liebot

Ok, I understand, my post is ridiculous. It's been two shows, and only three corps have competed. But I have a right to my opinion, and I stand by it, and I'll be reviving this thread come August when Crown wins, Cadets are third, and Cavies are fifth. See you in a couple of months.

It's June. Everyone is dirty. I saw a multitude of ticks from every corps, including a guy out of step on the 50 during the final company front of Crown's show. They'll get clean. Cadets show is a lot slower, though. Procession is only 120, I think their second song is around 150, and then it gets bumped up to the 180/200 ranges.

Cavaliers won't catch Cadets, and Cadets won't catch Crown. Cavies are dirty and their show is a mess, plus their hornline is weak. Cadets have a decent show but are still sloppy, Crown is the cleanest and has the best show. It's going to come down to Crown and BD for the title this year.

Ok, just watched the whole thing. That was stupid. Give me my three minutes back. Over-wrought, corny, and over-the-top. Represents the complete antithesis of the Blue Devils as far as I'm concerned. Can't wait to see the show, please don't release any more bad videos.

As far as I can tell the guy who produced the video just felt like playing word association games for the first minute. Lame. Dumb.

ITT: people don't understand the concept of paragraphs.

March a euph for a couple of seasons and then we can talk.

Yeah, pretty much. It's the largest section in the hornline but doesn't have the huge audition turn-out that the trumpet section usually does. Not to mention that there are just fewer low brass players in general, but I'd say bari is probably the section corps have the most difficulty filling.

Can we please not have this dumb conversation again?

Let's play the "hypothetical scenario" game for a second. Say Crown takes this low brass alternate, puts him into a 3rd bari spot, moves a 3rd up to 2nd, and a 2nd up to first. Two current members have to completely relearn their parts, get new drill numbers, and learn new drill. An inconvenience, but not a significant one, you say. Not to mention that the tuba player has to make the adjustment to euphonium which is admittedly not very difficult, but still, we would assume that he's not as good of a player on euph as he is on tuba (or he would have auditioned on euph). Whatever, no big deal. So what if the first week of July rolls around and a tuba player gets hurt. Instead of having a tuba alternate ready that already knows the parts/has been watching the tuba section's drill and can figure it out pretty quickly, they have to go online and find somebody new, somebody unknown to come in in the middle of tour and try and figure stuff out. Is that really ideal? Doesn't it make more sense to find a replacement early on when the new guy's got time to come in and learn everything at about the same time the rest of the members are? In every corps I've marched in - and I think this is fairly true across the board - every alternate that has been taken has been given the opportunity to march. The vast majority of alternates that don't get into the show by the end of the season don't because they haven't demonstrated the minimum amount of progress, ability, talent, will, learning, etc. necessary for the instructors to trust them as performers. The reality, with today's drill, is that if you don't know what you're doing, you will hurt people. I've seen it happen several times. I know we as a culture think everyone's a special shining star and they all deserve their equal opportunity, but that kind of logic helps no one. You can only teach people so much - at some point it comes down to personal responsibility. Still, my feeling is that, barring a personal failure, this low brass alternate will get his shot at the field. People get injured, #### comes up. There's no reason to freak out because they're looking - during spring training, mind you. . . this isn't mid-July - for a BARITONE player to fill a BARITONE hole instead of promoting from within and putting a TUBA player on BARITONE.

So if there's an alternate that doesn't have the chops to play lead, he should be allowed to march that spot anyway? Is that what I'm hearing people say here?

Surprised no one answered this yet. After the corps from the G7 he says "Hey Siete" and after all the other corps he just says "Presente."

One of the goals that the Crossmen design team had going into this year was to have the show completed by the April (or March? or May? can't remember which one) camp. They achieved that goal. So, in the big scheme of things, Guidry's job is pretty much done for the summer, except for rewrites (which he won't know what to do until the staff decides what needs to be changed). Besides, he lifted the music from a reggaeton song - pretty sure all he did was tweak it a little bit and write some lyrics. Probably didn't take to long.

/lol

I was under the impression that housing was the bigger problem.

