagine the first step would be to have a meeting/info seesion/informal rehearsal for all interested parties. If you can get enough people together who really want to start something then you'll know you might be on to something.

Do you really think that show designers consider this? They want their corps to do well this year, and they base that on what each component of the performance is worth numbers-wise and what corps have been given credit for in the immediate past. Perhaps when the DCI member corps have their meetings to decide on the score structure they might consider public support, crowd reaction, etc., and the resulting effect on revenue, but what each of them is actually focused on is the best interests of their own corps, because placement determines how well a corps will get paid for the shows, and of course it also determines to a large extent how next year's recruitment will go, which will also affect their scores and placements etc. Only if there is a huge change in the number of fans that attend shows and support drum corps will there be any effect from this in the show designs, and even then it will be delayed and it may be too late by that time.

You may want to look through the archives of DCP. There were at least a couple of corps for whom you can track the early progress to the present day from postings in this forum.

Who decides? It's the judges at finals who decide, and also the members corps themselves, who decide on the score structure that places importance on what they think should count the most to the final score. Corps are out there to win. Corps using asymmetrical drill got consistently higher scores at some point so everyone started doing it. More recently the corps that used Bb instruments when they were first legalized got higher scores so mostly everyone started using Bb. If a show like this year's Cadets show wins this year, after they also won last year, it will create a precedent for the future. When it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what the reaction of the crowd is or how many posts get put up on DCP about how much people hate amps or Bb instruments or pink picnic tables. All that matters at the end of it all is the numbers. It's all about survival of the fittest. Drum corps is a continuously evolving phenomenon. Whatever changes are successful will be carried through to the next years and those that are not so successful will be abandoned. It is possible to innovate using the tools that already exist in drum corps. Take a look at the Cavaliers show (just as an example). It's different from anything put out there before but if you think about it, they only use horns, percussion and guard and they don't even use any props, but the show is one that I want to see a few more times just because it is so amazingly well designed and well performed. Making the pit stationary was not a big change. It's the same instruments after all (only bigger and harder to carry), and the same sound. Legalizing amped vocals is in effect adding another instrument to the repertoire, and it should have been considered more carefully IMO. Amping the pit instruments is one thing, and many corps do it in a way that enhances the music (and some have forgone the amps and still their pit sounds good and balanced), but including in that rule that vocals should be allowed to be amped as well was a huge step and should have been considered separately from just amping the pit. There really is no point in complaining about amped vocals. I don't really like them, and I think the mellophone soloist(s) in the Crossmen should be very upset that nobody can hear his/her/their solos over the amped narration (both times in the show, at least what I could hear in the dome at Indy), but what is complaining going to do? It's all up to the judges, the member corps themselves who make the rules, and the show designers who choose what to put in the shows based on what they believe is best for their drum corps.

For the people who were at the show: Does anyone know what the deal was with that guy near the front of the crowd waving the British flag before and after the Glassmen show? I had no idea what their show was going to be beforehand and because of that flag I thought they'd be playing British music and so did people sitting near me. Anyway, their silent drill with the rifle toss and then the horn entrance exactly when the toss was caught was the most memorable part of the whole evening for me (except for marching in the Minnesota Brass show of course).

I thought it was funny. If the staff did it then it was obviously intended to be part of the show. What's wrong with that? It's not like the music was interrupted or anything.

Of course even that isn't consistent because at the Menonmonie show there were only 2 all-age corps, MBI and Chops, who were judged on DCA sheets. One wonders how much of a difference it really makes right now this early in the season. I'm pretty sure the shows in late August will all be judged on DCA sheets.

no :)

DCI shows require 13 judges, 12 without the second percussion judge. DCA shows require 11 judges (without the 2 extra effect judges which I believe are only needed for big shows like prelims and finals), so there are still enough judges. I guess they just make sure there are enough judges with percussion judging expertise for the DCA segment.

I answered the percussion ensemble question above.

As far as I can tell, the only reason some lead players hang over is that they wouldn't be heard otherwise. The best players can nail a high note and have that note soar above the rest of the ensemble, no matter how loud the ensemble is playing. The best players also don't need to stroke their own egos and they know that drum corps isn't about how good individual players are, but how well the team works together, which also means releasing notes together.

In that system how do you account for the varying difficulty level and effect of the shows? You could get corps playing boring easy stuff and they'd get 100 because they wouldn't make any mistakes. It definitely wouldn't be all that great to watch though.