That's "Pruit Igoe" from the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. I'd love to see a corps (other than Vanguard Cadets, which played "The Grid") take on that soundtrack.

Crossmen will make finals. Hey, I can hope, can't I?

I agree. But I think that it's not as important for staffs at corps to impress that upon the members nowadays because they don't have to go out and night after night and be embarrassed by the performance of the corps. There are some corps that do things right still (Cadets, Vanguard, etc.) but I don't think that kind of discipline is as widespread anymore.

I think it has a lot to do with not having retreats at every show anymore. When retreats were at every show, you took time setting up blocks, talking about etiquette, etc. Also, if you messed around with A/OC or something else, there would be consequences (at least at the corps I marched in). The problem is that these corps show up on finals night knowing there are relatively no consequences (they either will never see their instructors again in a professional setting or won't for another four months). Added to that is the fact that it's a time to enjoy your last minutes in uniform with your brothers and sisters and blow off the steam that has been building up with over three months of intense rehearsals and people screaming at you. When retreat was every night, finals night wasn't really special (at least insofar as the playing of A/OC is concerned). Furthermore, you would probably know (or at least figured out a couple of notes) by that point in the season. Yeah, people would still mess around, but it would usually be one or two screamers (usually the lead players in each section) just notes up the octave. As an aside, I confess that I messed around while playing America/O Canada (instead of playing the "Battle Hymn" lick that the mellos/baris played, I played "Dixie"), but it was hardly audible, I cutoff when the DM did, and I played every note in the rest of the song correctly. It was just something I did to amuse myself on finals night. But anyway. . . I think with retreats every night the performance became "normalized" in a way, so that it would be out of the ordinary for you to screw around, as opposed to when it was just finals when (I imagine/know) there was a culture passed down from vets to rookies that "Oh and then after scores we play this song but no one really knows the music and we just kind of screw around." I'm not saying we should go back to having retreat every night. I think it was a great tradition and I miss seeing the corps lined up at every show and it could add a certain drama to corps beating other corps. However, I understand the logistical concerns, and if it means getting an hour more of floor time after every show, I'm all for it.

I'm still amused that there are two YouTube links in that thread (one of which was the one I am referencing) and my original topic got closed. Peculiar.

Huh, funny how there are two links to youtube videos still posted in that thread and yet my thread got deleted for "implying" a link to a video. Although I guess now that I posted that they'll be taken down pretty soon.

The video exists, but the last thread was closed because the mods determined I was "implying" a link to it by telling you what site to find it on. I'd rather keep the discussion open than be accused of linking to the video, so I took the necessary precautions to make sure this one doesn't also get closed.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad behavior at retreat that year. Cavies' Samurai stunt, the Bluecoats' public intoxication, the terrible noises that came across in America/O Canada, Scouts bassline refusing to leave the field. I'm just saying that, as far as O Canada is concerned, most of the blame was put on BD. While I'm not saying that the Blue Devils hornline played the page during America/O Canada, they definitely weren't the only one. And man, that BK video is very, very bad.

Also, in the interest of keeping this thread open for discussion: if you do find the video, please do not post a link or imply how someone can reach it in this thread. The mods will be very angry, and I would prefer for this thread to not be locked.

And was mostly blamed on the Blue Devils. Turns out that's not the case. I have seen a video online which - although I am not allowed to tell how to access it - shows pretty conclusive evidence of the Blue Knights ####### all over America/O Canada. I will not, if you PM me, tell you how to find the video, but suffice to say that it does exist, and is pretty bad. It is kind of amusing to me, after months and months of diatribes about the Blue Devils being sore losers and playing like #### because they were "angry" they lost, etc, that some pretty damning evidence has come up that it was in fact another corps. Now, this raises some interesting questions, as the video in question also captures some members of other corps playing pretty disgracefully. Was it, now that we've seen that the mishaps were not limited to a single corps, reasonable for DCI to go the route that they did in rehashing the retreat system? Is there a better way to do things besides the "stadium entrance" that happened last year. Discuss.