Tom: People are going to be making those comparisons anyway. Might as well make it easy for them. :) Also, the DCI judges that judge the DCA corps on DCA sheets are supposedly DCA trained. Not only that, but it seems that in the midwest at least the judges are judging different captions when they are using the DCI or DCA sheets, so it's not like they have to compare exactly the same things from DCI corps to DCA corps, and hey, last time I checked, MBI scored higher than Madison Scouts on Saturday, which I know means absolutely nothing about anything, but it indicates that the DCA corps aren't necessarily being disadvantaged by being judged by the same judges at least. Of course, not even simultaneous shows judged by different judges who only judge DCA all summer can really be compared on par, but until certain corps meet certain other corps on a level playing field, so to speak, it is the only possible way to make any comparisons at all, other than the rumours and innuendo people love to spread around, which tend not to be very quantitative in nature. :) It'd be cool to see scores for all DCA corps, especially those judged on DCA sheets, on the scores section of the DCA website, if it's possible and when there's time, or perhaps even just links to the DCI shows where they can be found, so people can be reminded that it's not just the east coast corps that are competing during the summer. To be honest, when I marched out east, I didn't even know that midwest and west coast corps were even competing at all in June and July.

I guess DCI's site is set up to show recaps for performances scored on DCI sheets. The ones scored on DCA sheets can be accessed as a pdf file from the DCI website and unfortunately not on the DCA website for some reason, even though the pdf files are in exactly the same format. At both DCI shows that Minnesota Brass, Chops, and Governaires played at last weekend, the judges were mixed up from who judged the particular captions for the DCI corps and who judged them for the DCA corps (though each judge stayed within visual, brass and percussion captions for the most part). I didn't count exactly, but it seems that the DCI captions require one more judge than for the DCA captions (given that there was only one judge for each of music effect and visual effect) so one judge gets to rest for the DCA corps. At the Menomonie show, the one who judged percussion 2 for the DCI corps was the same judge for percussion ensemble for the DCA corps. The judges for the DCI sheets are listed in the DCI recap and the judges for the DCA sheets are listed in the pdf file containing the DCA recap so it's relatively easy to cross reference who judged what.

Last time I checked, some of those corps weren't from the East coast, or is everything east of California considered "East coast" to you west coasters? :P

It seems that someone wrote a script to parse and tabulate the info from the DCI website. I guess nobody has done that for the DCA scores. I'm also unhappy that the midwest (and from what I understand, also the west coast) DCI shows that are scored on DCA sheets are not on the DCA website, and you have to dig through like 3 layers of links on the DCI website to see the recaps for the all age corps.

I don't know what the site looks like on Windows, but on Linux Netscape it looks ok. No popups or fancy stuff, but then I don't particularly like popups and fancy stuff as they tend to bog down my computer. However, I would like to know how to access scores from past years, as was possible in the previous format. Is that an upcoming feature or has it been done away with? I hope at some point all the scores from the very first DCA contest to the present, or at least from the past decade or so, will be viewable.

I imagine so too, but I just want to make sure. Hopefully someone who can give a definitive answer will reply.

Do last year's individual winners get to perform last this year?

The way the hat thing worked last year is that last year's top 5 (or so) draw for the last slots in the show, then the rest of the member corps in a show draw for the slots before that, then the Class A (from last year) and non-member corps draw for the first slots. That's why the Sunrisers went on first at every show last year. There is also some rule about corps that are not member corps but that declared open class last year, and they go on after the Class A and new corps, but I'm not sure of the exact details. Obviously it wouldn't be good to have a small corps following a corps like Bucs or Empire. Actually I might have got the exact details a bit wrong but the group of slots a corps draws for is based on how they did last year. I'm sure the rules are available from DCA.

I don't think anyone lives in 'cuse, not even members of the Brigadiers, so I guess that means Rochester is upstate. :) What difference does that make to the topic though? Whether you consider "west New York" or "upstate New York", or just plain "New York State", there are still way more corps in DCA than DCI, which is what the original topic was about. I believe there was a junior corps called the Patriots, wasn't there? They are/were from west upstate New York (Rochester). There is also a junior Div 2 corps called Quest from Brooklyn NY, in addition to the already mentioned Div 3 corps Cadets of NYC. If you only consider competitive senior field corps, there are 6, and soon to be 7, and if you add alumni corps there are another 4 at least.